Education Week - January 23, 2013 - 1

Education Week
VOL. 32, NO. 18 • JANUARY 23, 2013

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edweek.org:

BREAKING NEWS DAILY

Nation, Districts
Step Up Safety
Some Schools Arming Volunteers, Staff

President Barack Obama’s announcement last week
of a wide-ranging anti-violence plan in response to the
Newtown, Conn., school shootings comes as many districts are adopting new and sometimes dramatic measures—including arming teachers and volunteers—intended to prevent similar tragedies in their own schools.
School safety experts warn against making major
changes to security procedures without thinking those
changes through. But in many communities, people say
not taking action after the deadliest K-12 shootings in
American history is just not an option.
“We started thinking about it right away,” said Angela
Bono-Severy, the president of the pta at Tanglewood Elementary School in Lumberton, N.C. “The weekend of
the shootings, I received phone calls and text messages
from at least a dozen different parents asking, ‘What is
Tanglewood doing?’ ”
In Tanglewood’s case, the pta quickly switched gears
from its usual fundraisers for school technology items to
raising money to enhance school security.
Other school systems, municipalities, and law-enforcement agencies around the country are hiring more school
resource officers, organizing armed volunteers to patrol
schools, or ratcheting up training for educators and
PAGE 13 >

Michael S. Williamson/Washington Post/Getty

By Nirvi Shah

Retired state trooper Les Strawbridge patrols the halls at Butler Intermediate High School in Butler, Pa. The district
accelerated efforts to arm school resource officers within days of the Newtown, Conn., school shootings.

Colleges Overproducing Elementary-Level Teachers
By Stephen Sawchuk
Though universities’ economics departments preach the gospel of supply and demand, that principle is not always followed
when it comes to their education departments.
Data, while imprecise, suggest that some
states are producing far more new teachers
at the elementary level than will be able to
find jobs in their respective states—even as
districts struggle to find enough recruits in
other certification fields.
For some observers, the imbalances reflect a
failure of teacher colleges—by far, the largest

source of new teachers—and their regulatory
agencies to cap the number of entrants.
“If you increase the number of elemen-

TEACHING THE TEACHERS
An occasional series
tary teachers beyond what the market will
bear, you are going to be forcing far too many
trainees into an overburdened K-12 system,”
said Arthur McKee, the managing director of
teacher-preparation studies at of the Washington-based National Council on Teacher

INDUSTRY & INNOVATION

Calif. Districts
Link to Push
Shared Goals

Quality. “We need to have some equilibrium
so we can set up strong clinical programs.
And everybody wants to do that.”
But scholars who study the issue acknowledge that, even if a net oversupply of elementary teachers exists in some states, remedies
are difficult. They are complicated, such
scholars say, by a lack of comparable, crossstate data and by the complex and variable
nature of the education labor market.
And at a more conceptual level, agreement
in the field is limited about whether—and
how much—individual preparation programs

Group Seeks NCLB Waiver
By Lesli A. Maxwell

PAGE 14 >

By Sarah D. Sparks
San Diego

Boosting early retirement in cashstrapped districts doesn’t hurt students’ math and reading scores, according to new studies released at
the American Economic Association
meeting here, but pension-incentive
programs may cost schools some of
their most effective teachers.
Separate studies of teachers in
California, Illinois, and North Carolina paint a complex picture of the
choice increasingly faced by education leaders: Keep your most experienced—and expensive—teachers,

or encourage them to retire to ease
budget woes.
Cornell University researchers
Maria D. Fitzpatrick and Michael
F. Lovenheim, both assistant professors of policy analysis and management, tracked 54,550 Illinois
teachers in grades 3, 6, and 8 before
and after the state’s “5+5” pensionincentive program, which took place
in the early 1990s.
The 5+5 program allowed any
teacher age 50 or older, and with
at least five years of experience, to
qualify for pension benefits immediately if he or she retired at the
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Dustin Franz for Education Week

Loss of Veterans Doesn’t Hurt Scores

CHARTERS EYE STANDARDS: Daniel Morgan, 11, works on math
at the Intergenerational School in Cleveland. The common core
is driving charter schools to examine their curricula. PAGE 6

Frustrated by their own state’s
pace and direction of school improvement, eight California districts have banded together to move
ahead on rolling out the Common
Core State Standards and designing new teacher evaluations based
in part on student performance.
The districts, which include the
Los Angeles and San Francisco
school systems and enroll more than
1 million students altogether, are
also mounting a major breakaway
from California in seeking their own
waiver from mandates of the federal
No Child Left Behind Act.
The U.S. Department of Education has already issued similar reprieves to 34 states and the
District of Columbia, but last
month rejected California’s waiver
bid, which ignored one of the department’s key criteria: teacher
evaluations that include student
outcomes. If approved by U.S. SecPAGE 11 >

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Education Week - January 23, 2013

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