The hearing, in a committee of the State Senate, was supposed to be routine. I, an L.A. Times reporter at the time, didn’t even bother to cover it. The subject was reappointment of the president of the State Board of Education. The president, Reed Hastings, was thought to be a shoo-in.

After all, Hastings, a tech entrepreneur and Democratic donor from Santa Cruz, had put together a successful ballot measure to make it easier to pass school bonds, launching a new era of school construction statewide after decades of neglect. He’d supported the state’s accountability system for schools, and backed the establishment of public charter schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Hastings also had bipartisan support—he’d been appointed four years earlier by a Democrat, Gov. Gray Davis, and was nominated for re-appointment by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican.

But the hearing went sideways. Some education groups didn’t like charter schools, or his blunt interest in transforming education systems. Hastings himself suggested that he was felled by criticism from bilingual educators after he pushed for more instruction time in English for English-language learners. Ultimately, two members voted to re-appoint him, and two voted against. A fifth legislator, a Democrat named Debra Bowen, who would soon be elected Secretary of State, abstained. At 2-2, his reappointment was effectively blocked.

This unexpected political assassination made a few headlines, but soon faded from view. Hastings vowed to continue his educational work but didn’t fight back (“I lacked political deftness,” he later said of the episode). After all, he still had his day job running the DVD subscription service he’d co-founded years earlier. It was called Netflix.

With our school systems melting down and with Netflix now one of our state’s most powerful and creative entertainment forces, it’s worth asking what would have happened if this Battle of Hastings had gone a different way.

In retrospect, 2005—and that rejection of one of California’s richest and most effective Democratic supporters of school reforms—looks like the beginning of an ill-conceived retrenchment in California’s educational ambitions.

Over the past 15 years, state leaders, and the teachers’ unions who elect them, turned hard against educational reforms—saying they wanted to focus on regular public schools. They obsessively opposed public charter schools and specialized programs, put obstacles in the way of online education and technological alternatives to the classroom, and dismissed anyone who dared pursue educational innovation as a tool of billionaires.

The state also junked the testing-based accountability system that gave parents and communities clear guidance on how their schools were doing—replacing it with a confounding color-coded system of measures designed to obscure our students’ academic stagnation. And, cynically, Gov. Jerry Brown created a new funding formula to help poor schools—only to admit that he had given up on the goal of closing racial and economic disparities in student performance.

While Gov. Davis, Hastings, and others once worked to make it easier to build public schools, today’s California is busy closing schools, in part because of rapidly declining enrollments. The state boosted school funding during the 2010s, but the new money has been gobbled up by retirement benefits, not students. And promises to support school-age children more comprehensively—in areas from child care to health care—have not been followed by action.

As California education has gone backward, Hastings has been propelling Netflix forward. After becoming dominant in DVD rentals, Netflix survived a bumpy transition to streaming video to become a global giant, with more than 200 million subscribers. The company isn’t just popular or well-run; its shows, from The Crown to Ozark to Orange Is the New Black, are smart and at the cultural cutting edge. Netflix leads all other companies in nominations at this month’s Oscars.

During these past 15 years, Hastings has remained involved in education, but as a philanthropic outsider. He backed the charter schools and technological innovations in education that the state of California was trying to make harder to pursue. He supported the Rocketship schools, charters which tried (and sometimes failed) to grow fast and integrate technology, as well as the online Khan Academy and DreamBox Learning, which develops online math lessons.

These efforts drew extensive criticism and controversy. So did his public statements arguing that elected school boards, and the politics and turnover they bring, were preventing schools from achieving the stable management necessary for educational improvement. He argued that streaming technologies and data collection could make education more personal and effective for kids around the world. And in California, he kept giving money to progressive ballot measure campaigns (including those to end the death penalty and reduce sentences for non-violent crimes) and to Democratic candidates who fought for school reform (and usually lost to union-backed opponents).

For all his trouble, he was frequently dismissed, by unions and media (including, on occasion, your columnist), as another billionaire pursuing tech-centric, quasi-private educational reforms that wouldn’t serve all students.

Then the pandemic hit.

Suddenly Hastings’ future-oriented vision made more sense.

When California schools shut down, they didn’t have their own online platforms. The only things that worked were the online tech systems like the ones that Hastings had funded; California teachers used videos from the Khan Academy, and my own kids’ teachers had them doing all their math on DreamBox.

Teachers, schools, and their districts lost track of many of their neediest students; California had never really built the extensive data systems that Hastings and other education reformers had advocated. Instruction time was cut drastically, putting English language learners and special ed students further behind. Parents, feeling abandoned by closed and unresponsive neighborhood schools, went desperately searching for alternative educational arrangements—of the kind Hastings had supported.

The pandemic exposed just how weak and broken the educational system had become. Without a real system of accountability like the one California had junked, we can only guess how much learning children have lost. Local school districts were exposed as powerless to reopen their schools. And in recent months, San Francisco began a relentless campaign to prove, all by itself, that Hastings had been right to dismiss local school boards as pointless.

Silicon Valley hasn’t invented a time machine, so we’ll never know what would have happened if we went back to 2005 and reversed that decision to cast off Hastings and so much of what he represented. But the state does have the power to change what it does going forward.

The state must transform schools, and not just to help today’s students recover from pandemic learning loss. Our students must be better educated and more technologically adept, and the achievement gap must be closed. Parents need more choices that fit their children. And our schools themselves must be made safer, so they can remain open no matter what new disasters or emergencies that 21st-century California throws at them.

If it’s going to achieve such transformations, California needs to bring its most creative and ambitious people back inside the educational system.

The post Revisiting California’s Battle of Hastings appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So let’s retire the old query, and turn it upside down to pose a new and urgent question: How can South Los Angeles save us?

