TALAS E-newsletter – August 16

Garland ISD announced plans to intervene in the lawsuit challenging Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins’ decision to order a mask mandate in response to the most recent surge of COVID-19 cases.

In a letter to Garland ISD families and staff Wednesday, Superintendent Ricardo Lopez said the decision is not for political reasons or to “push one agenda over another,” but to help the district clarify its COVID-19 policies and which order it is supposed to follow.

Decades after Lupe Alemán was forced to repeat the first grade three times, her son is making it his life’s work to reverse racial inequity in schools.

Enrique Alemán Jr., 50, has spent the past few years talking with numerous students in Texas and across the United States about how his mother and other Mexican American children in Driscoll, Texas, were treated in the 1950s by school officials who claimed they couldn’t speak or understand English.

The famous adage “you only get one chance to make a good first impression” rings especially true to job interviews.

The first impression a potential candidate makes is critical, especially during that moment when the interviewer asks if they have any questions. This gives the candidate the chance to shine by asking thoughtful questions or flub it by asking seriously poor questions.

A superstorm is bearing down on school districts across America this fall. Relationships between teachers, families, unions, and school leaders were already threadbare after a year and a half of uncertainty. Now, schools in at least seven states are not allowed to require masks, regardless of the local infection rate. Eleven states, meanwhile, have enacted new restrictions governing what teachers can teach when it comes to racism and American history. The Tennessee education department is considering fines for school districts starting at $1 million if a teacher knowingly violates such restrictions.

While the teaching workforce continues to be heavily dominated by white teachers, in particular white women, the academic and social-emotional benefits for students of color of having a teacher who is their same race have been widely documented. Less studied is the impact that having a same-race teacher has on attendance.

In new research published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Penn Graduate School of Education’s Michael Gottfried, a professor in the Education Policy division, sets out to explore this question along with J. Jacob Kirksey from Texas Tech University and Tina L. Fletcher, a doctoral student at Penn GSE.

When Denisse Rojas entered college, her path to becoming a doctor started with a lot of uncertainty — and loneliness.

While her peers were able to get a driver’s license, passports to study abroad, and financial aid to help pay for school, Rojas’ undocumented status — where no official record of her being in the U.S. existed — meant that she was also shut out from getting government-issued documents and benefiting from federal programs.

Oakland filmmaker Peter Nicks had already made two well-regarded documentaries capturing the flawed institutions of his city and their role in shaping local lives: 2012’s “The Waiting Room,” about a public hospital, and 2017’s “The Force,” about the Oakland Police Department during a wave of shootings and protests.

To complete his Oakland trilogy, Nicks turned to Oakland High, a public school with a diverse student body of mostly Asian American, Black and Latino children. Nicks’ interest wasn’t just in rounding out his city-surveying series. It was personal. His teenage daughter, Karina, had been going through a difficult time. In making a movie about the hardships of growing up as a teenager of color in Oakland, he was, in a way, making a movie about her.