LPI Blog

This blog post, from Dr. Patricia Gándara, LPI Senior Fellow and Director of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, is part of the Learning Policy Institute series, Education and the Path to Equity. Dr. Gándara discusses the changing demographics of immigrant students and how they’ve been impacted by increased immigration enforcement practices. She also argues for reframing how we think about immigrant students to focus on their assets, which “prime them to be the very best learners in our schools.”

Fifty years ago, the Kerner Commission issued a seminal report on racial division and disparities in the United States. With this blog by Learning Policy Institute (LPI) President Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond, LPI launched a new blog series, Education and the Path to Equity. With it, we commemorate the release of the Kerner report and examine the persistent struggle to provide an equitable education for each and every student.

As California policymakers look to strengthen the state’s early care and education workforce, the state could take a page from New Jersey’s playbook. In 1999 the Garden State launched an initiative to strengthen and increase compensation for its pre-K teacher workforce. Within 10 years, nearly every preschooler in the state program was taught by a fully credentialed teacher being paid a public school teacher’s salary.

Access to deeper learning—classes in which students are engaged to think deeply and develop the skills and abilities they’ll need for college and work—is a central equity issue for our time, says Dr. Pedro Noguera in this LPI Blog. In this interview, Noguera discusses the role of deeper learning in providing all students with an equitable and empowering education and what it will take to “scale up” deeper learning practices.

In districts throughout California, many newly hired teachers lack any experience teaching the subject or students they were hired to teach and are not enrolled in a teacher preparation program. That’s according to a survey conducted last fall by the Learning Policy Institute, which found that persistent teacher shortages are once again leading districts to rely on underprepared teachers to fill classrooms throughout the state.

Like the movie “Groundhog Day,” the President’s 2018 education budget proposal feels like déjà vu all over again. Last year, we published a blog post that addressed the President’s proposed cuts to the Every Student Succeeds Act. Fortunately, the Congress that developed the Act and passed it in a strongly bipartisan vote in 2015 protected its key features. This year, in the President’s new budget proposal, however, those cuts are back.

Family and community engagement is one of the four pillars of high-quality community schools, yet school staff often struggle to build a culture that includes ongoing engagement and creates partnerships that cultivate trust and respect. In this blog, LPI Research and Policy Associate Anna Maier highlights two community school initiatives successfully bridging the gap between home and school and shares the compelling evidence of the impact of effective engagement on student and school success.

A recent long-term study concluded that the effects of high-quality preschool programs last long into adulthood, and that because of higher projected income and diminished likelihood of incarceration, every dollar invested in quality preschool could generate a two-dollar return. Unfortunately, without a commitment by policymakers to invest in children’s education, this “powerful vaccine” won’t survive.

Over the last three years, thousands of news stories and dozens of studies from LPI and other organizations have documented teacher shortages across the country. Yet some critics argue that turnover is not generally a problem and shortages may not even be real. In this blog, Linda Darling-Hammond, Leib Sutcher, and Desiree Carver Thomas break down the research and explain that solving turnover and shortages is not a pipedream; it’s a policy question.

By Young Whan Choi | What should a high school student be able to do upon graduation? In this guest blog, Young Whan Choi, manager of performance assessments for the Oakland Unified School District, discusses how the use of a districtwide Graduate Capstone Project is an integral part of the district’s commitment to graduating all students prepared for college, career, and community.