South L.A. is no longer a place apart. Today, it sits in the center of the California story, embodying some of our greatest possibilities and our greatest struggles. And in a particularly nasty and anxious time in the United States, when pessimism and angry nonsense spread faster than Western wildfires, the South L.A. of 2016 offers a tough-minded but optimistic narrative that ought to remind us just how much can be achieved—beyond mere survival—through gritty determination and small, steady improvements.

South L.A. is both the closest thing we have to an urban success story, and the furthest thing from a fairy tale. In today’s South L.A., crime, despite recent upticks, is less than one-third of what it was a quarter century ago, access to health care is improving, there are more and better schools, housing prices and home ownership are up, transportation and arts and food options are multiplying. And major new developments are arriving—with all their promise and peril.

Of course, it is dangerous to generalize about a place so large and diverse. South L.A. consists of about 30 very different neighborhoods, from pristine suburban-style historic tract to industrial precincts to college-town enclave to narrow boulevard-based corridors. South Los Angeles is comparable in size to San Francisco, California’s fourth largest city. Both are nearly 50 square miles and have populations of 850,000.

But today’s South L.A. is more often described as Los Angeles’ version of Oakland. It’s a poorer place that is being changed, for better and for worse, both by the work of its residents and by proximity to the wealth and spillover housing demand of Los Angeles’ booming downtown and Westside.

South L.A. has not shed its older challenges, particularly around poverty and jobs, while its gains have created new challenges. In particular: How do South L.A.’s people and businesses make sure they don’t become exiles from their own success, driven away by a higher cost of living?

That poignant question resonates across the state. South Los Angeles is the largest working-class place left in coastal California. If it can figure out a way to remain such, it could provide a crucial model of success for a state with a dwindling middle and a widening divide between its affluent and America’s largest population of poor people.

Part of South L.A.’s importance lies in its relative openness to new approaches in addressing this conundrum. There’s less of the NIMBYism that’s epidemic elsewhere in the state. I recently heard community planners call South Los Angeles “L.A.’s L.A.” They meant that in two ways. First, in the sense meant by Tom Bradley, modern L.A.’s greatest mayor and a longtime South L.A. resident, who once said that people come to L.A. “looking for a place where they can be free, where they can do things they couldn’t do anywhere else.” And second, in the technical sense: while so much of L.A.’s planning and zoning has already been settled, with overlays and districts for different areas, South L.A.’s plans remain relatively free of such obstacles.

So how can South L.A.’s example save us? The region has become a popular proving place for new initiatives.

It’s already the site of some of L.A’s most significant cultural investments these days—in Exposition Park alone, the Coliseum is being renovated, a new soccer stadium is scheduled to be built, the Natural History Museum has been recently renovated, and the Space Shuttle Endeavour now resides at the California Science Center.

Many of South L.A.’s bigger developments come with “community benefits agreements” and local hiring promises that are all the rage among labor unions and local economic development wise men. But it remains to be seen whether such agreements lead to enduring improvements, or whether this one-deal-at-a-time approach undermines efforts at more thoughtful and comprehensive planning and development. USC’s The Village, which combines student housing with a new Target and South L.A.’s first Trader Joe’s, opens next year and is being closely watched because it comes with some of the strongest community benefits in the city’s history, including hiring for disadvantaged people, local business assistance, $15 to $20 million for a new affordable housing fund, and the creation of a legal clinic to assist local tenants. A proposed $1 billion expansion of the Washington Boulevard high-rise for creative firms and artists known as The Reef, to include new housing units, retail, and a hotel, faces skepticism about its feasibility and opposition from neighbors who fear it could further drive up rents in the area.

In an L.A. where it’s hard to build housing, South L.A. is a relative hotbed of new homes—often fashionably close to transit and retail—but it’s far from clear whether it is affordable enough to serve local residents. Recent efforts to improve access to health care are being closely watched, notably Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital, located south of the 105 Freeway, which recently reopened in conjunction with expanding local health clinics. The just-completed Expo Metro rail line (which connects South L.A. with downtown and Santa Monica) as well as the forthcoming Crenshaw line will make South L.A. a key test of whether highly touted transit investments can improve neighborhoods.

And South L.A. is home to dozens of charter schools, billions of dollars worth of new and improved school facilities, and various other educational innovations, including the Partnership schools, a district within a district. So far, some of these school experiments are showing strong results, while others lag.

South L.A. is a fertile ground for experimentation, from efforts to help local businesses embrace technology, to a new approach in sidewalk repair. The city’s new trash franchise is supposed to curb illegal dumping in South L.A. and establish recycling facilities in the area. Private and nonprofit efforts to provide healthy and locally grown food are targeting South L.A. And if high-profile efforts to boost voter registration and turnout are to succeed, they’ll have to gain traction in South L.A., where people vote less frequently than in other Southern California communities with similar population profiles.

Statewide efforts to increase park access in poorer communities are being tested in South L.A., which has seen the opening of many small parks but has struggled to establish the mid-sized community parks it desperately lacks. South L.A.’s long street corridors are ripe for the redesigns promised by the “Great Streets” movement, which aims to make streets friendlier for bicyclists, pedestrians, and community gatherings.

In all these initiatives, the stakes are high. If any of these ideas can show results in reputedly hardscrabble South L.A., they are likely to find a receptive audience in struggling urban areas around the country.

Of course, the two most profound changes South L.A. needs involve not physical, but human, capital.

First, South L.A. stands to benefit tremendously from statewide efforts to ease re-entry into communities for people who have served time, as well as from efforts to help people clean up their criminal records by expunging or reducing non-violent felony convictions. Nonprofit groups are collaborating to make it easier for people with records to get hired and become eligible for housing and student benefits.

Second, there may be no greater advertisement for long overdue immigration reform than to spend time in South L.A. And if the undocumented workers and entrepreneurs behind so many small or home-based businesses had the legal status to come out of the shadows, South L.A., as both an economy and a community, would be unstoppable.

