The pros and cons of big money donated to public education, an electric car you never have to charge, the biggest 3D map of our galaxy.
How educators can help homeless and foster youth overcome instability
A team of local educators has won a $10 million grant to start a school serving foster and homeless youth in Los Angeles.
The money comes from Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, as part of a competition she funded, "XQ: The Super School Project."
The school, called RISE, will launch with the aim of helping a population that is often challenged with the instability of frequent moves.
Take Two’s Deepa Fernandes spoke with Shari Walker, a former foster youth, to understand more about the obstacles this group faces in the school system. Walker spent part of her childhood in foster care and now helps others navigate the foster care system.
Highlights
The biggest challenge to a foster youth’s education: instability
One of the biggest problems is that foster youth move around to so many homes that they end up going to so many different schools, so there’s no real stability. They aren’t able to build solid relationships, so school becomes less and less of a priority at each move.
Even if you get a connection with a really great teacher, when you’re moved the next week or even within a few days from when you first started school, it can be very difficult. So, many foster youth get to the point when they don’t want to build relationships with teachers, even if they’re going to stay for a few months. They’re thinking, "I’m just going to leave again, so what’s the point in building a relationship with this adult when they’re going to leave me like most of the schools have?"
On whether teachers receive training to teach kids in the foster care system
I would say for the most part, absolutely not, they don’t have training in that. Myself and one of my mentor’s, we went out to a school and we spoke to the teachers. They were confused as to how to deal with the kids in the classroom, because again, many of the moves and many of the home transitions, the child’s behavior can sometimes be abrupt. They can sometimes be loud and sometimes be dysfunctional in the classroom, so teachers are trying to figure out how do we deal with such students, and if the students only stay for a little while, how can we make an impact?
I think it’s absolutely important that teachers do get training about how to deal with foster youth. Even if they’re in their classroom for one day or one week, they should be able to find some connection with that youth to instill in them that they are worthy and capable and they can do the work.
Creating stability through relationships
The main thing with the kids who have behavioral problems and move around a ton is that these kids need relationships, and they need mentors. Mentors are something so vital to these children within the foster care system, because no matter if you have a brilliant school who will go wherever they go and a satellite school — I think that’s absolutely amazing — but if these kids don’t have mentors, they don’t have those relationships, so that when they are feeling terrible on the inside, or they’re just feeling like, what’s the point of school when all this stuff has happened to me… or is happening to me. It can be very hard regardless of how many resources you give them if they don’t have those relationships. So, I think it’s up to both the schools and DCFC [Department of Children and Family Services] to provide mentors who have been through the foster care system — former foster youth who will be able to relate to them and be able to talk to them about education.
How can you tell a child education is important when they’re suffering abuse at home. How can you tell a child education is important when you’ve moved them 15 times within one semester. How can you say such a thing? It doesn’t make sense. Kids can’t fathom what you’re talking about, but if you have mentors who are able to get inside of the child’s life and really connect to the child on, "I know things are going on on the outside, but we are going to focus and we are also going to figure out the stuff that’s going on in the inside and outside." I think that will be vital.
*Interview edited for clarity
To hear the full interview, click the blue arrow above.
Do big charitable donations to education always get an A+?
Wealthy philanthropists like Laurene Powell Jobs, Eli Broad and Mark Zuckerberg have made headlines for their charitable contributions to public education.
They make sizable donations with the hope of improving schools and, therefore, improving our future work force. Educational institutions benefit from these generous donations, but some wonder what kinds of complications could also arise?
For a deeper look into big money in public education, Take Two’s Alex Cohen spoke with Dale Russakoff, the author of “The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools.”
Highlights
Your book,“The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools” looked at what happened when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million dollars to revitalizing schools in Newark, New Jersey. What was he trying to accomplish?
This was his very first philanthropic move. He was twenty six years old when he made the gift. His desire was to change the nature of public education. He felt that it wasn’t serving the poorest kids at all and that he felt the main thing that was needed was to have a higher quality teacher in a system at every level. He wanted to create a different system that would attract better teachers and reward them so that they would stay. He thought he could do it by taking on this one public school district and transforming it.
What was the result of Zuckerberg’s donation to the schools in Newark, New Jersey?
It was a very mixed picture. The school district has seen some improvement in just the last year or so but for the first five years, the student performance was going down not up. There was a tremendous amount of upheaval and change because so many kids were leaving for charters in part and also because they were closing district schools and moving children around and moving teachers around so that students would come back to school in the fall and they would have all different teachers and a different atmosphere. I think that churn and that change turned out to be very problematic.
