SUMMARY: The FBI reports that hate crime violence in the U.S. is at a 16-year high. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, meanwhile, says the highest percentage of hate incidents since the 2016 election occurred in elementary and secondary schools. Special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault takes a look at how this problem has manifest in northwest Oregon -- and what tool teachers are using to intervene.
SUMMARY: Last week, several students from Big Sky High School in Missoula, Montana, wrote to the NewsHour to sing the praises of their beloved teacher Mark Moe, who announced he would be retiring. Moe shares the news summary with his classes daily, so his students thought a message from the NewsHour would be a fitting tribute -- and maybe a reason to reconsider. Judy Woodruff shares their story.
SUMMARY: Some of the nation's top teachers recently gathered in El Paso, Texas, to speak out against the government’s practice of detaining children who cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Dismissing the notion that they shouldn't get involved in political advocacy, teachers said they see some U.S. policy and procedures as "abusive." Special correspondent Kavitha Cardoza of Education Week reports.
SUMMARY: The idea of the TEACH Grant program was simple: Teachers got a grant to pay for college or graduate school, and in exchange they agreed to teach for four years where they're needed. But an investigation by NPR found that inflexible rules were turning free grants into costly loans. William Brangham speaks with NPR's Cory Turner about a federal fix for program recipients.
SUMMARY: Teacher strikes and walkouts have been spreading from West Virginia to Arizona. Thousands of Kentucky educators rallied on Friday at their state Capitol, as Oklahoma's largest teachers' union called for an end to their nine-day walkout. William Brangham talks with Sarah Jaffe, author of “Necessary Trouble,” about what these states have in common and why it’s happening.
SUMMARY: Thousands of teachers protested Monday in Oklahoma and Kentucky, demanding higher wages and more resources for students. So far this year, teachers in four states - each with a Republican governor and legislature -- have walked out of classrooms to press for more school spending. John Yang talks with Liana Loewus of Education Week about what’s happening around the country.
SUMMARY: Some Oklahoma school districts will remain closed on Monday as the state’s largest teachers’ union continues its nearly week-long strike, demanding more school funding. State lawmakers approved adding $40 million to public schools on Friday, but the head of the union said that would not be enough to end the walk-out. Ben Felder, a reporter for The Oklahoman, joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss.
SUMMARY: President Trump, a number of other Republicans and the NRA have ramped up calls for arming teachers. But it's an idea that generating a lot of criticism among educators. Jason Villalba, a Texas state representative and the architect of the School Marshal Program that allows Texas school districts to train and arm teachers, joins John Yang to discuss how it works.
SUMMARY: What do teachers think of calls from President Trump and others for arming educators as a response to mass shootings at schools? Becky Pringle of the National Education Association joins John Yang to share opposition to the proposal and why many teachers can’t imagine the responsibility of carrying a firearm in the classroom.
SUMMARY: Teaching climate change in schools is a hot-button issue in a number of states, including Idaho and New Mexico, where lawmakers have tried to weaken or dismantle science standards crafted by educators and scientists. Amid a climate-change skeptical Trump administration, legislators cite a concern about one-sided arguments. Special correspondent Lisa Stark of Education Week reports.
SUMMARY: To earn extra money, many teachers around the country are selling lesson plans via online marketplaces. But as such sites become more popular, there are also concerns, including who legally owns the educational materials a teacher creates, and what it means for the collaborative spirit of the profession. Special correspondent Kavitha Cardoza of Education Week reports from Alabama.
SUMMARY: Oklahoma ranks 45 out of 50 states in spending per student. It's home to overcrowded classrooms and more than 100 districts that have approved four-day school weeks. Now, more than 40 teachers who are tired of not being heard are trying to change things themselves -- by running for office. Special correspondent Lisa Stark of Education Week reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): In some parts of the country, it's not just the presidential race on voters' minds. State elections are taking center stage in some places, too, like Oklahoma, where education is at the forefront of the ballot.
Teachers are upset over spending cuts and what they see as a political assault on public education. They have decided it's time to take matters into their own hands. A record number of teachers are running for seats in the state legislature. All of this comes as Oklahoma faces tough budget decisions.