South L.A.’s reputation, particularly in mainstream media, hasn’t yet caught up with its new, improved, and more complicated reality. Its success has come too slowly and steadily, without a sole catalyst, and so it’s not easily told.

But that may be about to change. Two high-profile political campaigns could bring media scrutiny to South L.A. Steve Barr, founder of a charter school network with many South L.A. campuses, is challenging the incumbent mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, in 2017. And if former mayor Antonio Villaraigosa makes a strong run for governor in 2018, Californians should hear a lot about South L.A., the setting for the most significant policy initiatives of his eight years in office.

South L.A.’s people and institutions are understandably reluctant to tell their turnaround story, given the remaining challenges. And progress can have its costs. South L.A. was turned down at first for a federal Promise Zone designation, which brings all kinds of resources to the neediest neighborhoods, largely because it wasn’t poor enough to meet the program’s standards. But, in a demonstration of their collaboration and sophistication, South L.A.’s officials and nonprofits rallied, suggested changes to the program’s standards, and won the designation.

An updated narrative of South L.A. is vital to the region’s ability to protect itself and its people from developments and changes that might threaten its progress, or displace its people. Vast and diverse South L.A. is on the rise, and we shouldn’t let anything get in the way of the example being built there.

Because if South L.A. can make it, there’s hope for all of us.

The post South L.A. Doesn’t Need Saving appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This year, that work has passed a milestone as our first charter school, USC Hybrid High School, graduated its first senior class. All of the students graduated on time and all of them have been accepted into at least one four-year college or university. Many will join the California State University and the University of California networks, and four students have chosen to enroll in the University of Southern California.

The road to these successes, however, has not been straight or easy. Indeed, it’s been humbling and instructive to watch how our ideas and research bumped up against competing visions and political realities. We’ve learned through the process how to make adjustments.

For me, the task of helping strong communities build strong children is personal. A devoted mother, a strong church, and a committed school helped push me toward becoming the first member of my family to attend—and graduate from—college. My work at Rossier and with the Ednovate charter management organization (which oversees USC Hybrid High), shares the common thread of trying to improve the quality of education for students, especially for those who need it the most.

Many of the students of Hybrid High—about two-thirds hail from South L.A.—don’t have anything resembling a privileged upbringing. Eighty-five percent of this year’s graduating class qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch. Eighty-one percent of them will, like me, be the first members of their immediate families to go to college.

USC Hybrid High has made progress because students, teachers, administrators, and the community have created a shared vision of making all students college-ready and helping them thrive once they enroll in college. But a unified vision is not easy to achieve, especially in school districts the size of Los Angeles, where each neighborhood has its own identity and its own needs. We learned this early on in our work in South L.A., and it continues to inform our thinking.

Back in 2007, USC Rossier joined the Urban League and the Tom and Ethel Bradley Foundation to form the Greater Crenshaw Educational Partnership. The partnership was part of a broader effort underway to improve the standard of living within a neighborhood of South L.A., and our partnership would focus on the anchor of that area, Crenshaw High School.

At the time, Crenshaw High School experienced problems with student achievement, graduation, and attendance. In the years prior to the partnership, Crenshaw had struggled to keep administrators and improve teaching, and almost 60 percent of students were failing classes.

The L.A. Unified School District saw the partnership as a way to apply outside resources and guidance to a struggling school. As part of our efforts, we enlisted two USC stalwarts: Sylvia Rousseau, a former teacher, principal, and school superintendent who helped lead the school’s administration, including as an interim principal; and Sandra Kaplan, a professor and education consultant. Our USC colleagues in social work, communications, engineering, and business agreed to contribute efforts as well.

LAUSD prioritized student achievement because of the school’s inability to meet the measures of accountability required by federal law. Getting students to show up and stay in school was another priority. But the partnership, while acknowledging those goals, had a larger vision, as did the community around Crenshaw. To change a school requires an understanding of that school, a sustained effort and, above all, stability and consistency. All of those things require time. We recognized that when administrators try to restructure a school around a short-term agenda, like increasing test scores, they risk undermining a school’s culture rather than building it.

The basic problem was this: Just because everyone wants change doesn’t mean they all want the same change. The partnership had thoughtful support and guidance from the school community, including many active parents and teachers. Attendance improved, as did graduation rates. But ultimately, after five years, the district and the partnership didn’t share the same vision and how to get there. And it was too hard to change an existing school without that shared vision.

With that in mind, we worked on building our own school. As USC Rossier began its work establishing USC Hybrid High in 2012, we had the benefit of our experience at Crenshaw, which had allowed us to better understand some themes of school improvement. First, the common purpose of a school must be clear. With USC Hybrid High, we had that: All our graduates will be accepted into college, and at least 90 percent of those who choose to attend won’t drop out.

Second, no school is an island. The community cannot be a passive witness to school improvement. Moving children from kindergarten all the way through to the end of senior year will not guarantee future success if the world they enter has no care, concern, or opportunity for them, so we needed to engage the community, government, and businesses in our work.

Third, equity is important. Years of disaggregating student achievement data shows what many already knew: Opportunity gaps have caused low-income students and students of color to struggle academically. It’s no longer enough to point the problem out—it needs to be addressed, whether the issue involves economic disparities, shortcomings within teaching or administration, or the lack of access to classified school staff members like counselors and nurses.

But even understanding these three essentials, we struggled, and had to make adjustments.

Some issues were more technical than others. We wanted to base the school immediately near our campus, but the cost and availability of space made that impossible, so we ended up downtown in the World Trade Center.

