Andrea D. Lewis is Assistant Professor and Chair of the Education Department at Spelman College in Atlanta, Ga. In her latest book, Preservice Teachers, Social Class, and Race in Urban Schools published by Palgrave McMillan, she explores her experiences growing up as a post-civil rights Black student in a middle-class, White community who went on to teach in a high-poverty school. She also examines how middle class teachers of color can balance economic and social class when working in low-income schools. NEA Today talked to Lewis about her book and her research findings.
What was different about your educational experience as a child and your experience as a new educator in a high-poverty community?
Lewis: The major difference was the lack of funding. As a child I attended schools brimming with supplies, the latest technology and bright and cheery, updated facilities. When I started teaching, I paid for everything to set up my classroom, from bulletin board paper to pencils. There were limited resources for basic school supplies and classroom necessities. I had two or three outdated computers in my classroom that typically didn’t work, the halls and classrooms were dark and in need of paint, and the bathrooms needed renovating. While there was an obvious need to update the building, the budget was nonexistent to make it happen. It was disheartening.
What expectations did your students and their parents have of you based on your race and class?
Lewis: My students and parents had high expectations of me as a young Black teacher, but in terms of social class, I think I was more nervous and fearful of my ability to connect with my students and parents. They saw me in the community making home visits and trying to make a difference in the classroom, which assisted in breaking down boundaries. I did have to learn to communicate with parents who insisted on being difficult. Although I was intimidated at first, I learned and grew to see through their frustration and pain. They were not mad at me, but at larger systems that had failed them.
Commentary —Jared Boggess for Education Week, By Elaine Weiss & Christopher T. Cross
Throughout the past year, we have heard broad assertions that U.S. public schools are failing low-income children, suggestions that teachers are a major part of the problem, and pledges from President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to fix the problem in a business-like manner.
Missing from all of these discussions—and from many similar ones under former education secretary Arne Duncan—is a fundamental truth. Namely, that all children need, and will thrive, if provided with certain basic resources and supports. And, as a corollary, that education policymakers should not design programs suited to “those children,” but rather advance strategies that ensure equal opportunities, and experiences, for all our children.
As brain research documents, every child begins to learn at birth. The problem that many children and their schools face is that the resources needed to maximize that learning are unevenly distributed. While most professional parents have jobs that provide paid maternity leave, which enables them to bond with their new babies, working-class and poor parents rarely do, and our narrow federal laws do not help. Low-income and working class parents also often struggle to afford safe, stable child care, let alone the stimulating, enriching early education that will prepare children for kindergarten. This results in enormous income-based gaps in school readiness.
Read the full article here. May require an Education Week subscription.
The earth-shaking overhaul of New Orleans education after Hurricane Katrina has not fixed one of the city’s enduring problems: public school segregation. That’s according to a study Tulane’s Education Research Alliance for New Orleans released Tuesday (April 4).
“New Orleans schools were highly segregated prior to the city’s school reforms, especially in terms of race and income, and remain segregated now,” the authors wrote.
The changes include the state takeover of more than 100 campuses and their reinvention into independently run charters, as well as the end of automatically assigning children to schools near their homes.
The report does not detail why the problem has persisted or offer large-scale recommendations…
CROSSROADS NEWS — Parents, grandparents and anyone raising school-age children, as well as property owners in DeKalb and across Georgia, can find out about the new national education law – Every Student Succeed Act, or ESSA – at a Black Parents’ Town Hall Meeting on Educational Excellence on Oct. 23 at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
The law, which will impact how children are educated, takes effect in 2018, but while Georgia completed its 112-page State Plan on Sept. 18, there has been little conversation in our communities about the plan.
The town hall panel of experts includes Georgia PTA President Tyler L. Barr; Patrice Barlow of the Atlanta NAACP Education Committee and an Urban League of Greater Atlanta education advocate; Deborah Gay, Georgia Department of Education deputy superintendent for Federal Programs and Special Education; and Dr. Knox Phillips, DeKalb School District’s executive director of Research, Assessment, and Grants.
It takes place 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., and is hosted by the National Newspaper Publishers Association, “The Black Press,” as part of a national public awareness campaign to heighten awareness among African-American stakeholders about opportunities presented by ESSA, which President Barack Obama signed into law to replace the No Child Left Behind law.
Parents and other stakeholders will get to ask questions and get clarification about how they can best advocate for their children under the new law.