Special correspondent Lisa Stark of our partner Education Week reports from Oklahoma as part of our weekly segment Making the Grade.
LISA STARK, Special correspondent: Football is king in Oklahoma, so it's no surprise the Norman High School homecoming parade shuts down the town's main street.
There's candy for the kids, cheerleaders, and athletes, of course, and enjoying the ride, Oklahoma's teacher of the year, whose day job is deciphering algebra for ninth graders at Norman High.
This is Shawn Sheehan's sixth year teaching.
So, you love being a teacher?
SHAWN SHEEHAN, Oklahoma Teacher of the Year: I do. I love it. I love working with kids. I really do. And I love math. That sounds super nerdy, but I do love math.
LISA STARK: So, it may seem odd that Sheehan, Oklahoma's top teacher, is ready to hang up the white board.
SHAWN SHEEHAN: I made the decision to run for state Senate.
I think what it is, is, we have is a lack of representation at the state capitol. We have folks up there who don't really understand what's going on in education and what's going on in our communities.
LISA STARK: He's not the only one who feels that way. Sheehan has joined more than 40 educators who have filed to run for the Oklahoma legislature.
Why do you think so many educators are running this year?
SHAWN SHEEHAN: I think, in this state, educators are finally fed up. And it's almost like a sense of, we don't have anything to lose at this point.
SUMMARY: Science tells us that critical brain development in children begins well before kindergarten, so their care and education prior to starting school matter. But the very foundation of effective early education -- child care providers -- often struggle to earn a living wage. In fact, nearly half of these teachers require some sort of federal support to make ends meet. Hari Sreenivasan reports.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Now a look at how pre-K teachers and early child care workers struggle to make ends meet, earning little better than subsistence wages, even as parents and the Obama administration say they increasingly value what they do.
It's part of our weekly education series 'Making the Grade,' produced this week in collaboration with The Hechinger Report.
CHANEE WILSON, Teacher, Booth Memorial Child Development Center: OK. What color is this?
CHILDREN: Yellow.
CHANEE WILSON: Yellow and white.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Chanee Wilson teaches at the Salvation Army's Child Development Center in Oakland, California. This year, the center received a top quality rating from the state.
CHERYL MURRAY, Program Director, Booth Memorial Child Development Center: Our teachers are doing a really good job. They're not just baby-sitting. They're actually teaching.
HARI SREENIVASAN: But program director Cheryl Murray says, despite the high rating, she is not able to pay her teachers a livable wage.
CHERYL MURRAY: We're unable. If we pay them more, then we wouldn't be able to serve the families, and the families really need the service. I wish I could hit the lottery and pay more for them.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The center serves low-income families and gets 80 percent of its funding from state subsidies. Families pay on a sliding scale based on their income, and teachers are paid minimum wage or slightly higher.
One issue is staffing. Because they have younger children, child care classes require more teachers than kindergarten. Chanee Wilson lives in Section 8 subsidized housing with her two children and receives a small amount of money in food stamps. She makes $13.25 an hour.
CHANEE WILSON: It's a struggle every month paycheck to paycheck. You have kids and you have bills. We more focus on the needs, which is like providing the roof over their heads, the clothes, then the food, and things like that.
SUMMARY: Karen Ritter, an assistant principal at a high school just outside of Chicago, wanted to see her school through a student's eyes. So she decided to follow 9th grader Alan Garcia, who came to her asking to be switched out of the many remedial classes in which he is enrolled, hoping to get a clear view of his experience in the classroom. Special correspondent John Tulenko of Education Week reports.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): High school students and parents sometimes say principals and teachers don't quite understand what it's like to be a student these days. It turns out there's an effort to change that. Some 1,300 principals recently took a day off from their usual role and instead followed one of their students for a day.
The approach came from two groups outside the traditional field of public education, the Design School at Stanford University, and IDEO, a design company based in Palo Alto, California.
Special correspondent John Tulenko of Education Week followed one principal through the first ever national Shadow a Student Day Challenge. It's part of our weekly education series on Making the Grade.