Academically, our model was about using research and technology and great teaching to create individual paths for students, and we planned to be open from 7 in the morning until 7 at night. That didn’t last. Students didn’t need our campuses open for 12 hours—they needed, and their parents wanted, a much more intensive focus on essential curriculum and academics during school hours. And we ended up having to make staffing and teaching changes for this different emphasis.

We also confronted a real problem with disrespectful interactions between students and faculty. And when we tightened up behavioral standards, some members of our first class left by the end of the first year.

There were enough adjustments that we decided we had to go before the L.A. Unified school board and modify our original plan. We had been following the research in our original plans, but we had to make the choices that were right for these kids and for our shared vision. I didn’t like asking, and our changes took some school board members by surprise, but they approved.

Now at Ednovate, our model still combines teaching and technology to tailor experiences to the needs of individual students, with a focus on college prep. Students do the work necessary to be college eligible. As they progress through grades, they receive more autonomy and more chances for self-directed learning, while teachers use data to figure out where students need help.

We’re also determined to make sure that as students choose higher education, they are able to stay. College completion has proven to be an enormous challenge for even the best-prepared students from less privileged backgrounds. To that end, we offer rigorous college counseling, and will continue our advising via dedicated alumni outreach after they graduate. We also are preparing to share our resources electronically with graduates and to be available to help them navigate college environments, including through campus visits.

We think the Ednovate model is now working, and LAUSD agrees—in April, the board of education approved an expansion of the Ednovate network, so that a total of five Ednovate schools will be in operation across the greater Los Angeles area by fall 2017, including in Lincoln Heights, Santa Ana, Pico-Union, and East Los Angeles.

These successes should not be misconstrued. While we benefit from the charter model, a charter school alone is neither a prerequisite for, nor a guarantee of, student achievement. Nor should our students be seen as fundamentally different from students in any other school in Los Angeles. They aren’t.

We think our progress shows the value of research, collaboration, and a commitment to make adjustments in the best interests of students. And we think this kind of work will only benefit future models of school improvement, whether through the new California task force working on improving the state’s school accountability system, or within the Los Angeles Compact, a commitment by 18 major L.A. institutions to support positive change in Los Angeles public schools. USC is involved in both these efforts.

I succeeded in college in part because of the support I received as a student; now, a new generation of students has support from my school and me. One day, we hope these students will support still more students. The work goes on.

The post For College Prep Charter Schools Serving Underprivileged Communities, High School Graduation Is Just the Beginning appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the 2013-14 school year, the state suspended the Academic Performance Index, or API, the chief tool Californians had for seeing how their kids’ schools stacked up among schools across the state. API wasn’t a perfect measure, but it offered a clear and consistent language for judging schools that could be understood by anyone in your neighborhood—from parents to real estate agents. And, for the many communities and schools that hung API banners boasting of school improvement in the rankings, the index provided a point of pride.

At the time the API was first suspended, our state’s leaders said they would give us a better, more useful index of schools. Three years later, they haven’t given us anything at all—except a promise that a new index will be in place for the 2017-18 school year. And there are reasons to doubt whether a useful index will ever be produced.

I am trying not to take this personally. The oldest of my three sons started kindergarten in our local elementary school in 2014. Under the current schedule for the new index, he’ll be heading into fourth grade—and his two younger brothers will be enrolled as well—before I can see how the school stacks up.

To be fair, state education officials had plenty of reasons for creating a new method for measuring schools and their progress. The old index was far too dependent on test scores. The federal government is transitioning out of its No Child Left Behind regime for a new accountability system. Charter schools, many of them founded by parents, are spreading. And California schools are adopting the new Common Core standards and adapting to the state’s new Local Control Funding Formula and its accompanying Local Control and Accountability Plans—which give parents and communities the new bureaucratic burden of developing school goals and monitoring school progress

Given all these changes, our leaders asked, shouldn’t there be a new index aligned with this new education universe?

Of course, there should be. So where the hell is it?

The state’s answer: these things take time and we’re making progress. Last week, the State Board of Education approved new metrics that it wants to include in the new system—including test scores, graduation and suspension rates, college and career readiness, and school improvement.

Which is great. But no changes and no process justify three years—and counting—of keeping Californians in the dark about their schools.

The state had better options than having no index at all. It could have kept the old index alive until it was ready to switch to a new one. Or, even better, the state could have used the previous years to experiment by compiling and releasing to the public a new draft index each year.

This public development of an index—a real-time, rolling rollout, if you will—would have drawn broad feedback each year, and kept parents and communities in the loop. Instead, the state chose to stay dark—keeping the conversation about any new index for school accountability contained in the usual silos of education insiders.

Which is why the darkest, most cynical view of this transition is almost certainly the right one. Is the real goal of state leaders less accountability for themselves and for California’s public schools?

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson used the suspension of the old index as justification for his failure to publish a legally required list of the state’s 1,000 lowest-achieving schools last year (he finally did so this January under threat of lawsuit, but built his list from 2013 data). And state officials have eliminated half of the standardized tests students are taking; they also have suspended the High School Exit Exam. Such steps have been taken in the name of leaving more time for actual instruction. But that’s hard to take at face value, given how low a priority instructional time has been in California schools. The number of school days was cut during the budget crisis and the state hasn’t added to the length of the school year since, even as charter and private schools, following research showing the benefits of more instructional time, do just that.

Then there’s the California Teachers Association, the state’s most powerful teachers’ union, which has been arguing against having any index that can be used to rank schools (and, they fear, punish laggards). In a recent letter to the state, CTA president Eric Heins protested against “a single one-size fits all numeric goal”—an API-style index simple enough for parents to understand—and argued in favor of a “locally based, iterative process of district review, reflection and improvement.”

What would the local iterative process look like? CTA has cited the Local Control and Accountability Plans—which were supposed to include meaningful input from communities and produce useful documents for the public—as models for what a new accountability system could be. But an index that looks like those accountability plans is exactly what we don’t need—those plans are monstrously long and confusing documents that run hundreds of pages.

