اینترنت

برچسب: shows

  • Trump Shows His Fascist Face

    Trump Shows His Fascist Face


    It was inevitable. And now it’s happening. During his first term, Trump repeatedly encouraged violence. He told police officers in New York not to be so nice when they arrest people. He asked “his” generals if they could shoot protestors in the legs. He broadcast fake videos showing him beating up a cartoon character labeled CNN. He urged his crowds at rallies to beat up protestors and said he would pay their legal fees. He wants to seem like a real man, a tough guy. But don’t forget that this tough guy dodged the draft five times with a podiatrist’s note about bone spurs in his feet.

    This week, his troubles were mounting. There was the very public split with Musk, who dropped hints about Trump’s name in the still confidential Epstein files. There was Elon’s claim that Trump would have lost the election and control of the House without Elon’s help. What kind of “help”? There was the tariff mess, which was causing a global economic disruption and predictions of inflation. And a Trump’s poll numbers were plummeting.

    What a perfect time to send in large numbers of ICE agents to immigrant neighborhoods in Los Angeles! Send them to Home Depot, where immigrants cluster in search of work–not the “criminals, rapists, and murderers,” but laborers looking for work.

    Voila! Their friends, families, a neighbors turn out to protests the ICE raids, and at o e there are crowds and people waving Mexican flags (a big mistake, they should have waved American flags). The situation was volatile but there was no reason to think that local and state police couldn’t handle it.

    Trump is shrewd: he saw his chance to distract public attention from his failing policies, and he took it. Without bothering to contact Governor Newsom, Trump mobilized the National Guard. He ordered 2,000 into the troubled neighborhood. Then he sent in another 2,000, plus 700 Marines.

    Only the Governor can call up his state’s National Guard, except in the most exceptional situations (the last time it happened was 1965, when President Johnson mobilized the National Guard in Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators because Governor George Wallace refused to do so).

    It is even more unusual for a President to call in the military to oppose ordinary people, which is normally handled by state and local police. There is an act-the Posse Comitatus Act–that specifically forbids the Army and Air Force from acting against civilians on American soil. A different law, 10 U.S. Code 275, forbids Navy and Marine Corps members from the same thing. Trump claims that the anti-ICE protests are an insurrection, which allows him to call in the Marines. Legal scholars disagree, but most think he overreached and that there was no insurrection in Los Angeles.

    Indeed, the large show of force drew an even larger crowd to the protests and made it more dangerous. Nonetheless, there seem to be more military at the scene than protestors.

    Miraculously, no one has been killed (unlike the genuinely violent insurrection on January 6, 2021, where Trump rioters viciously beat police officers and several people died). He sat back and watched the insurrection on television and is now considering whether to reimburse them for their legal expenses after being imprisoned for engaging in insurrection.

    Trump said on national television that “many people” had been killed during the protests (not true) and that if he had not sent in the troops, the city would have been “obliterated.” This is nonsense. The clash between the protest and the military is contained to a few blocks of a very large city.

    Today, there were spontaneous peaceful rallies in many cities to show support for the demonstrators in Los Angeles.

    The best response: show up for a “No Kings” rally on Saturday. Check the website http://www.nokings.org to find one or create one where you live.

    Trump is not only diverting attention from his monstrous One Ugly Bill, he is laying the groundwork for martial law and dictatorship.



    Source link

  • Report shows few California college students enroll in CalFresh, despite qualifying

    Report shows few California college students enroll in CalFresh, despite qualifying


    At the University of California, Irvine, the basic needs center offers a food pantry, housing support and more to meet students’ basic needs.

    Photo: UCI Basic Needs Center

    Few college students participate in the state’s CalFresh food program despite being eligible, according to a report published Tuesday by the University of California’s California Policy Lab.

    The report, “Filling the Gap: CalFresh Eligibility Among University of California and California Community College Students,” is the first to link together datasets that provide estimates on the number of California college students who are eligible for CalFresh, the state’s food benefits program, in addition to their take-up rate — the share of students who are eligible and also participate in the program.

    The report’s authors found that CalFresh eligibility and students’ subsequent enrollment in the program depended significantly on which institution of higher learning they attended, age, housing situation, and other factors. The school they were enrolled in was often connected to the level of outreach they received informing them of the food benefits program and whether they received a certain financial aid grant that made them eligible for CalFresh.

    “California in the last few years has been increasingly focused on this channel of potential support for college students. It’s one of the pieces that students can paste together to put together a financial package that allows them to go to college,” said Jesse Rothstein, report co-author, about the CalFresh program.