Dr. Elizabeth Primas, NNPA’s ESSA program manager, said that education has been a bridge leading to upward mobility for African-Americans in the United States even before emancipation.
“Now, more than ever, it is important that we ensure our voices are heard to ensure the academic success of our children,” she said. “ESSA prioritizes high quality education, equity, and closure of the achievement gap. By raising awareness of ESSA, we are seeking to empower stakeholders to advocate for such policies.”
The meeting is hosted by Atlanta’s black-owned newspaper publishers, including CrossRoadsNews.
Jennifer Parker, CrossRoadsNews editor and publisher, said the town hall meeting is a great opportunity for parents and stakeholders, including homeowners, to find out about the law and what is coming.
She said that even homeowners who don’t have children in the school district should attend, because the quality of our schools directly affects our property values and they too can be advocates for quality education.
“People buy homes in counties with quality schools, so this affects all of us,” Parker said. “And parents with kids in school need to know how to navigate the law to get the best resources for their kids education.”
Dr. Benjamin Chavis, NNPA’s executive director, said NNPA is asking church leaders across Atlanta to announce the meeting at services and send emails to their congregation.
“Moral leadership in education is paramount,” said Chavis, a former NAACP executive director and civil rights leader who at age 24 was sentenced to 34 years on arson charges with the Wilmington Ten.
Chavis and the other nine members walked to their freedom in 1980 after the federal appeals court overturned the convictions. They were pardoned by N.C. Gov. Beverly Perdue on Dec. 31, 2012.
The Black Parent Town Hall Meeting takes place in Ebenezer Baptist Church’s Martin Luther King Sr. Community Resources Complex at 101 Jackson St. N.E.
Free parking is available behind the Community Resources Complex; across the street from Ebenezer’s sanctuary; and in the National Martin Luther King Center’s parking lot off Irwin Street.
For more information, call Jennifer Parker at 404-284-1888.
Parents of K-12 children are encouraged to learn about the new Every Student Succeed Act (ESSA), which is offering $1.6 billion in funding and more flexibility to individual states and school districts in how students learn and are evaluated.
Atlanta NAACP Education Committee member Patrice Barlow speaks as a panel member during a parents’ town hall for the Every Student Succeeds Act, at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Oct. 23.
The federal education act was passed into law with bipartisan support in December 2015 under the administration of President Barack Obama. Its specific aim is to close the achievement gap for minority students.
[/media-credit] Parents, teachers, school board members and social workers attended the parents’ town hall on the Every Student Succeeds Act at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Oct. 23.
It replaces the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.
Georgia Department of Education Deputy Superintendent Deborah Gay speaks as a panelist at a parents’ town hall on the Every Student Succeeds Act, alongside DeKalb County School District Director of Research, Assessments and Grants Dr. Knox Phillips, at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Oct. 23.
ESSA reduces federal mandates over education, and gives states and school districts the power to design and implement systems catering to the needs of specific communities, schools, classrooms and students.
ESSA is partway through being implemented and brings with it the power for parents and caregivers to help shape their children’s education, which is what Georgia officials want to see happening throughout metro Atlanta including in DeKalb County.
[/media-credit] Dr. Benjamin Chavis, President of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, speaks during a parents’ town hall on the Every Student Succeeds Act, alongside panelists Tyler Barr, Georgia PTA President; Deborah Gay, Georgia Department of Education Deputy Superintendent; Dr. Knox Phillips, DeKalb County School District Director of Research, Assessments and Grants; and Patrice Barlow, Atlanta NAACP Education Committee member, at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Oct. 23
“ESSA is a true opportunity and we cannot miss this critical opportunity to make sure our voices and concerns are heard. If we don’t, the doors will close and the opportunity, the choices and decisions will pass,” said Patrice Barlow, a member of the Atlanta NAACP Education Committee.
Barlow was one of four panelists at an Oct. 23 parents’ town hall on ESSA, convened by the National Newspaper Publishers Association – “The Black Press” – at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
The panelists – Barlow, Georgia PTA President Tyler Barr, Georgia Department of Education Deputy Superintendent Deborah Gay, and Dr. Knox Phillips, DeKalb County School District Director of Research, Assessments and Grants – said it is crucial for parents to be involved in how ESSA is implemented in their children’s schools.
“ESSA creates the opportunity for every community, every school to design a plan for improvement that is unique. There’s not a prescriptive template anymore,” Gay said.
