Education Week - February 27, 2013 - 1

Education WEEk
VOL. 32, NO. 22 • FEBRUARY 27, 2013

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AM E R ICAN E DUCATION’S N EWS PAPE R OF R ECOR D • © 2013 Editorial Projects in Education • $4 

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BREAKING NEWS DAILY

Standards
Worrying
Teachers
Unpreparedness Is Cited
In Common-Core Survey

Even as the Common Core State
Standards are being put into practice
across most of the country, nearly half
of teachers feel unprepared to teach
them, especially to disadvantaged students, according to a new survey.
The study by the EpE Research Center, an arm of Editorial Projects in
Education, the publisher of Education Week, found deep wells of concern
among teachers about their readiness
to meet the challenges posed by the
common core in English/language arts
and mathematics.
“Teachers are under tremendous
pressure,” said Lisa Dickinson, an
assistant director of educational issues for the American Federation of
Teachers, which conducts several
common-core training programs in
school districts each month. “The new
standards do require a major shift in
instruction. And the needed supports
really aren’t there.”
Teachers in adopting states were
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Matt Roth for Education Week

By Catherine Gewertz

SETTING THE PACE: As the U.S. Department of Education’s point person on K-12 policy, Deborah Delisle, the assistant secretary for

elementary and secondary education, draws on expertise from a career spent as a teacher, principal, district superintendent, and
state schools chief. She shares her policy perspective and the department’s priorities in a Q & A with Education Week. PAGE 20

Districts Dumping At-Large Races
California Voting-Rights Law Spurring School Boards to Change Course

INDUSTRY & INNOVATION

Universities Train
Entrepreneurs
For K-12 Schools
By Sean Cavanagh
Efforts to promote an evolving area
of study—entrepreneurship in education—are taking hold in graduate
schools across the country, as universities craft programs and courses
focused on cultivating school leaders
and private-sector developers capable
of bringing new ideas, and possibly
new products and technologies, to
schools.
University faculty members and
administrators say the study of K-12
entrepreneurship and innovation has
had a presence in the postsecondary
world for years. But recently, interest
in the subject has grown, and it has
secured a much more clearly defined
place in a number of colleges of education, business schools, and other academic departments.
A number of factors are driving the
programs’ increased prominence.
School leaders and policymakers
PAGE 16>

By Nora Fleming
Pasadena, Calif.

Luis Carlos Ayala treks up and down hilly
driveways in a local neighborhood on a recent
weeknight, going door to door to deliver his short
campaign spiel and a flier. The school board candidate touts his titles and duties: parent, husband, lawyer, teacher, and a list of accolades and
credentials he hopes will sway voters to select
him over a two-term incumbent in the election
here March 5.
Even though the 18,650-student Pasadena
Unified district serves a locale of more than
202,300 residents, Mr. Ayala aims to reach vot-

ers in an area of only 28,900 for this race, as a
result of the school district’s recent switch from
at-large elections—in which voters can cast ballots for any candidate—to trustee or “district”
elections, in which voters select a candidate on
the basis of where they live.
Pasadena’s election switch follows an increasing number of others in California school districts, influenced by the 2001 California Voting
Rights Act, which prohibits localities from running at-large elections if they hinder minority
groups from electing candidates of their choice.
In the past few years, California has seen a
number of lawsuits challenging local at-large

Well before President Barack Obama vaulted
early-childhood learning to the top of the education agenda in his recent State of the Union
address, states were taking steps to bolster their
own preschool programs.
More than a dozen states—including some,
such as Hawaii and Mississippi, that have had
no state-financed preschool programs in the
past—are currently eyeing proposals to launch
or expand early education.
Leaders in those states say that they’re inter-

By Lesli A. Maxwell

ested in the president’s still-evolving proposal to
provide incentives for states to create or expand
high-quality birth-to-5 programs, with a focus
on low- and middle-income access. But some
say they don’t want any such federal money—
the amount of which has yet to be specified, let
alone appropriated—to come with cumbersome
requirements.
“If the federal government wanted to make
sure that Georgia would not participate, they
would say, ‘You have to do x, y, and z,’ and offer
no flexibility,” said Bobby Cagle, the commis-

The many ways of identifying which
students are English-learners and
when they reach proficiency in the
language could meld into a more uniform process as a result of the move to
common standards and assessments,
a profound shift that could drive
changes in instruction and provision
of resources, experts say.
As two big groups of states work to
design shared assessments for the new
standards, they are laboring to establish shared definitions of what it means
to be an English-language learner and
when those students no longer need
language instruction. That would
represent a massive change from current practice, which finds districts and
states using unique definitions for Ells
and widely varying criteria for reclassifying them as fluent.
Getting states to agree on such a
complex and often politicized issue
will require a deliberate, multiyear
process, state policy officials and Ell
experts say.
Among the advantages of doing so,
they say: true comparability among
states for how well they are teaching English-learners and more confidence that Ells are served equitably

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States Welcome Obama Pre-K Proposal—Cautiously
By Christina A. Samuels

Push Under Way
To Standardize
ELL Definitions
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Education Week - February 27, 2013

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