    CalFresh, once known as food stamps, is designed to provide money for groceries for California residents, making it a significant support program for low-income students. College students are typically eligible for CalFresh if they meet the regular rules that everyone, whether a student or not, must meet, in addition to at least one of more than a dozen exemptions. Understanding the long list of eligibility criteria specific to students has long been seen as a significant barrier for students, according to the report.

    “But because CalFresh is run by a different agency — it’s not part of the education system — I think it’s hard for students to navigate,” said Rothstein, Carmel P. Friesen Professor of Public Policy and Economics at UC Berkeley and the faculty director of the California Policy Lab’s UC Berkeley site.

    The data for the report was collected by the UC’s California Policy Lab from four institutions: California Community College Chancellor’s Office, University of California Office of the President, California Department of Social Services and California Student Aid Commission.

    In gathering data from these four agencies, the authors developed a database connecting college enrollment numbers, monthly CalFresh participation records, and annual federal financial aid (FAFSA) details.

    The data points to differences in eligibility and take-up rates between students in the California community colleges and the UC campuses as well as which students actually enroll to receive the benefits if they are eligible.

    Data from the fall of 2019, the semester immediately prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, provides one of the clearest examples. During that time, the data showed a significant discrepancy between students who were eligible for CalFresh versus those who applied to receive the food aid — and further disparities depending on whether students were enrolled in a community college or a UC.

    They found that 20% of community college students, 33% of UC undergraduates and 7% of UC graduate students were likely eligible for CalFresh. Yet just 26% of eligible community college students, 22% of eligible UC undergraduates, and 27% of eligible UC graduate students actually enrolled to receive CalFresh benefits.

    The authors suggest a few reasons for the discrepancies.

    First, UC students are less likely to live at home with their parents, increasing their chances of being eligible for CalFresh.

    Second, students in the community colleges are overall less likely to be eligible for CalFresh. This is because “the version of the Cal Grant given to UC students qualifies many of them for CalFresh eligibility, but the version given to CCC students does not,” per the report’s authors.

    And, finally, the UC has increased outreach efforts to enroll more eligible students into basic needs programs like CalFresh. This would explain, the authors wrote, why the take-up rate among UC undergraduates has increased substantially since 2017, while the same rate among community college students has declined.

    The authors note that they can only provide data estimates in the report because the multiple eligibility determination factors may be captured inaccurately, although errors were likely insignificant and “our estimates are a good approximation of the share of students who would be found eligible under individualized determinations.”

    A deeper look into data from the fall of 2019 highlights important details, including:

    • The Central Coast’s UC Santa Barbara had the third-highest eligibility rate at 37% but the highest take-up rate at 37%
    • Of the community college regions statewide, the Central Valley had both the highest eligibility rate at 29% and the highest take-up rate at 33%, while the Bay Area had the lowest eligibility rate at 15% and the lowest take-up rate at 20%
    • Black and Latino students were more likely to be eligible than white or Asian peers regardless of the institution attended
    • When it came to actually enrolling in CalFresh, Black and Latino students were more likely to do so if attending a UC, but Latino students were less likely to enroll in the program if attending a community college
    • Students over the age of 23 had higher take-up rates than those 23 years and younger at both institutions

    Some of those details were expected given the history of outreach out of certain institutions. Santa Barbara County and UC Santa Barbara, for example, have long worked toward smoothing out the process for students to both determine their CalFresh eligibility and to apply for the program.

    Other details, such as the low take-up rates in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, highlight the potential need for additional outreach in regions with increasingly high housing and cost of living expenses. Among community college students in Los Angeles, just 5% of the population were both eligible and participating in CalFresh during the fall of 2019. That number is 3% during the same timeframe in the Bay Area.

    The development of a new dataset

    The report included data from millions of students who attended UC and community college campuses between the 2010-11 and 2021-22 school years. While the report’s authors were largely focused on the most recent data, they included previous years’ data that was consistent across the four agencies they had data sharing agreements with — and this happened to take them as far back as the 2010-11 school year.

    The bulk of the project took about four years to complete, according to Rothstein, who noted that this project took “longer than most” he’s worked on in his career. The team first needed to execute data sharing agreements between each of the institutions included in the report and then clean it up to ensure accuracy.

    “It’s really beyond the ability of the individual agencies to do this kind of project,” said Rothstein.“It just takes too long and requires too much collaboration between agencies.”

    Notably missing from the institutions that shared their data was California State University, which is the nation’s largest four-year public university system.