KAREN RITTER, Assistant Principal, East Leyden High School: My name is Karen Ritter. I'm an assistant principal at East Leyden High School, which is just outside of Chicago.
And, today, I will be shadowing a student.
JOHN TULENKO, Education Week: Why are you doing this?
KAREN RITTER: Just to get a sense of what students go through during the day.
I don't really get to spend a lot of time with students. Usually, I'm in charge of things that the teachers are involved in. So, this includes teacher evaluations, teacher attendance, professional development. I would say 50 percent is in meetings.
JOHN TULENKO: Do you feel like you know what goes on here?
KAREN RITTER: I — I do, just because I do observe a lot of classrooms. Now, I'm looking at it more from the teacher's perspective.
But now I want to know what it feels like through the lens of a student.
JOHN TULENKO: Her public high school serves some 1,700 students and is both racially and economically diverse.
Today, Karen is following a ninth-grader.
SUMMARY: Detroit's public schools have been in financial decline for more than a decade as their enrollment plummeted. Now on the brink of insolvency, the district is confronted with decrepit buildings, a chronic lack of resources and fed up teachers who have staged "sick-outs" in protest of the conditions. The NewsHour’s April Brown reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Next, to Detroit, and a city school system in turmoil, plagued with decrepit buildings, financial uncertainty, a chronic lack of resources, and now a recent wave of teacher sick-outs.
All of it is fueling a growing anxiety that the system could run out of money in coming months.
April Brown has our report. It’s part of our Making the Grade series, which airs every Tuesday.
Tonight’s story is in partnership with the American Graduate Initiative.
APRIL BROWN (NewsHour): The playground at Detroit’s Spain Elementary and Middle School sat empty for weeks. No children were allowed in because of this.
LAKIA WILSON, Counselor, Spain Elementary-Middle School: We started to call it a steam geyser, because we really don’t know what it is, if you notice that there is steam coming out there. There is also some liquid that is spewing out from it. So it’s very dangerous because it causes the temperatures on the playground to reach 110 degrees.
APRIL BROWN: Lakia Wilson is the counselor at Spain, a school with a century-long legacy in this Detroit neighborhood. But for the last two years, she says, steam and water, reportedly from the sewer system, have been seeping out of the concrete in the parking lot and shooting out of this pipe a few feet away.
This is your only playground?
LAKIA WILSON: This is our own only playground. We have lost our gym, and we have no playground now.
APRIL BROWN: What do your kids do for exercise now?
LAKIA WILSON: Our children are limited to walking the hallway. They have become like mall walkers.
APRIL BROWN: The gym she referred to is now locked. But before that happened, a few cameras captured what is there.
How would you describe what we see inside?
LAKIA WILSON: A scary movie. The floor has been removed, the parquet. And now what you see is just a layer of blackness. We have been told that it was black mold. In fact, the city inspector said that it was mold.
APRIL BROWN: Teachers and staff say they have had building issues for years, including mold, water damage, and broken windows, some of which city inspectors recently cited as code violations.
India Brimberry, the school’s student health aide, is among those concerned these problems are affecting the health of those who work and study here.
SUMMARY: Research on the brain and how we think and act is influencing the way some teachers teach. Special correspondent John Tulenko of Learning Matters goes into a classroom where the instructor uses different methods to engage different parts of the students’ brains, then checks with a neuroscientist about whether that strategy actually works.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Next, neuroscience and education.
Thousands of teachers around the country are learning about an alternative teaching program that aims to use scientific discoveries about the brain to improve the way children learn in the classroom.
Special correspondent John Tulenko of Learning Matters reports from Philadelphia.
JASSELLE CIRINO, Teacher, Francis Scott Key Elementary: When I say class, you…
CLASS: You stop what you’re doing. Look at the teacher.
JOHN TULENKO, Learning Matters: Today is Wacky Wednesday in Jasselle Cirino’s third grade classroom, which explains the blue wig.
JASSELLE CIRINO: So I want you to teach your neighbor.