Community input encouraged
The 50-plus people present included parents, teachers, school board members and social workers from throughout metro Atlanta, who asked questions about the new law and Georgia’s plan, and voiced concerns about the current state of local education, saying there needs to be more teachers, smaller class sizes, more help for disabled students and their families, more culturally relevant teaching material, more teacher training and greater accountability for principals under pressure to make schools and students look good on paper.
One former teacher of 22 years, who asked not to be named, said he left the profession last year after a principal made him alter test scores.
Georgia’s Department of Education spent over a year consulting stakeholders, including parents, and drafting its 111-page ESSA plan, which it submitted to the U.S. Department of Education on Sept. 18 for review within 100 days.
“ESSA creates the opportunity for every community, every school to design a plan for improvement that is unique. There’s not a prescriptive template anymore.” Deborah Gay, Georgia Department of Education
Once Georgia’s plan has been finalized and approved, each school district in the state will create its own plan. That’s where parents, caregivers, community leaders, church groups and nonprofits can really make a difference, by reading up on ESSA, attending town halls, joining school boards and committees, lobbying policy makers and holding officials to account.
Panelists said this is the time for parents to voice concerns about their children’s education, make suggestions for improvement, volunteer in school programs, email elected officials and be proactive in general.
“The ESSA plan, if it communicates nothing else, is that this is a collective activity for all of us to engage together, work together and maybe start to realize the dream of that 1965 legislation in a way we couldn’t before,” Gay said.
“School districts have more flexibility now under ESSA than they have in many years, but the success of it will depend on the strong engagement of stakeholders being knowledgeable, understanding the needs of their community and bringing those into the schools,” she said.
Emphasis on improvement
To comply with ESSA and fulfill its ideals, the Georgia Department of Education is grouping achievement indicators in five categories – content mastery, progress, closing gaps, readiness and graduation rate – applied according to grade bands.
Students will still primarily be assessed on statewide test scores for English, math, science and social studies, with other data recorded such as how well a student is progressing compared to academically similar peers, how well schools are progressing towards improvement targets, whether schools offer alternative classes, and what access exists to support services and resources.
Annual targets will be set for every school, so the Georgia Department of Education can reach its long-term goal of closing the achievement gap by 45 percent over 15 years. It will also establish an assessment task force, comprising stakeholders and experts, to explore assessment methods and how they can be scaled statewide.
Dr. Elizabeth Primas, program manager for NNPA’s ESSA initiative, said there will be less high-stakes testing for students.
Students will still have to take standardized reading and math tests in grades three through eight and once in high school, but states can choose their own standards and accountability systems as long as they align with ESSA.
“States can now write their own standards. It’s taking the federal government a little bit out of public education, that’s public and charter, and putting it back into the hands of the community where they serve,” Primas said, adding that Georgia’s ESSA plan is a living document to be revised and amended to suit specific needs within the state.
ESSA comes with $1.6 billion in federal funding that is not only available to schools, but also to nonprofit organizations able to provide support services, resources and programs to help schools and students achieve ESSA goals and standards.
The holistic community approach in educating children is a key theme of Georgia’s new education state plan, which also aims to teach and assess children in a more holistic way than before.
“Georgia is going to get more education money,” said NNPA President Dr. Benjamin Chavis.
“The question is what is Georgia going to do with that money and how is that money going to impact and make quality education more accessible?” he said. “We want to arouse awareness among our parents about what is happening in the education sector, and we have to be focused on where the resources are going and how local school boards and state departments of education are allocating those resources.”
NNPA is holding ESSA town halls throughout the country.
The Georgia PTA sees ESSA as an improvement and a step in the right direction.
“Finding innovative and flexible ways to assess academic achievement is an essential extension of Georgia’s current policies,” Barr said. “One test cannot accurately reflect a student’s knowledge, and by extension, that same single test cannot accurately evaluate a school.”
Georgia’s lowest-performing schools should know by the end of the year whether they’ll be subject to state intervention.
Among the schools that will be considered are eight in the Bibb County district, three in Dooly County and one in Peach County.
Eric Thomas will lead school improvement efforts as the “chief turnaround officer” and starts work Thursday. The state school board hired him on Oct. 25 to fulfill the requirements of a new law, the First Priority Act, that passed in the spring.
The Governor’s Office of Student Achievement identified 104 schools on its Turnaround Eligible Schools List, released Nov. 3. The schools on the report have three-year-average College and Career Readiness Index scores in the bottom 5 percent of the state…
Boys at Hartley Elementary School got free haircuts on Monday, Nov. 13, 2017, during the “Books with Barbers” event at the school. A partnership between several local barbers and the school’s Family Engagement program made the haircuts possible. The boys read books while the barbers cut their hair.