    The CSU “was more reluctant” to share their data, said Rothstein, and his team decided to move forward without that system’s information. He noted that his team plans to work on another edition of the report in which they hope to be able to include CSU data.

    “Our hope is that by kind of developing long-term relationships with the agencies we can build the trust that’s required to do this kind of project,” said Rothstein. “We can also build the kind of specialized knowledge of the individual data sets that makes it possible.”

    The story has been updated to reflect changes made to the report by the California Policy Lab.





    Source link

  • Long-term English learners do worse on tests than peers with fewer years in U.S. schools, data shows

    Long-term English learners do worse on tests than peers with fewer years in U.S. schools, data shows


    Credit: Alison Yin / EdSource

    Este artículo está disponible en Español. Léelo en español.

    Long-term English learners who have been enrolled in U.S. schools for more than six years without becoming proficient in the language do worse on California’s math and English language arts tests than English learners who have been enrolled for fewer than six years.

    California released data for the first time on long-term English learners’ achievement in standardized tests in math, English language arts and science for the 2022-23 school year, after a bill signed in 2022 required it. Long-term English learners are students who have been enrolled in U.S. schools for six years or more but have not advanced on the English proficiency test in two or more years. The state also released data for those “at risk of becoming long-term English learners,” defined as students who have been enrolled for four or five years and scored at intermediate level or below on the English proficiency test.

    In the past, California had separated achievement data for English learners by those who had been enrolled for less than or more than a year, but not for long-term English learners or those at risk of becoming long-term English learners.

    As a whole, students classified as English learners tend to do poorly on academic tests precisely because they are still learning English, and once they are reclassified, they tend to do much better. 

    Yet the data shows that long-term English learners do worse than their counterparts who have been enrolled in U.S. schools for fewer years.

    Only 5.4% of long-term English learners met or exceeded English language arts standards in 2022-23, compared with 10.9% of English learners as a whole. In math, only 2.1% of long-term English learners met or exceeded the standards, versus 9.9% of English learners as a whole.

    “There’s something really tragic that happens when students are not getting what they need every year, and they’re not feeling successful, and it really shapes their identity as a student,” said Nicole Knight, executive director of English language learner and multilingual achievement at Oakland Unified School District. 

    Knight said Oakland Unified has been separating the district’s own achievement data by the number of years English learners have been in school and found similar results. “The longer they’re in the system as long-term English learners, at least from a statistical standpoint, they tend to do worse and worse,” she said.

    Conor P. Williams, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, said the data is not surprising and is likely due to several factors. 

    In part, these scores may have to do with the way the state defines English learners. Students who do not do well on academic tests continue to be classified as English learners because California requires students to do as well as their English-speaking peers on English language arts tests, in addition to passing the English Language Proficiency Assessment, in order to be reclassified as fluent. 

    “The fact that long-term English learners do particularly worse on a lot of academic metrics likely reflects the fact that there is an academic indicator in California’s reclassification criteria. That is not standard in all states,” said Williams. In many states, he said, students only have to pass an English language proficiency test in order to be reclassified as fluent.

    Shelly Spiegel-Coleman, strategic adviser of Californians Together, said it’s important to note that most English learners do reclassify within six years. She said long-term English learners may not have received strong English language development support in their early years and probably no instruction in their home languages. She added that some English learners with fewer years of enrollment in U.S. schools may have arrived in the country already knowing how to read in their home languages.

    A study by Californians Together showed that more than a third of long-term English learners also have disabilities that qualify them for special education services.

    “Sometimes that is an excuse for folks, but those students can also reclassify, (though) it may take them a little more time,” said Knight. She said English learners with disabilities are less likely to receive quality instruction in English language development and quality special education services. “That’s a big issue that districts and schools need a lot more support and guidance with than what we currently have.”

    Knight added that being classified as English learners for many years can hurt students’ self-esteem and cause them to become disengaged with school and stop turning in assignments or attending class.

    The data is a call to action for districts, said Spiegel-Coleman. She said beginning next year, districts will have to include plans for long-term English learners in their local control accountability plans, or LCAPs. These are plans that every district and charter school must write every year, explaining how they will use state funds to improve educational outcomes for certain groups of students.

    “When they’re writing their LCAPs, they need to look at those kids and say what is it we need to do for them?,” Spiegel-Coleman said. “Now that will happen. It will heighten their visibility, for sure.”