JOHN TULENKO: But the rest of what you’re about to see is what her classroom looks like every day.
JASSELLE CIRINO: I want giant gestures.
JOHN TULENKO: She uses a set of techniques some call whole brain teaching.
JASSELLE CIRINO: A lot of times in traditional teaching, you’re just lecturing, and you’re talking and talking. And what we like to say, whole brainers, we like to say that the more you talk, the more students you lose. And so we use different methods to engage multiple parts of the brain. And that way, you get 100 percent engagement.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): As the new school year approaches, teachers have come to expect that many of their students will have forgotten some of what they learned earlier. It’s called summer learning loss, and some teachers believe it’s inevitable. Are they right?
Special correspondent for education John Merrow of Learning Matters reports.
SARAH PISANO, Springboard Teacher: Everyone, turn to page three, please.
JOHN MERROW: The traditional educator’s remedy for summer learning loss is more of the same, more hours and more days of classes and, of course, summer school.
SARAH PISANO: Now we’re on page four.
JOHN MERROW: But suppose there is another solution.
SARAH PISANO: Good morning, Springboard families. Please sign in.
JOHN MERROW: What if schools enlisted family members as partners to help teach the children? That’s what’s happening here at Russell Byers Charter School in Philadelphia. For five weeks this summer, Sarah Pisano helps 6- and 7-year-olds get better at reading.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Teachers unions lost a major court case in California today, which could make it easier to fire ineffective teachers. A California judge ruled that the state’s tenure protections for public school teachers are unconstitutional.
The case was brought on behalf of and by nine students, who said those policies effectively denied their right to a quality education.
We begin with some background.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu struck down three laws, saying they offered teachers job security at the expense of many students.
Elizabeth Vergara and her sister Beatriz are two of the students who brought the complaint. A year apart in age, they attend the same Los Angeles area high school. The sisters told the NewsHour this spring that when they were in middle school, they both sat through a history class taught by the same ineffective teacher:
ELIZABETH VERGARA, Plaintiff: He would just be at his desk, like, just using his computer or sleeping. I didn’t even learn anything. Like, I was getting behind.
GWEN IFILL: In 2012, they joined with seven other California students to file suit against the state, saying their education suffered because teacher and tenure laws prevented schools from acting in their best interest.
Teachers are eligible for tenure in California after 18 months. The students sought to get rid of that and other laws, including seniority protections and dismissal procedures they say allow poorly performing teachers to stay in the classroom.
But attorneys for the state and teachers unions told the judge the laws are key to recruiting and retaining a skilled teaching force, and were meant to ensure educators aren’t dismissed unfairly.
SUMMARY: Learning to read is the essential foundation of elementary education, but it's also very complex and many students in America are falling behind. John Tulenko of Learning Matters reports on one model school that has re-trained teachers in hands-on skills and strategies and has dramatically improved proficiency scores.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): The new school year is under way in many districts around the country, an even more important time than usual, as many states get used to new testing standards and changing course work.
Teachers remain front and center in the ongoing debate over accountability and student performance. But there is new attention to the role of principals as well.
We begin a two-part look with a report from Eddie Arruza of WTTW Chicago.
ERNESTO MATIAS, Wells Community Academy: Hey, why are you messing around? Why are you messing around?
EDDIE ARRUZA: Principal Ernesto Matias runs a tight and disciplined school on Chicago's north side. Like most urban high schools, Wells has occasional problems, but nothing like what was happening when Matias first arrived five years ago.
ERNESTO MATIAS: There was a lot of conflicts, a lot of violence. There was a student walkout the year before. There were four teachers in remediation who were taken out of this building, not to return. And so that's what I stepped into, a lot of distrust, disunity, and a lot of beating up of staff members here.
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JUDY WOODRUFF: Ray Suarez has the second part of our report.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): Some perspective now on the national picture when it comes to finding and retaining good principals and how that's changing.
Will Miller is the president of the Wallace Foundation, a national philanthropy that focuses on education for disadvantaged children. The foundation funds research, including on ways of improving principal quality.
For the record, the Wallace Foundation is also a NewsHour underwriter.