A $13 million dollar federal grant has been awarded to two New Orleans universities and four nonprofits in an effort to recruit and train 900 diverse teachers for Louisiana by 2020.
The U.S. Education Department’s Supporting Effective Educator Development Program grant will fund the task set forth by Xavier University and Loyola University, according to school officials Monday morning (Nov. 13) at Xavier’s campus. The schools will be collaborating with Teach For America Greater New Orleans, teachNOLA, Relay Graduate School of Education, and New Schools for New Orleans to address teacher pipeline challenges in the city.
The federal funding comes as figures from Tulane University’sEducation Research Alliance for New Orleans showed the rate of teachers leaving the profession or leaving the city was as high as 25 percent annually as of 2015. With this in mind, New Schools CEO Patrick Dobard said the funding serves as a “starting point” as organizations seek longterm sustainable strategies to fund and retain teachers in the city and the region.
Dobard said New Orleans needs to fill 800 teacher vacancies annually, and that doing so would contribute to the improved quality of its public schools. Drawing attention to the C-rating awarded to Orleans Parish schools by Louisiana’s Department of Education, Dobard stressed that “too many of our children are still not receiving the quality education that we’ve come to expect in New Orleans….”
Right now, state education departments are working to try to come up with a plan that meets all the requirements of the Federal government’s Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). One area that has received a lot of attention in ESSA is the student accountability section and the required indicators that hold schools accountable for student learning.
The first indicator under ESSA is known as the academic achievement indicator and requires states to annually measure English/Language Arts (ELA) and Math proficiency using statewide assessments. To simplify, I would call this a proficiency indicator, where states use the information from state standardized tests to see if students are meeting grade level standards. When I was a 4th grade teacher, this information was incredibly useful for me. I needed to know what level my student’s were performing at in language arts and math so that I could scaffold lesson plans, create student groups and understand which students needed to do the most catching up. These scores helped me also talk to parents about where their child was performing in relation to where he/she should be performing as a 4th grader. However, a student’s proficiency score was only a part of the puzzle, which is where the second indicator under ESSA comes in to complete the picture.
The second ESSA accountability indicator is the academic progress indicator, which looks at the growth or progress that an individual student or subgroup of students has made in elementary and middle school. States have created different policies to measure this, but the general goal is to measure an individual student’s growth over a period of time.
When I was a teacher I also had a method of measuring this for each of my students. For example, in reading I would assess their starting reading level at the beginning of the year and then map out an individual plan for each student. Each student would have to grow between 6 or 8 reading levels, depending on where they started, with the overall goal of growing the equivalent of two grade levels. Some of my students did grow two grade levels, but they would still be below where they should be at that grade. For others the two-grade boost would put them way above the 4th grade reading level. It is important for teachers and students to understand and celebrate their progress at multiple checkpoints throughout the year that are not in the form of state tests. In my classroom, this gave students a sense of purpose for their assignments because they wanted to meet the individual goal that we had set together. As a teacher, I also would constantly adjust assignments, homework, student pairs, etc. based on the new levels that students reached throughout the year.
For me, both proficiency and growth measures were crucial for the success of my students. The growth measure made learning real for students as they saw their reading levels steadily increase throughout the year. But I couldn’t rely on growth measures alone. The proficiency measure provided that benchmark to help me know what level fourth grade students should be able to perform at by the end of the year. Without this, I could not have identified the achievement gaps in my classroom and would also not have been able to communicate these to the parents of my students. After understanding the difference between growth and proficiency indicators and how to use the data from each to inform my instruction as a teacher, I do not think that it is a matter of one being more important than the other, but rather both working together to paint a more holistic picture of student learning.
Sway Calloway knows firsthand the life lessons kids receive while learning to play instruments.
Mastering the song flute, clarinet and alto saxophone fostered a love for music that he eventually turned into a career as one of the most well-known hip-hop journalists today.
“What I learned from music is a lot about melody and that’s how I communicate,” the Oakland native told HuffPost, citing his interview strategy. “I learned a lot about rhythm and as I got older, I learned how to make that translate into social skills, how to communicate with people, how to talk to folks, when you talk to folks, when you jump out, when you interject…”
Andrea D. Lewis is Assistant Professor and Chair of the Education Department at 
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