    Knight said districts also need to offer more training and support for middle and high school teachers to incorporate explicit instruction in the English language, no matter what subject they teach. For example, she said Oakland Unified has worked to train middle school math teachers on how to teach students the language they need to understand in order to figure out a math problem.

    She said districts can also help long-term English learners become more engaged in school, for example with internships or career education where they can use their skills in their home language.

    The data also shows districts need to do more to help students learn enough English to reclassify as fluent in their first six years of school, before they become long-term English learners, both Spiegel-Coleman and Knight said.

    “The number of long-term English learners in our system is really an indictment on our system as a whole, in Oakland and outside of Oakland,” Knight said.

    She said some schools in Oakland reclassify almost 30% of their English learner students every year, while other schools reclassify almost none of them. 

    “That tells us that it’s really about the experiences they’re getting,” Knight said. “So how do we make sure more and more of our classrooms and schools are doing what these schools that have high reclassification rates are doing?”





    Source link

  • California schools recovering from pandemic, dashboard shows

    California schools recovering from pandemic, dashboard shows


    Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education

    Este artículo está disponible en Español. Léelo en español.

    California’s K-12 schools made progress in several areas last school year, including increasing graduation rates slightly, and reducing suspensions and the number of students who were chronically absent from school, according to the School Dashboard released Thursday. 

    The state also had an overall increase in scores on state standardized tests in both English language arts and math, prepared more students for college and careers, and had more students earn a seal of biliteracy.

    The improvements, although incremental in some areas, are an indicator that California schools have made progress in reducing the learning loss and chronic absenteeism that resulted from school closures at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020.

    “Today’s dashboard results show California continuing to make important strides in post-pandemic recovery,” said California State Board of Education President Linda Darling-Hammond. “We’re getting students back to school, getting more of them prepared for college and careers, and graduating them in greater numbers.” 

    The dashboard, a key part of the state’s accountability system, uses an array of colors to show whether a school or district showed growth or decline in several areas, including chronic absenteeism, suspension and graduation rates; preparation for college and career; progress of English language learners; and on state standardized test scores in math and English language arts.

    Students are considered chronically absent if they miss 10 percent or more of instructional days during the school year.

    Blue identifies schools and districts with the best performance, followed by green, yellow, orange and red. Schools and districts are scored based on their performance that school year, as well as on whether there were increases or decreases since the previous school year. Anything below a green rating indicates a need for improvement, according to state officials.

    This year, the state added science scores from state standardized tests to the mix, but only as an informational item. Next year the scores will be an official indicator, used to help determine whether schools need support from the county or state.

    Fewer school districts require support

    Districts that have a red rating in one or more priority areas are required to receive assistance from their county office of education as part of the California Statewide System of Support. Poor-performing county offices, which also operate schools, receive support directly from the state. 

    Priority areas include school climate (suspension rates); pupil engagement (graduation rate and chronic absences) and pupil achievement (English learner progress and math, science and English language arts tests).

    Because of the progress made by California schools last school year, the number of districts with performance low enough to require support from their county offices of education declined for the second year in a row. This year, 436 districts were qualified for help, compared with 466 last year.

    In 2022, 617 school districts were referred for assistance, largely because of high chronic absenteeism rates, according to the California Department of Education. But over the last two school years, chronic absenteeism rates have declined 5.7 percentage points each year. In 2021-22, almost a third of students were chronically absent.

    Chronic absenteeism continues to decline

    Despite the decline in chronic absentee rates, the state still has to make improvements to reach the 12.1% rate it had in 2019, before the Covid pandemic. The current chronic absentee rate is 18.6%.

    High school students were the most likely to be chronically absent last school year, missing on average 15.6 days of school. Transitional kindergarten and kindergarten students missed an average of 13.9 days, seventh and eighth graders 12.6 days, fourth through sixth graders 11 days, and first through third-grade students 11.5 days. 

    Eleven of the 15 school districts in El Dorado County were designated for differentiated assistance from the county because of high levels of chronic absenteeism in 2022. County Office of Education staff met with leaders from the 11 districts to review data and identify the root causes, said Ed Manansala, El Dorado County superintendent of schools. The county office provided data to districts every month in an effort to zero in on why student groups and individual students were absent and moving toward chronic absenteeism, he said.

     Last year, the county had three school districts on the state list because of chronic absenteeism. This year there were none, Manansala said.

    “To me, it’s a validation that the statewide system of support is working,” he said.

    Long-term English learners added

    While many districts improved their chronic absentee numbers and other indicators last year, avoiding the need for support, 215 districts are on the list, in part, because of the performance of their long-term English learners — a student group that was added this year.

