Denver Teacher Strike Ends; Chicago Designer Revamps School Uniforms

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An end to the Denver teacher strike

Denver teachers returned to the class this week after the Denver Classroom Educators Association and Denver Public Schools reached a tentative labor contract Thursday morning. Teachers in Denver had been on strike since Monday.

At issue was teacher pay — particularly, a system that granted certain teachers rewards for working in high-poverty schools or in hard-to-staff subjects. Union leaders desired higher base salaries for more teachers and more chances to work towards a greater pay grade through professional development.

The tentative arrangement includes a base income boost, in between 7 to 11 percent, and modifications to the incentive system.

“This agreement is a win, plain and simple: for our students; for our teachers; and for our communities,” stated Henry Roman, president of the instructors union, on Thursday.

“This is a strong financial investment in our teachers — in both their base wage and the equity incentives,” Superintendent Susana Cordova said after the offer was revealed. “I’m very pleased we were able to reach a offer and in the collaborative method we worked together today. There was a acknowledgment that we share lots of areas of agreement, and we worked tough to listen and discover common ground on the couple of locations where we had different perspectives.”

The arrangement will go into effect once it is validated by a bulk of union members and the school board.

In Oakland, Calif., the teachers union revealed Feb. 4 that educators had voted to authorize a strike, although a date has not yet been set.

And not rather a year after teachers in West Virginia went on strike, a controversial education bill has educators considering another strike there.

New eight-year college completion data

College graduation rates are often determined after 6 years, but this week, the National Trainee Clearinghouse released numbers on completion after eight years.

In those two extra years, researchers discovered that the general graduation rate (for 2- and four-year schools) leapt from 55 to 60 percent. For Hispanic trainees who began at a four-year organization, the number of trainees who got a degree jumped by 8 percentage points.

Still, even after eight years, 40 percent of students who started college didn’t earn a degree.

Passing through high-crime communities makes it harder to program up for school

A brand-new study from Johns Hopkins University suggests living in a high-crime area, or simply passing through one on the method to school, can impact how frequently students show up to class.

“Some kids have a more difficult time getting to a school than others, not for any fault of their own, but since of the way the transport system is set up, because of the way criminal activity clusters in specific locations,” describes Julia Burdick-Will, a sociology teacher at Johns Hopkins and the lead author of the research study.

She and her team looked at how area crime in Baltimore impacts attendance. They establishes “kids who are expected to be strolling along streets with greater rates of violent criminal activity are more most likely to miss out on school,” Burdick-Will describes.

As school choice gains popularity, students are going to schools farther and farther away from their homes. And, Burdick-Will states, “Getting kids to school is going to have to be something that we pay more attention to as we open up [school] option choices.”

Research by the Urban Institute discovered that, in cities where school option is a popular choice, black children frequently travel farther and longer than their white and Latino classmates.

In Baltimore, where all high schools run on a school choice system, trainees spend, on average, more than 35 minutes getting to school, and they have at least one public transit transfer, according to Burdick-Will.

Chicago clothes designer to revamp school uniforms at alma mater

Designer Desmond “Des Money” Owusu unveiled a new clothing line for trainees at Betty Shabazz Academy, an African-centered school in Chicago. Owusu describes “We Genuine Cool” as a job that promotes “a true sense of pride, neighborhood, high self-confidence, and culture” for students at the school.

“I thought it would be intriguing to see if I could aid in changing the narrative of school uniforms from being boring and lame, to something more significant, enjoyable, cool, distinct, and most notably, culturally pertinent,” he wrote in an op-ed in South Side Weekly.

Owusu received a grant from the not-for-profit Midwest Culture Laboratory to create a lookbook and a sample collection. But he says he wants to take the job a step further. He’s raising loan to offer each of Shabazz Academy’s nearly 300 students two pieces from the collection for the upcoming school year.

If trainees desire another product, Owusu states, they can purchase it at a discount, with all continues going back to the school and its effort to revamp its carrying out arts area.

Owusu is holding a style program later this month, including students from the school.