The union’s “statewide ignorance is bliss” logic looks even uglier in light of Governor Jerry Brown’s recent comments that Californians shouldn’t expect the state’s work to close the achievement gap between black and Latino students and other students. “The gap has been pretty persistent,” Brown told CALmatters, so his educational reforms shouldn’t be judged on closing it.

Such educational fatalism isn’t just dispiriting—it’s at odds with California’s own record of educational progress. In 2013, more than 80 percent of schools scored above 700 on the API; only 31 percent had scored that high a decade earlier. The same decade saw big declines statewide in the dropout rate, big advances in the number of students taking challenging courses (especially math and science), and significant increases in the school performance of English-language learners, migrants, special education students and kids from low-income families.

Some of the children’s and educational groups who pushed for that progress are now putting forward legislation—AB 2548—to guarantee that the current process produces a coherent index that parents and communities can understand. But the teachers’ union and some politicians are dismissing this legislation as premature. Their strategy seems to be delay—and then try to get away with producing an index so complicated it isn’t really an index at all.

State officials will object that this assessment is terribly unfair. But after three years, they’ve lost the benefit of the doubt. If they want to restore their credibility, the state should take on a make-up assignment: Produce an index of all California schools for each of the past two years—the academic year now ending, and for 2014-15. The state has testing and the other data to do it. And we parents sure could use the information, even belatedly.

But I bet they won’t. They’re too busy coming up with excuses for keeping Californians in the dark.

The post Why California Keeps Failing to Grade Its Schools appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s what I thought as I read through a new framework for teaching K-12 history in the U.S.—California’s History-Social Science Framework.

This is supposed to be the new, 21st-century approach. It spans hundreds of pages of minute detail. But the document privileges comprehensiveness over vision. This history framework doesn’t seem to recognize the value of history.

Consider the framework for fifth grade. It’s 164 pages. The book-length document defines the theme for the year (“making a new nation”) and provides a jumble of guiding questions (e.g., how proximity to water affected the lives of North American Indians, why colonists rebelled against Great Britain), a narrative of the history that should be covered, teaching resources, and even classroom activities (e.g., team analysis of paintings depicting the American Revolutionary War).

Absent, though, is any concise statement of why all this content, and the skills needed to thoroughly analyze that content, are important. In other words, why should anyone care?

There are good answers to that question. I have a doctorate in history and used to teach college courses in American and world history; now I’m a social studies curriculum designer at an education technology company. I know that history can be more than simply enriching or engrossing. It teaches students about the messiness of the world in which they live; it invites them to argue and speak truth to power. It shows them that they, too, are historical actors. In a word, it is empowering.

But it’s hard to sense that when reading through the various state frameworks for social studies. Unlike math and language arts, social studies has no set of standards approved by multiple states, so my colleagues and I are left to sift through idiosyncratic and sometimes-conflicting documents. And California’s is far from the worst: It doesn’t have the whiff of politicization in Texas’ elementary school standards, which ask teachers to communicate the “benefits of the free enterprise system,” or the local bias of Tennessee’s—which asks second graders to identify 11 “major” American cities, four of which are in Tennessee itself.

The California’s instructional framework doesn’t insist upon one particular approach, either, trusting teachers to find different ways to communicate ideas. It’s also current—it draws on new research about teaching effectiveness, inclusion of underserved groups of students, and fostering 21st-century skills. In many ways, it’s a model for other states across the U.S.

But nowhere does it say why history matters.

I can guess why the standards don’t answer this question. In most schools across the country, it’s math and language arts, and the testing tied to them, that drive instruction. So it’s hard to justify social studies education on its own terms. Rather, educators are forced to present this subject as serving the other subjects. Students use their graph-reading skills in history class to reinforce math lessons. Reading primary sources lets students exercise critical thinking skills learned in language arts classes—which prepares students for the next language arts test.

The problem is that learning history isn’t merely useful for learning other things. When we reduce it to that, we lose an opportunity to think about history as illuminating and transformative on its own.

I had a favorite assignment when I taught college survey courses on global and American history. At the end of the semester, I asked students to become teachers. Each student was to draft a short lecture that identified and explained themes in the hundreds of years and thousands of miles we had covered over the course of the semester. The lecture assignment was an opportunity for students to think not just about facts and figures—the Chinese dynastic periods, the transatlantic slave trade, the texts of the Enlightenment—but to make connections between them. Were there links between seemingly disparate places and across seemingly unrelated cultures? Common themes or chartable changes over time? I wanted students to put together what they’d learned in a meaningful way.

Students had different reactions to the lecture assignment. The conscientious ones were often annoyed. For them, the assignment seemed like a betrayal of the unspoken rules for most survey classes; it required more than simply doing the reading and memorizing names and dates. On the other hand, students who naturally thought beyond the limits of the textbook were energized. These were the ones who forgot to do the reading on the Cold War and Soviet politics because they were so excited to get a head start on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. These were the students who could identify the big ideas of social discord and globalization across the various facts that we had learned, the students who wanted to debate with me even though I was the authority figure. These students might not earn A’s, but they were using history to make sense of the world around them.

These are the students state officials should be thinking about when they design history standards.

To make the necessary changes, we could start with those few state standards that try to say something about the value of history. Part of the rationale for an eighth grade standard in Wisconsin reads: “Reconstructing and interpreting historical events provides a needed perspective in addressing the past, the present, and the future.” The statement is vague but sound. This is what history does: It provides perspective.

But even states like Wisconsin can go further. Any guide to teaching history should open with a few clear paragraphs laying out the vision. Forget about the usefulness of history for a moment and concentrate on what history education can do for students. It teaches them how to make sense of the world around them—so that they might make history of their own.