    The performance of long-term English learners on academic tests, graduation rates and other indicators was the leading reason schools and districts were flagged for improvement this year. 

    The dashboard defines long-term English learners as students who speak a language other than English at home and have been enrolled in U.S. schools for seven years or more but have not yet achieved proficiency in English. In the past, the dashboard only included data for English learners as a whole.

    The inclusion of long-term English learners in the dashboard is the result of legislation that advocacy organizations pushed for several years. 

    “It’s a monumental step forward,” said Martha Hernandez, executive director of Californians Together, a statewide organization that advocates for English learners. “Long-term English learners’ needs will no longer be hidden, and they’ll be spotlighted for statewide accountability.”

    Hernandez said it is paramount that school districts use the new data about long-term English learners to develop programs and train teachers on how to help these students in particular. Long-term English learners have needs that differ from recently arrived immigrant students. For example, long-term English learners often have a good command of informal spoken English, but have not mastered reading and writing in the language.

    In addition, Hernandez said districts should also focus on helping students achieve fluency in English faster, so they do not become long-term English learners in the first place.

    “English learners come to school bright and ready to learn, and the system really fails them. (If) they become long-term English learners, it’s not an indication of the students, but really the system’s failure to meet their needs,” Hernandez said. 

    In El Dorado County, there are six districts in need of assistance from the county office of education. Like many districts in California this year, El Dorado Union High School District made the list because of the addition of long-term English language learners to the state metric. Manansala and Mike Kuhlman, superintendent of the high school district, have begun discussions on how to improve the achievement of long-term English learners.

    “We have 12 TK-8 districts that feed into that high school district, so it’s going to become a systemwide discussion,” Manansala said. “Again, we’re going to look at that more closely over these next few years.”

    More earn State Seal of Biliteracy

    The number of students who received the State Seal of Biliteracy on their high school diplomas also increased — up from 52,773 in 2022-23 to 64,261 in 2023-24. This may be due to a law that went into effect in 2024 that offers students more ways to prove their proficiency in English, in addition to a second language.

    In the past, advocates and administrators said many students, particularly English learners, didn’t receive the State Seal of Biliteracy, even though they were bilingual, because there weren’t enough options to prove proficiency in English.

    Graduation rates up slightly

    High school graduation rates in California increased 0.2 percentage points to 86.4% this year. But that was enough to give the state the largest cohort of students to graduate from high school since 2017, with 438,065 students, according to state officials. Of those 227,463 met the requirements to attend the University of California or California State University.

    Graduation rates have stayed fairly stable over the last decade, primarily because many districts allowed juniors and seniors to graduate upon meeting the state’s minimum requirement of 130 units during pandemic closures, instead of the higher number of units most districts required.

    Suspension rates decline

    Suspension rates declined slightly last school year, from 3.5% in 2022-23 to 3.2%.

    The decline in suspension rates was for all student groups, according to the California Department of Education, although there continues to be a focus on disparities in suspensions for African American students, foster youth, homeless students, students with disabilities and long-term English learners.

    Equity report

    Assistance to districts is also based on poor performance by student groups. So, even if a district overall has satisfactory performance, with yellow or even green, it will receive county guidance if the ratings of one or more student groups are red as measured on multiple measures of performance.

    An equity report on the dashboard gives users a look at the progress of the 14 student groups that attend California schools, including African American, American Indian, Asian, English learners, Filipino, foster youth, Hispanic, homeless, two or more races, Pacific Islander, socioeconomically disadvantaged, long-term English learners, students with disabilities, and white students.

    This year, school districts will get assistance to improve outcomes for long-term English learners in 215 districts, students with disabilities in 195 districts, homeless students in 125 districts, foster youth in 104 districts, English learners in 84 districts, economically disadvantaged students in 68 districts, white students in 30 districts, American Indian and Alaska Native in 27 districts, students of two or more races in 19 districts, Pacific Islander students in eight districts, and Asian students in one district, according to an EdSource analysis.

    The number of districts needing help to improve outcomes for African American and Latino students declined this year. Districts will get assistance to help African American students in 51 districts, down from 66 in 2018. Thirty-nine districts will get assistance to help Latino students, down from 44 compared with 2018. 

    “Across California, we’re seeing that when we provide for the most vulnerable in our communities, all students reap the rewards,” said State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond in a statement. “Our migrant students and socioeconomically disadvantaged students show marked improvements in consistent school attendance and graduation rates, reflecting the dedication of our educators and students alike.”





    Source link