Friday News Roundup…

It’s Friday! Time for the news roundup…

Texas Republicans Want to Arm More School Employees, But Few Districts are Opting In (The Texas Tribune)

Governor Greg Abbott Instructs School Safety Officials to Conduct “Unannounced, Random Intruder” Audits of Texas Public Schools (The Texas Tribune)

“Since Texas launched the school marshal program in 2013, just 84 school districts out of more than 1,200 have armed school staff. Educators say the program’s lack of popularity shows that teachers don’t want to be the ones to defend schools from mass shootings.”

At the same time, “Governor Greg Abbott has ordered state school security and educational officials to start conducting ‘in-person, unannounced, random intruder detection audits on school districts’ to find weak access points and see how quickly staff can enter a school building without being stopped.”

Texas just doesn’t get it, and I’ve written about the state’s misguided policies before. You can’t improve school security by asking people who wanted to become teachers to help kids to now start “packing heat.” And, you can’t play a game of “gotcha” if you want to instill faith in a school leader’s ability to secure their campuses to the best of their abilities.

Texas should set the expectation for safety and security, provide funding to achieve those ends, and offer support to school districts along the way.

An Expansive Look at School Segregation Shows It’s Getting Worse (EducationWeek)

“School segregation has increased in the last 30 years, especially in the 100 largest districts that enroll about 40 percent of the nation’s K-12 population.

While the overall public school population has increased in diversity, and a majority of students are now nonwhite, schools remain highly segregated by race, ethnicity, and economic status, according to a newly released report by researchers from the University of Southern California and Stanford University.”

Many years ago, I remember Jerry Weast, superintendent of the Montgomery (MD) Public School system outside Washington, D.C., being asked why his school’s test scores were increasing at a higher rate than other urban school districts. Weast gave an answer that surprised the room. He said that his kids became better readers and problem-solvers not because of any improvements made inside his learning organization. Weast cited changes in the Montgomery County housing ordinances that mixed low-income families with traditionally middle-income neighborhoods. The superintendent encouraged all municipalities to look at their segregated housing policies if they wanted to see their kids achieve at higher levels.

“Most Black students who could be tapped as academically gifted attend schools where they are either likely to be overlooked or have no access to getting identified at all, a study in the journal Urban Education finds.

In 2016 alone, while nearly 277,000 Black students were identified as academically gifted nationally, some 771,000 others were estimated to be ‘missing.’”

Honestly, I don’t know why black, brown, and poor families choose to attend America’s public schools. Wait! How stupid could I be. Most black, brown, and poor families don’t choose to attend America’s public schools. Instead, they are mandated to attend, and most of the time mandated to attend what we use to call in the business “sucky schools.”

Are Police Required to Confront a School Shooter? The Legal Answer is No (EducationWeek, reprinted from The Charlotte Observer)

“Police aren’t required to protect you.

When shots ring out in a school, the law doesn’t demand police rush inside and confront the shooter, even if lives could be saved.

There’s an expectation that they will – as the mott ‘To Protect and to Serve’ suggests – and departments train and prepare to do so. But as the courts have found, there is no law to hold officers accountable if they don’t.

The so-called ‘public duty doctrine’ doesn’t apply to mass shootings only, but also a practically innumerable spectrum of possible scenarios, according to experts. The doctrine holds that ‘an individual has no duty to come to the aid of an individual,’ and that principle extends to police officers. They have no more legal responsibility to save someone than an average citizen, in most circumstances.”

So arming schools, whether it is a police officer, teacher, or a custodian – only works if that individual police officer, teacher, or custodian decides to take their lives in their own hands and move forward to confront the bad guy (have you notice that female mass shooters are very rare?)? Doesn’t this legal interpretation hurt the Republican strategy to “harden” schools? If armed school personnel can choose not to engage with a mass shooter, then why have them armed on campus? Strange logic, don’t you think?

Education Secretary: “Let’s Transform Our Appreciation of Teachers to Action” (EducationWeek)

“It’s been a tough couple years for the teaching profession. Job satisfaction is down, attrition rates appear to be going up, and administrators and policymakers are desperate to find ways to staff classrooms with highly qualified and diverse teachers.

To address some of these issues, the U.S. Department of Education is seeking an additional $600 million to recruit, support, and retain teachers in its fiscal year 2023 budget request. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a June 9 speech that policymakers – including those at the state and local levels – must make significant investments in the teacher workforce.”

The first U.S. Secretary of Education was Shirley Hufstedler, nominated by President Jimmy Carter and took office November 30, 1979. Since then, Terrel Bell, William Bennett, Lauro Cavazos, Lamar Alexander, Richard Riley, Rod Paige, Margaret Spellings, Arne Duncan, John King, Jr., and Betsy DeVos have all served our country as education secretary before Miguel Cardona was sworn into office March 2, 2021.

I bet everyone of those education leaders gave a similar speech during their tenure as Miguel Cardona gave this week. They said a teacher’s job is hard. They said that teachers weren’t appreciated and it was time to give them greater respect. They implored states and local school boards to do their part in showing appreciation to teachers by increasing their salaries and benefits, and improving their working conditions. Secretaries of Education have been giving speeches like this for 45 years, and veteran teachers still earn on average around $65,000 nationally.

Enough. It’s time to deliver a different speech, and it goes like this:

Teachers! Listen up! Even though your job is hard, we, as your elected leaders, aren’t going to do anything systemically to help you. We promise to keep saying that we appreciate you, but we won’t do much of anything to give you greater respect across our country. Your state legislature or your local school board might do something to help, but don’t count on it. Thanks for all you do, and here’s looking to a great teacher appreciation month in 2023!

It’s time for a new type of learning leader. It’s time for this country to invest in and support the creation of learning coaches.

Have a great weekend, and we’ll talk Wednesday (I’m taking Monday and Tuesday off.) SVB