Education Week - March 1, 2017 - 5

REPORT ROUNDUP

| TRANSITIONS |
Jill Biden, an
educator and the
wife of former Vice
President Joe Biden,
has been named
board chairwoman of
Save the Children.
Biden teaches
English at Northern
Virginia Community College.
She also has been a high
school teacher.
Save the Children works in
120 countries and focuses on
children's health, education,
and safety.
Bridget Foster, a
longtime member
of the Software
& Information
Industry
Association, has
become the senior
vice president
and managing director of
its Education Technology
Industry Network.
She started her career as
a high school science and
math teacher and has worked
in the ed-tech industry for
nearly two decades.
John "Jack" Lynch
has been tapped
as the next CEO of
Houghton Mifﬂin
Harcourt.
Since November
2012, he has served
as the CEO of Renaissance
Learning, a provider
of products focused on
assessment and learning
analytics.
Giselle "Gigi" Antoni
will join the Wallace
Foundation as
the new director
of learning and
enrichment.
She is the
president and CEO of Big
Thought, a Dallas-based
nonproﬁt that focuses on
building partnerships to
close the opportunity gap
through out-of-school-time
programs.

www.edweek.org/go/rr

SCHOOL SPENDING: CHARTERS VS. NON-CHARTERS

TEACHER SALARIES
"Here's How Much Teachers
Make in Every State"
Alaska and New York state pay teachers
nearly double the salaries of those working
in Mississippi and Oklahoma, says a study
by GoBankingRates.
According to the ﬁnance website, teachers in Alaska and New York are paid each
year on average $77,843 and $76,593, respectively. By contrast, the averages in
Mississippi and Oklahoma are $42,043 and
$42,647, respectively.

■ Non-Charter

$10,618

Total
Spending

Support
Services

■ Charter Districts

$8,931
3,525
3,623

Where teachers get paid the most
1. Alaska
2. New York

76,593

3. Connecticut

75,867

4. California

72,050

5. Massachusetts

71,587

6. New Jersey

70,700

7. Rhode Island

67,533

8. Maryland

65,257

9. Illinois

65,153

10. Virginia

63,493

Where teachers get paid the least

Schools loosened their belts and spent
a little more in 2013-14, in spite of lower
federal support, according to the latest
federal data on school district spending.
In ﬁscal 2014, the median school district spent about $10,300 per student,
up about 1 percent from ﬁscal 2012. The
uptick was driven by higher spending in
suburbs, towns, and rural areas; urban
districts actually spent a little less.
At the same time, federal support for
those districts dropped by more than 4 percent, to $54.2 billion, from ﬁscal 2013 to ﬁscal 2014. In 16 states, more than 40 percent
of school district budgets come from local
property taxes and city or county funds.
The report comes from the U.S. De-

$42,043

2. Oklahoma

42,647

3. South Dakota

43,200

4. North Carolina

43,587

5. Arizona

43,800

6. West Virginia

45,477

7. Arkansas

47,053

8. Idaho

47,063

9. Kansas

47,127

STUDENT TESTING

10. Louisiana

48,587

"District Leadership in the New Era of
Assessment"

-BRENDA IASEVOLI

"The Hour of Code: Impact on Attitudes
Towards and Self-Efficacy With Computer
Science"
Spending an hour learning computer basics
may positively change students' attitudes
about computer science and increase their
feelings of self-efﬁcacy where that subject is
concerned-especially among girls, suggests
a study.
The study focuses on 563 classrooms participating in Hour of Code, a one-hour classroom
program aimed at demystifying computer
science. After completing the program, 75
percent of high school girls with no previous
computer science experience said they liked
the subject. That's up from 55 percent prior
to the activity. The study was conducted by
Code.org, the national nonproﬁt group that
promotes Hour of Code.
-MARVA HINTON

4,970

"Revenues and Expenditures for Public
Elementary and Secondary School
Districts: School Year 2013-14"

1. Mississippi

The average teacher salaries in 50 states
(not including the District of Columbia) were
calculated using data from the Bureau of
Labor Statistics. The authors averaged the
mean salaries of elementary, middle, and high
school teachers to get the average salary in
each state. The calculations did not include
the salaries of special education teachers.

