Introduction to: Education Inadequacy, Inequality, and Failed State Policy: A Synthesis of Expert Reports Prepared for Williams v. State of California

This report synthesizes the findings of a set of expert reports analyzing the plaintiffs’ claims in Williams v. State of California, and it presents the implications of those reports for changes in state policy and practice. It examines California students’ access to three basic requirements for educational quality and opportunity: qualified teachers; adequate textbooks and other relevant instructional materials; and clean, safe, and educationally appropriate facilities. It reviews the role of these resources and conditions in providing or limiting access to students’ opportunities for achievement, and, more specifically, it places the availability of these basic requirements in the context of California’s current standards-based education policies. This report considers both the overall availability of these essential conditions to California students and patterns in their distribution among schools serving different student groups. This synthesis also supplements the material in the expert reports with information from documents produced by the California Department of Education (CDE) and other State agencies, information generated by California schools and districts, and reports of independent organizations. Finally, it assesses the past performance of state education policies and officials in providing California’s students with the educational essentials they require, and suggests policy alternatives that would bring considerable improvement

Community Schools: An Evidence-Based Strategy for Equitable School Improvement

This brief examines the research on community schools, with two primary emphases. First, it explores whether the 2015 federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) opens the possibility of investing in well-designed community schools to meet the educational needs of low-achieving students in high-poverty schools. And second, it provides support to school, district, and state leaders as they consider, propose, or implement a community school intervention in schools targeted for comprehensive support. The brief is drawn from a larger research review, available at https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/comm-schools-equitable-brief. The online research compendium can be found at https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/online-research-compendium

Deweyan tools for inquiry and the epistemological context of critical pedagogy

This article develops the notion of resistance as articulated in the literature of critical pedagogy as being both culturally sponsored and cognitively manifested. To do so, the authors draw upon John Dewey\u27s conception of tools for inquiry. Dewey provides a way to conceptualize student resistance not as a form of willful disputation, but instead as a function of socialization into cultural models of thought that actively truncate inquiry. In other words, resistance can be construed as the cognitive and emotive dimensions of the ongoing failure of institutions to provide ideas that help individuals both recognize social problems and imagine possible solutions. Focusing on Dewey\u27s epistemological framework, specifically tools for inquiry, provides a way to grasp this problem. It also affords some innovative solutions; for instance, it helps conceive of possible links between the regular curriculum and the study of specific social justice issues, a relationship that is often under-examined. The aims of critical pedagogy depend upon students developing dexterity with the conceptual tools they use to make meaning of the evidence they confront; these are background skills that the regular curriculum can be made to serve even outside social justice-focused curricula. Furthermore, the article concludes that because such inquiry involves the exploration and potential revision of students\u27 world-ordering beliefs, developing flexibility in how one thinks may be better achieved within academic subjects and topics that are not so intimately connected to students\u27 current social lives, especially where students may be directly implicated

Entry Assessment in Community Colleges: Tracking or Facilitating?

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66989/2/10.1177_009155219302100302.pd

Loss of DNMT1o Disrupts Imprinted X Chromosome Inactivation and Accentuates Placental Defects in Females

The maintenance of key germline derived DNA methylation patterns during preimplantation development depends on stores of DNA cytosine methyltransferase-1o (DNMT1o) provided by the oocyte. Dnmt1omat-/- mouse embryos born to Dnmt1Δ1o/Δ1o female mice lack DNMT1o protein and have disrupted genomic imprinting and associated phenotypic abnormalities. Here, we describe additional female-specific morphological abnormalities and DNA hypomethylation defects outside imprinted loci, restricted to extraembryonic tissue. Compared to male offspring, the placentae of female offspring of Dnmt1Δ1o/Δ1o mothers displayed a higher incidence of genic and intergenic hypomethylation and more frequent and extreme placental dysmorphology. The majority of the affected loci were concentrated on the X chromosome and associated with aberrant biallelic expression, indicating that imprinted X-inactivation was perturbed. Hypomethylation of a key regulatory region of Xite within the X-inactivation center was present in female blastocysts shortly after the absence of methylation maintenance by DNMT1o at the 8-cell stage. The female preponderance of placental DNA hypomethylation associated with maternal DNMT1o deficiency provides evidence of additional roles beyond the maintenance of genomic imprints for DNA methylation events in the preimplantation embryo, including a role in imprinted X chromosome inactivation. © 2013 McGraw et al

Ability Tracking and Social Capital in China's Rural Secondary School System

The goal of this paper is describe and analyze the relationship between ability tracking and student social capital, in the context of poor students in developing countries. Drawing on the results from a longitudinal study among 1,436 poor students across 132 schools in rural China, we find a significant lack of interpersonal trust and confidence in public institutions among poor rural young adults. We also find that there is a strong correlation between ability tracking during junior high school and levels of social capital. The disparities might serve to further widen the gap between the relatively privileged students who are staying in school and the less privileged students who are dropping out of school. This result suggests that making high school accessible to more students would improve social capital in the general population

Oakes, Jeannie, Keeping Track, Part I: The Policy and Practice of Curriculum Inequality, Phi Delta Kappan, 68 (September, 1986), 12-17.

Reviews arguments regarding tracking based on research

Concept 6 and Busing to Relieve Overcrowding: Structural Inequality in California Schools

About 6% of California’s students attend schools that operate on a multi-track calendar known as Concept 6. On this calendar, three tracks rotate throughout the school year, with two tracks in session at any given time and a third on vacation. This results in the school year being broken up into separate blocks by two two-month long vacations, which occur at different times for different tracks. This calendar provides for the maximum enrollment given a school’s existing space. However, students who attend schools operating on the Concept 6 calendar suffer several clear disadvantages. These schools remain large, even with the implementation of this calendar. Students at Concept 6 schools also lose instructional time, since they have fewer days of school compared to other students, fewer nights for teachers to assign homework, and delays due to the need to review material at the beginning of each block of instruction. Furthermore, because of uneven distribution of curriculum across the different tracks, students have limited access to courses (including Advanced Placement courses) and specialized programs; the ill-timed breaks mean students have less access to extra-curricular activities. Students in Concept 6 schools have poorer academic performance than their peers in other schools. Likewise, busing seeks to address the negative effects of overcrowding, but creates inequities of its own. Students who are bused to school due to overcrowding suffer several disadvantages, including reduced parental involvement, an incentive to skip kindergarten (to avoid having to ride the bus), limited access to after-school programs, and poorer academic performance. Overall, students who attend schools on the Concept 6 calendar, as well as students who are bused to relieve overcrowding, receive a significantly lower quality education than that provided to the overwhelming majority of students in California

Making the Rhetoric Real

On April 29, 1992, the faculty of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA were stunned and angry as they watched their city’s tenuous social contract go up in smoke just hours after the jury delivered its not guilty verdict in the Rodney King beating trial. Their anger turned to action over the next three years to create a new center—Center X—to directly address issues of race, poverty, and inequality in schools. In this paper, Jeannie Oakes chronicles the founding of Center X and details the strategies it created to transform the fields of teacher education, induction, and professional development—a broad-based collaborative effort to make the rhetoric about social justice and multiculturalism real