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My family lives in a rural, geographically isolated area of Northern California. Del Norte County has just a handful of preschools, and back in 2009, the only two that had space for our son Henry were private religious schools that charged fees. We visited both.

One seemed like a pipeline to factory work: a windowless room where the emphasis was on following directions and “instilling discipline.” My husband and I observed a coloring lesson where kids had to choose a red crayon to color a picture of a Bible bookmark. We watched as one boy was chastised for choosing green. Another boy, no more than three years old, couldn’t sit still and was punished by having to be last in the line to visit the bathroom. “We give them bathroom breaks twice a morning,” the teacher told us while the kids were queueing up. “They learn to go on a schedule.”

We went with the second preschool. It had colorful rooms decorated with art, a nice play yard, and a kindly head teacher who, among other things, let kids go to the bathroom when they needed to.

Henry attended that school for nearly a year, but it wasn’t a good fit for the long run. The kids went to chapel every day and we noticed that Henry was becoming especially worshipful of the pastor. He described how the teacher and the children would open up a special wooden display box somewhere in the sanctuary, look at his picture, and say a prayer. On reflection, it was probably a picture of Jesus, but my son thought it was the pastor, and no one seemed to disabuse him of this notion. Meanwhile, I became a bit suspicious of the good reverend. He met regularly with the children, but his lessons seemed to be especially political. Henry would report his views back to us. For example, it was wrong for men to marry other men, and Buddhists misguidedly “worshipped Buddha.”

We weren’t the only family with concerns. My friend Geneva was worried about her daughter, Temaia. “She gets confused by the doctrine,” Geneva complained. “She told me that Jesus doesn’t like it when you vacuum in the afternoon.”

I never said, “We need to start a movement for a better preschool in our community.” I just kept running into parents with the same problem. One set of parents was Jewish. They didn’t want their four- year-old to attend a religious school, but they couldn’t afford a nanny. Two physician friends could afford a nanny, but they wanted their son to get more socialization. Another friend was a single parent who needed a school that accepted childcare subsidies, but she didn’t think that the one she qualified for offered a very creative, student-centered curriculum.

It soon became clear that we could keep complaining, or we could work together to make something happen.

We started having meetings—sometimes at the local Family Resource Center; sometimes in each other’s homes. We wrote down ideas on flipcharts, and debated options: A co-op day care? A home day care? An elaborate nanny share? But when the dozen or so of us agreed on a vision for a full-scale, all-day preschool, we knew we had to look for a partner organization. The Del Norte Child Care Council, which at the time focused on afterschool care and in-home child care licensing, had a director who was interested in expanding their services—and the council co-owned a building with an available classroom. After a dramatic meeting with a reluctant DNCCC Board—which had never seen members of the community turn out in such numbers—the partnership was born.

The next step was funding. The parents group worked hard on a proposal for a grant from the California Endowment. Our idea for a small school soon became a vision for changing the community’s norms, empowering parents, and reforming education. The idea for a “Preschool Without Walls” was born: Our preschool would be more than a classroom. It would be a center for home-schooling parents, networked families, playgroups, and student teachers to exchange practical ideas for early childhood education. Our preschool would move the needle towards better education at all levels.

That was the dream, and that dream was still alive when the Little School of the Redwoods—a name our kids chose in a vote—opened in 2011. It was our area’s first Montessori and Reggio Emilia-inspired preschool, combining two innovative teaching methods: self-directed independent learning activities in the morning and child-led group projects in the afternoon. Little School was also the first private pay, non-religious preschool in our county. The parents’ organization—now named the Parents’ Advisory Group (PAG)—helped interview new teachers, select and gather books and materials, and dig a garden.

But since the opening, the road has been very, very rough. Most of the original PAG parents involved in the effort moved away for better jobs or to be closer to family. Some of them never got to send their kids to the school. They aged out before it opened. Others carried on for a while. The PAG continued to meet, but most original members—including me—felt we had earned a rest. And I was pregnant with my second kid and didn’t have time to stay involved.

Now, in 2015, I’m the only founding PAG parent left with a child in the school. Our son Theo has been attending for over two years now.

The quality of the education is still pretty good. But the “Preschool Without Walls” dream—a preschool that offered training experiences and knowledge sharing to the larger community—never really materialized. There was no one to pick up the work at the DNCCC. The funder didn’t follow up with that part of the proposal, and new parents on board didn’t want to devote the energy or time to fight battles they saw as someone else’s.

The PAG has dwindled in power and influence. What was once an organization that provided vision and direction for the school has become a fundraising group that does raffles and jewelry sales. Its members don’t know that the PAG once participated in hiring staff and amending the handbook. Now the PAG is so disempowered, it can’t even get the billing office to accept credit cards to pay monthly tuition.

To be fair, the DNCCC, our partner organization, has good reasons for being disappointed with us. The school’s finances have been in the red. Parents, the council complained, just don’t get involved.

But as I reflect on the effort to create and sustain the Little School of the Redwoods, I have to catch myself from slipping into negative thinking. This is a lesson about the success of a social movement, not its failure. It is hard to organize parents, but we did it. Our principle goal was achieved: the school is here.

Meanwhile, those original parents who remained in the community have gone on to organize other movements—bigger ones. One mom now leads our local community food council and has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to improve our food systems. Another parent from our group created a recycling movement across the school district, saving what now amounts to over a million dollars—and preventing millions of tons of waste from going to the landfill. One founding school parent now serves on the Library Board, orchestrating slow but meaningful reform in a once defunct system where the board chairman did not even have a library card. One couple who moved away is moving back—the husband will help local tribes better invest their money, and the wife will be doing broad-based community development work with a local foundation. They have a new baby, too, who will eventually go to Little School of the Redwoods. The circle of change continues.