The question was, were those dollars actually spent on the individual needs of the kids? Having better teachers definitely meets certain individual needs of the kids but changing a big system and how teachers are rewarded and recruited and so forth doesn’t ensure that every child is going to have a better teacher. It may create a better system but when you get to the level of the individual child, you’re not guaranteeing that you’re going to see real change in the support for that kid’s needs.
For a wealthy benefactor like Mark Zuckerberg, how is donating to education different than other kinds of contributions like medical research or helping the homeless?
I think that in education, the emergence of charter schools - and charter schools in Newark did get a big chunk of the Zuckerberg money - has very much attracted wealthy donors because they see charters as running on the same principles as business run because they’re private organizations. Most charter schools are not union and they have the flexibility to make the kinds of changes that public schools in large bureaucracies with union workers can’t make on a dime. I think also, when they give money to a charter school, with a relatively small amount of money for them, they create a school and there’s something for them to see for their investment whereas if they’re giving to an art museum or a hospital they’re perpetuating something but they’re not seeing something new and different and I think that’s very satisfying to donors.
*Quotes edited for clarity.
The hear the full interview, click the blue arrow above.
California's drought could continue for centuries
If you were hoping for a respite from California's drought (on its fifth year), you may be disappointed. That's because, according to a new study out of UCLA, published in the journal Nature, California's drought could continue for centuries.
"The conditions we've had for the past five years – very very high temperatures and relatively low precipitation – that could well be the way that we'll see out the 21st century," said Glen MacDonald, who authored the study. "Our research suggests that in the past when we've had prolonged periods of warm temperatures, like we're experiencing in the 21st century. They tend to coincide in California with long periods of aridity."
In the past, those long periods of warming and drying were associated with natural phenomenon including changes in the Earth's orbit, in volcanic activity and in the output of the sun. But there's a new factor influencing temperature levels around the planet: greenhouse gases.
MacDonald said that according to current models, the increase in greenhouse gasses is contributing 15 to 25 percent to the severity of the current drought in California.
These gases are trapped in the upper atmosphere and act as a sort of giant blanket that contribute to something called radiative forcing. Basically, that's when energy from the sun gets trapped and heats up the Earth, instead of bouncing back into space.
To figure out California's arid history, MacDonald and his team compared sediment samples from a lake in the Sierra Nevada mountains with sediment samples from the Pacific. By comparing the relationship between the samples they were able to discover a connection between a warming earth, ocean temperature shifts and long stretches of a very dry California. Or, in other words, the same conditions that we're seeing nowadays.
"Based on our study it could be quite possible that as we move into the 21st century that the conditions we've seen over the last five years, these will be more or less what normal conditions are like," said MacDonald. "And then on top of that we would have more severe drought and that drought could last for longer periods. We're used to thinking next year the drought's going to end or it's going to end after two years or three years... This might not be a three to five year thing."
If you'd like to hear more about the study click on the audio at the top of this post.
Joshua trees might be a threatened species
Climate change is dramatically affecting the future of Joshua trees, the iconic plants that are spread across the Mojave Desert.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Tuesday it's starting a yearlong review to study whether Joshua trees should be designated "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act.
Take Two talks with Taylor Jones, endangered species advocate at Wild Earth Guardians which successfully petitioned the Service to study this.
The Ride: A spin the Honda's new fuel cell-powered sedan
An electric car that has a 300 mile range, and never needs to be charged?
Later this year, Honda will begin selling its new generation Clarity. It's a roomy, well-appointed four-door sedan with a difference. Its electric motor is powered by a hydrogen fuel cell.
Our motor critic and host of The Ride, Sue Carpenter, took a spin in a pre-production model, and found it to be appealing in both looks and performance. Honda says the Clarity will sell for less than $60,000 and lease for about $500 a month, which sets it up squarely against Toyota's fuel cell car, the Mirai. Both cars have an advantage over battery powered electrics. Rather than waiting for the batteries to charge, fuel cell vehicles are filled with hydrogen in an operation that's familiar and takes about the same amount of time as a gas fill-up does.
The problem is finding a filling station. Although California has aggressive plans to build hydrogen stations, there are currently only about 40 in the entire state, mostly clustered around LA and San Francisco.
And, although fuel cells are zero emission - the only by-product is a few drops of water - some environmentalists are concerned because the majority of hydrogen fuel is made by burning fossil fuels. But, under California law, a third of that fuel must be created from renewable energy such as wind or solar, and the ratio of "green" hydrogen is expected to increase dramatically over the next few years.