6,596

InstructionRelated

$77,843

COMPUTER SCIENCE

sions exam beginning next year. The
move matches one by its rival, the
College Board, which recently introduced a 2017 summer test date for
its SAT exam.
ACT said it will add a seventh
date to its 2017-18 lineup. This
year's ACT schedule shows six dates,
between September and June. Next
year's will add a July date.
A July test date would make it
easier for students to take the ACT
twice before early-admission college deadlines, typically in early
November. It could also help cushion students from any score-reporting delays as application deadlines
-C.G.
draw near.

Independent charter school districts spent 10 percent less per student than
non-charter districts, according to federal data for the 2014 ﬁscal year. The
biggest gaps were seen in instruction-related spending.

SOURCE: National Center
for Education Statistics

partment of Education's Common Core
of Data, which collects annual data on
school spending and other indicators in
more than 18,600 school districts in all
50 states and the District of Columbia.
Of the 25 states that reported highquality ﬁnancial data for both charter and
noncharter school districts, the numbers
showed that charter schools spent 10 percent less per student on average than traditional district schools. The gap was most
apparent in instruction.
The 73,000-student Alpine district in
Utah had the lowest spending among
the 100 largest districts in the country,
at just over $5,600 per student in ﬁscal
2014. That was little more than a quarter of the per-pupil spending in Boston's or New York City's public schools,
which each topped $21,000.
-SARAH D. SPARKS

ties. Thirty-three percent said their students
spent a week or more-sometimes a month or
-CATHERINE GEWERTZ
more-on test prep.

Most school superintendents think students
spend too much time on tests but report that
their districts are still investing time in testpreparation strategies, according to a survey.
The ﬁndings released last month are based
on a 2016 survey by the Center on Education Policy. The center, at George Washington University, surveyed superintendents in
states that adopted the Common Core State
Standards and used tests that reﬂect those
standards.
The study reﬂects their experience with tests
in one year only: 2014-15, the ﬁrst year that
the two federally funded assessments for the
common core, the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers and
Smarter Balanced, made their debut.
More than 6 in 10 district leaders said they
think students spend too much time taking
tests. They also said that in reducing testing,
they would prefer to shorten state-required
tests and to keep those designed by districts or
teachers, which are often seen as more instructionally valuable than state tests.
Despite their feelings about time spent on
testing, more than three-quarters of the superintendents said their districts used test-preparation strategies such as reviewing released
items or administering practice tests.
Nearly 60 percent of the district leaders said
the average student in their districts spent
a week or less on test-preparation activi-

SCHOOL CLIMATE
"Teacher Job Satisfaction and Student
Achievement"
Teacher satisfaction affects student achievement, but being part of a professional learning
community can have also a buffering effect on
that outcome, a study has found.
The study, published last month in the
American Journal of Education, was conducted by Neena Banerjee, an assistant
professor of public administration at Valdosta State University in Georgia, and three
researchers from the University of North
Carolina at Charlotte. It draws on federal
data for 5,850 students and their teachers.
The students were part of a national database that tracked them from kindergarten in
1998 to middle school.
The authors found that students have higher
reading achievement by 5th grade when their
teachers enjoy teaching and think they are
making a difference. In math, there was no signiﬁcant relationship between student achievement and their teacher job satisfaction.
When students with dissatisfied teachers
were in schools with strong professional learning communities, they scored higher in math
by the 3rd and 5th grades. The study suggests
that the professional learning environment
"cushions" students from harmful effects from
-MADELINE WILL
unhappy teachers.

EDUCATION WEEK | March 1, 2017 | www.edweek.org | 5

http://www.edweek.org/go/rr http://www.Code.org http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - March 1, 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - March 1, 2017