As for myself, I’ve stayed interested in education reform, particularly how we might improve after- school programs in our area, despite cutbacks from the school district. Right now, I’m just casually talking to parents when they have a minute, and attending a few meetings. I have a better sense now of how things get done. Which is probably why I hesitate. I know it’s going to be another long road. I also know that it’s not likely to happen unless enough people with a shared interest get together with a flipchart.

The post Why Starting a Preschool Is Harder Than You Think appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I was sitting down with a fourth grade student I had just been asked to counsel. I had success at getting to the bottom of students’ issues and I had earned a reputation as a teacher version of “Columbo.”

The student had been sent to the principal’s office for hurting another kid during recess. The reports were that he had also kicked another student for taking his place in line. I had worked with this student in the past for similar behavior toward peers. Now the behaviors were getting worse, and the parents were not responding. The boy answered my question about his motivations by saying, ¨Students were cutting in front of me,” and, “Two days ago they were calling me names.”

I had this realization that I was expecting the student to somehow psychoanalyze himself and come up with a grand justification for his behavior and actions. Asking the “why did you do it” question did not help me to solve the issue—and I realized it never would. It was simply a fall-back question for adults when they were not sure what to do.

This was the beginning of my attempts to engineer ways for myself and other teachers to take care of the emotional lives and mental health of our students.

I first knew I wanted to be a teacher when I was in middle school in Michigan. I got paid a $25 stipend for running a basketball clinic with little kids and discovered I was good at motivating students. As I pursued teaching, I moved to California, and became an assistant in a classroom with students that had developmental disabilities, emotional disturbances, and aggressive behaviors. This environment, along with excellent training, challenged me to figure out how to support students with multiple challenges and give them a better quality of life. I currently teach two special needs classrooms at Canalino Elementary School in Carpinteria.

Every good teacher I’ve talked to wants to build better relationships with their students. But lack of time is a major barrier. A typical classroom has 25 to 30 students and if a teacher devoted just 2 minutes to each student, that would add up to an hour every day, which would have to come out of valuable instructional time in this academic-focused (and test-crazy) era. And even if they had time, teachers rarely have the resources to handle social, emotional, and mental health challenges. Improving professional development in this area would help. So would clear, practical, and efficient protocols that are used school wide.

What teachers most need is the ability to teach students strategies and techniques to meet the expectations of a challenging school day. To this end I developed the “Think Time,” protocol, a process for identifying student’s needs by connecting their feelings and actions. My brother, a fellow teacher and a mentor to me, and UC Santa Barbara student psychologists worked with me to create a paper-and-pencil form that took teachers through the steps of asking students questions such as “What were you feeling before the problem occurred?” It gave them suggestions to pass on to students—for example, conveying that, “a better choice next time, rather than acting out, would be to ask to speak to the teacher privately.”

Here is a typical example: A student was sent to me after getting multiple warnings for disrupting the math lesson. The teacher reported that the student struggled to sit still and focus, blurting out answers without raising his hand, and was disrupting the students at his table by fidgeting and tapping his pencil. When we began, he was asked to identify his feelings from a chart. He chose energetic, excited, and anxious, which helped me understand his impulsive behaviors. The student then listed the actions that were connected to his feelings—in this case, blurting out and fidgeting. Once I better understood the feelings that motivated his actions, I realized he just needed to choose a more socially appropriate way to cope with his feelings. We settled on having him discreetly step outside the classroom, take a 3 minute break to move around, and return to the lesson ready to try again.

Of course, not everything was smooth when I began to roll this program out at my school. Teachers struggled to find the time to sit down with students and go through the process. They had trouble finding the right replacement behaviors, and struggled to understand the true purpose of the process.

So we improved the protocol by providing training to teachers that explained the rationale, created and implemented lessons for students, revamped the questions teachers should ask students, hired mentors to assist the teachers, and made the process digital.

After these tweaks, teachers reported that students were using replacement behaviors, which increased instructional minutes and improved communication with parents. But we also realized that we were only reaching the students with chronic disruptive behaviors (typically 2-5 kids per class). What about the needs of the other students?

Students with difficult behavior are not the only ones who struggle emotionally. Students often internalize feelings and lack the ability to express their needs appropriately, which makes it nearly impossible for teachers to recognize what is motivating their actions. We tested a “positive version of Think Time,” where all students could record things they were proud of, or simple acts of kindness that showed good citizenship.

From there, we developed the “check-in system.” This system teaches students how to reflect on their feelings routinely and to express them appropriately to get their needs met.

Our helloyello.net web app allows students to let teachers know what’s going on in their lives good or bad, wrong or sad, daily. And the app gives teachers the opportunity to “close the loop” quickly—within seconds—to strengthen their relationships with students.

The results have been stunning. For instance, a teacher recently shared with me that her student checked in that she was struggling to stay awake at school because her baby brother’s crying was keeping her up at night. The teacher closed the loop by letting the student know she had read her check in and asked if she could email her parents. The teacher sent a friendly email to the parents, who in turn were grateful and quickly solved the problem at home.

“Check-ins” are particularly good at addressing bullying. Students feel safe reporting problems on the playground or in the bathroom since they can confidentially reach their teachers without having to tell them face to face, in view of the bully. In one example, a student wrote about feeling bad because he participated in teasing someone; teachers, armed with additional information, are able to step in before the conflicts escalate.

Our HelloYello team is confident our procedures can help other schools in California. My school, Canalino Elementary, is a Title I school, meaning at least 40 percent of students come from low-income families. Many of our students are also English language learners, requiring us to take extra care to find ways to make sure the kids understand the questions and the behaviors expected of them. Of course, schools better off than ours also struggle with the emotional well being of their students.