Clearly, the Clarity and other fuel cell cars aren't for everyone. But they do provide an interesting alternative to someone considering a battery electric car, and a report out just this week indicates their popularity will ramp up pretty quickly. The firm Information Trends predicts within about 15 years, there will be 20 million fuel cell vehicles worldwide. That's impressive when you consider that the number of plug-in electric vehicles sold in the US since Telsa introduced its Roadster in 2008 totals just more than half a million.
Macy Gray shows off new song from her unreleased album
No reverb, no compressors, no editing. On her latest album "Stripped" Macy Gray foregoes the usual trappings of modern music and just sings raw jazz numbers.
The setup was simple: Macy Gray, a band and one microphone inside of an old abandoned church.
"Literally you get a take or two and that's it. One shot," said Gray in a recent interview with Take Two's A Martinez."You don't realize until after that you can't go fix stuff. There's no compressors, there's no editing, there's no mix. Cause I'm sitting there riding the producer like do you think you could turn the drums down a little bit and he was like, 'What? You can't.' Cause there's just one mic. There's nothing you can do after you cut it. That's it."
The company responsible for Gray's foray into the jazz world is Chesky Records, who have done a whole binaural series of recordings. That's where they use one microphone, shaped like a human head, to capture stereo sound as audiences would hear it.
On the album, Gray sings jazz infused covers of classic songs like "Nothing Else Matters" by Metallica, but also her own original songs, including "I Try."
"It's a good album to smoke a big joint to," she said.
During the taping of the interview, Gray also talked about her album coming out next year.
"It's the opposite of this one. It's super produced," she said. "I have this group of really awesome producers and the whole thing is I wanted to do something different. Come up with some kind of new sound that nobody's doing and that's always risky."
They're still working on the album and are unsure of a release date.
Below is the song "Just Like Jenny," written by Gray.
"Remember Forest Gump, Jenny?" said Gray. "It's just about like how she said, 'Build me a bird so I can fly far far away,' because she's trying to get rid of her situation. It's just about that thing where you want to get away."
Gov. Brown decides on bills, the tobacco tax debate, and a giant voter guide
Overtime pay for farmworkers becomes law in California, a tax break on tampons gets the ax, and a very hefty voter guide hits the presses.
All that and more on this week's State of Affairs, our weekly look at government and politics in the Golden State.
Joining Take Two to discuss:
- Marisa Lagos, political reporter for KQED
- Carla Marinucci, POLITICO's California Playbook reporter
Rep. Xavier Becerra: why the nation needs a National Museum of the American Latino
Hispanic Heritage Month is a time to celebrate the contributions made by Hispanic and Latino Americans, but what about a place to do that?
Here in California, there are venues like the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach and the Mexican Museum in San Francisco. But there is no NATIONAL institution.
House Democratic Caucus Chairman Xavier Becerra is yet trying to change that. This week, he reintroduced a bill to create a National Museum of the American Latino.
He spoke with Take Two's Alex Cohen:
Click on the blue player above to hear the whole interview
The European Space Agency is working on a map of the stars
On Wednesday, the European Space Agency made a pretty huge announcement: the agency released pictures and data from the satellite associated with its Gaia Mission.
Researchers with the mission described it as the biggest and most precise three-dimensional map of our galaxy.
The data that's been used to put the map together is being distributed among scientists, but they're also counting on others for help ...
Namely YOU.
Earlier I spoke with Emily Lakdawalla, senior editor at the Planetary Society, to get her thought, and she explained what researchers already know about the stars.
Click here if you'd like to get involved in the Gaia space project
Forget Jurassic Park - this is what a real dino looked like
This week, researchers in the UK unveiled what experts are calling the most realistic and lifelike model of any dinosaur, ever.
The model of the parrot-looking plant eater, the Psittacosaurus (sit UH cah SOAR us), and the coloration and pigment is based on research done by Dr. Jakob Vinther of the UK’s University of Bristol.
The model was done by paleoartist Bob Nicholls, here's a link to his work.
What does this mean for what we think of when dinosaurs come to mind? Have we been wrong when we think that THIS is what one looked like?
Or what about this?
We talked to Vinther about the dino model, and what it means for science. And oh, this is a much better representation of what the Psittacosaurus would look like if it was walking around:
Look who's sneaking through the forest. Our new study led by
— Dr Stephan Lautenschlager (@PalaeoStephan) September 15, 2016
@macroevolut & @Paleocreations https://t.co/bgWKUr2xgn pic.twitter.com/bfDUhFGlti