Taking care of our students’ social and emotional health isn’t an end just in itself. Research studies have shown that social and emotional well-being has a significant impact on student achievement. Teaching students to express themselves appropriately, with reasoning and evidence, is a recurrent theme in the Common Core Standards. Teachers cannot help students achieve their academic potential or demonstrate how much they’ve learned if they do not know how the students are feeling, what they are thinking, and what’s going on in their daily lives.

The post How to Turn Elementary School Teachers into Emotional Detectives appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“It hurt my soul that here were these wonderful students who were very, very capable, but they were expected to be the working poor,” Lowe recalled. They needed an opportunity to go to college, but that goal was elusive in a place that encapsulated what a certain president famously called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Today, that community is still poor and ethnically isolated. Bell Gardens High, with a student body that is 99 percent Latino, is one of the least diverse schools in the country. According to the 2010 census, the education level of its students’ parents was the lowest of any community of similar size in the state: 55 percent had not graduated from high school, and just 17 percent had gone on to obtain at least some college credits. More than 92 percent of students were from families poor enough to qualify for federal lunch subsidies. The median household annual income was slightly more than $30,000.

Yet something unexpected has happened to the level of learning at the school. Bell Gardens High’s Academic Performance Index score, the 1,000-point scale that was used by California to measure test score success, has gone from 469 in 1999 to 704 in 2013 (the latest reported year), a 50 percent gain. Attendance is up to 95 percent. The school now offers 18 Advanced Placement course subjects and was ranked in the top 7 percent of all U.S. schools on the 2015 America’s Most Challenging High Schools list, a measure of college-level test participation I put out each year for The Washington Post.

Many changes in the school’s philosophy, faculty, and resources have helped it become such a vivid example of the potential of low-income Hispanic children. But Bell Gardens educators and parents agree that a program called AVID, short for Advancement Via Individual Determination, has much to do with the transformation.

Non-profit AVID (pronounced like the word that means “eager”) is the largest college readiness program in the country. Its success has much to do with unusually effective teacher training and a tutoring system that goes deeper than any I have ever seen.

AVID has 400,000 students in 5,000 schools in 44 states and several countries. It began in 1980 when Mary Catherine Swanson, the head of the English department at Clairemont High School in northern San Diego, decided to experiment with 32 low-income students coming to her suburban school as part of a busing program. Many teachers at her school said those Latino and black children should be put in remedial classes, but Swanson felt that if they were placed in a daily class that taught study skills and time management and provided tutoring, they could eventually handle even college-level Advanced Placement classes.

It worked, but not without much adversity. Some teachers were so disbelieving of the AVID students’ good work in their classes they accused Swanson of helping them cheat. Her first principal was supportive of the program, but the next one tried to kill it. The director of San Diego’s seminar program for gifted children tried to steal her students so he would no longer be criticized for having so few minorities.

In 1986 Swanson began to work with the San Diego County Education Department to spread AVID throughout the county and the state. State legislators were so taken with the results that they gave AVID its own line in the budget. School superintendents as far away as Virginia began to hear about AVID’s success, buttressed by data that Swanson insisted every school collect. They asked if they could have AVID, too.

As Bell Gardens learned, despite the positive headlines, the program was not easy. AVID classes demanded that students keep their work in order and, even more shocking to American teenagers, required that they learn how to take notes properly and do so in all of their courses. The tutoring was even more of a challenge.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, tutors, usually college students, would arrive to help students with homework questions that stumped them. The tutors did not follow the usual practice of telling tutees where they went wrong. Instead they trained the students, in tutorial groups of no more than seven, to ask questions of whomever was discussing a particular difficulty, to help think through the problem.

For example, in a recent 9th grade AVID class, a student had not recorded the steps she was taking on a math problem on the whiteboard she held up for the other students in the tutorial to inspect. AVID teacher Mirna Underwood, roaming the room, stopped her mid-class and asked her what was missing from her board. The student added the words: “Steps: 1. Write expression. 2. Factor numerator and denominator.”

The tutor who was there asked the group for more questions: “How can you help your classmate?”

“What is the difference between these equations, so what are you missing?” one said.

It takes weeks, sometimes months, to get the hang of it.

Lowe, now the AVID coordinator at Bell Gardens, in 1994 was the first teacher at the school to get the one-week AVID training course. But it took three years for Bell Gardens to start its program. Juan Herrera, now the school’s principal, was then the school’s state and federal project director. He was very taken with the AVID emphasis on recruiting average low-income students. His father had been a janitor, his mother a seamstress. Kids like him tended to be left out, he thought, even though they would have benefited from an extra push.

State and district backing for the program has been helpful. Bell Gardens has about $115,000 for tutors this year. Its AVID program grew from 29 ninth graders in 1997 to 566 students, about 16 percent of the total school enrollment this year. The school has 18 AVID classes. It became so successful maintaining standards that it achieved National Demonstration School status, a designation given to only two percent of AVID schools.

Mario Martin del Campo, a former Bell Garden AVID student who became an AVID tutor, said he noticed at California State University, Northridge, where he was an English major, that students without AVID experience often gave up. They’d just say, “I don’t get it.” By contrast, del Campo said, his reaction to a difficult college assignment would be “I don’t know how to do it but I’m going to try it and see how far I get.” Then, when he finally had to seek help from another student or the professor, he saved much time by being able to say “this is the point where I just don’t understand it.”

With the support she gets from the district, Lowe said, she can welcome to AVID even students whose grades appear too low or whose habits seem too erratic to do the work AVID requires. “Many times they will come to me and want to get out,” she said. “I say, ‘You know? You need to hang on a little bit longer.’”

The AVID classes become as much a club as a course. Students make friends. They help each other out. It makes Bell Gardens High School a very different place from what it was in 1989. Educators like Lowe and Herrera think more schools stuck in poverty could make the same transition, if they are willing to fight for the money and make it extremely difficult for their kids to give up on themselves.

The post What Educators Can Learn About a Southeast L.A. Turnaround appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.