Education Week - March 6, 2013 - 22

EDUCATION WEEK

High Court
Hears Case
On Voting
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 20

were African-American, and 3.1
percent were Hispanic. While
the study didn’t distinguish
elected from appointed board
members in those groups, some
95 percent of board members
are elected, the nsba said.

‘Bailout’
The statute allows a covered
jurisdiction to seek an exemption—called “bailout”—from
Section 5’s preclearance requirements if it has met certain
conditions, chiefly a 10-year
record of nondiscrimination in
voting. The Obama administration submitted a list of covered
jurisdictions that have won
such exemptions, including several dozen school districts.
One of those jurisdictions
was Merced County, Calif.,
which last year received a bailout from preclearance requirements for itself, its 22 school
districts, and other local agencies.
“After ... decades of compliance with Section 5, extensive
work by the county to oversee
compliance by independent cities and agencies that it does
not control, the expenditure of
more than $1 million in legal
fees, ... and more than two
years of investigations by the
United States Department of
Justice,” says a friend-of-thecourt brief filed by the county,
“the county of Merced finally
achieved its goal of bailing out
of Section 5 coverage.
“That effort finally relieved
the county of the stigma of
being covered by a statute designed to target historic discriminators.”

MARCH 6, 2013

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House Panel Weighs School Safety Concerns
By Alyson Klein
Washington

School resource officers, additional guidance
counselors, and professional development for
educators can help schools head off tragedies
such as the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last December,
witnesses told members of the House Education
and the Workforce Committee at a recent hearing last week on school safety issues.
Left largely unsaid: Expanding federal grants
to help schools offer those programs—as Vice
President Joe Biden proposed in January—will
cost money. And right now, with the federal government in the midst of a budget crisis, there
doesn’t seem to be a lot of extra cash on the horizon for new programs.
Some lawmakers on the Democratic side of
the aisle at the hearing, such as U.S. Rep. Joe
Courtney, of Connecticut, said they would like
to see more resources for school safety and mental health. But the committee didn’t engage in a
robust debate over whether the federal government, or state and local governments, should be
financing school safety efforts.
Instead, members heard from witnesses
about practices that are already in place, including ensuring that school resource officers
develop close relationships with students, and
updating school safety plans continually.

Student Relationships
One witness, Bill Bond, was the principal of
Heath High School in West Paducah, Ky., the site
of a school shooting in 1997 in which three students were killed. Rep. Joe Heck, R-Nev., asked
him if there was anything he could have done
differently to prevent the shooting.
Mr. Bond, who is now a school safety specialist
at the National Association of Secondary School
Principals, said it would have been helpful if everyone in the building had felt a responsibility
for school safety—including students.
“Students know more about what’s going on in
school than the principal,” he said. “Eight kids
saw the gun before the shooting took place.”
None of them told him, any of the teachers, or
their parents, he said.
Jumping off that point, Rep. Robert Andrews, D-N.J., asked whether districts have
enough guidance counselors to truly get to
know students, so that they might be able to
gain their confidence and identify potentially
troubled students early. (The average stu-

dent-counselor ratio nationwide is 470-to-1.)
Right now, however, counselors are pulled in
dozens of directions, some witnesses said. “School
counselors often spend their time doing schedules,” said David Osher, the vice president of the
American Institutes for Research in Washington.
Rep. Andrews also asked one of the most provocative questions of the hearing: Did the witnesses, who included a host of school safety and
school mental-health experts, think it made
sense to arm school officials, a step that some

“

Students know
more about what’s going
on in school than the
principal. Eight kids
saw the gun before the
shooting took place.”
BILL BOND
Former Principal
Heath High School

districts are already taking? Nearly all of them
said they considered it a bad idea.
Frederick Ellis, who handles security in the
Fairfax County schools in Virginia said, “It’s a
very risky proposition, and I would not be in
favor of it.”

Gun Control?
There was also almost no discussion of gun legislation—which isn’t in the committee’s jurisdiction. But, in his opening statement, Rep. George
Miller of California, the top Democrat on the
committee, made it clear that school safety and
mental-health programs must go hand in hand
with comprehensive gun-control legislation.
“Any school safety changes in the wake of
Sandy Hook must be implemented in tandem
with comprehensive gun-violence prevention,”
he said. “Common-sense strategies are needed
to keep guns out of the hands of those who intend harm.”
The Obama administration—and many
congressional Democrats, including U.S. Sen.
Dianne Feinstein of California—want to crack

down on the sale of military-style assault
weapons and ensure that buyers undergo background checks before purchasing guns.
The Obama administration has already proposed a myriad of programs—at a price of hundreds of millions of dollars—aimed at bolstering school safety and helping schools improve
mental-health services.
The proposals include new money for schools
to hire school resource officers or counselors
and grants for states to upgrade their safety
plans. It also includes smaller grant programs
aimed at helping schools train teachers to recognize the signs of mental illness early, and
new money to help school districts establish
partnerships with law enforcement agencies,
as well as write a grant proposal to help train
additional school psychologists and guidance
counselors.

Questions for the Administration
Republicans on the education panel, including Rep. John Kline of Minnesota, its chairman,
sent Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and
other Cabinet officials a list of questions about
the proposals last month. Among them: How
would the administration’s proposals differ
significantly from school safety and counseling programs already on the books, and how
would they avoid the pitfalls of the Safe and
Drug-Free Schools Grant program, which was
scrapped because the Obama administration
and Congress decided that the funds were
spread too thinly.
Since the administration rolled out its proposals, individual members of Congress, including
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., have introduced legislation to bolster mental-health services in schools.
And Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., has put forth a
set of bills to help schools improve safety.
The same day as the hearing, the White
House held an event at which Secretary Duncan and U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security
Janet Napolitano moderated two of the three
panels on the emergency-management needs
of schools, institutions of higher education,
and houses of worship. Two of the participants had deep connections to the K-12 world:
John McDonald, the executive director of security and emergency management for the
Jefferson County public schools in Colorado,
and Natalie Hammond, a teacher at Sandy
Hook Elementary School.
Staff Writer Nirvi Shah contributed to this report.

9 California Districts Seek Own NCLB Waiver
By Lesli A. Maxwell
Nine California school districts
last week requested a waiver from
the No Child Left Behind Act that
would set up a radically different
school accountability system from
the rest of the state and present the
biggest political and legal test yet
of the U.S. Department of Education’s ability to grant flexibility in
exchange for promises to enact certain reforms.
More than 1 million students are
represented by the group of districts known as the California Office to Reform Education, or core—
including Fresno, Long Beach, Los
Angeles, and San Francisco. California failed in its own bid for flexibility late last year.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne
Duncan has said he is open to

district-level waivers, but would
prefer to work with states. The department’s current waiver process
applies only to states, so just how a
district-level waiver process would
work remains murky.
“People may think this is a waiver
from something, when what it really represents is a significant,
deep, and authentic embrace of
accountability and responsibility
to care for all of these kids,” said
Tony Smith, the superintendent of
the 37,000-student Oakland school
system, which is one of the core
districts.
The core approach to accountability may be the most novel of any
of the waiver plans proposed so far.
For example, the core waiver would
not only measure schools on academic measures, it would also judge
progress at eliminating disparities

in rates of student discipline and
absenteeism, among other factors.
The Education Department has
already approved waivers for 34
states and the District of Columbia.

Raising Hackles
That Mr. Duncan is even considering district-level waivers has
raised hackles in Congress. Andy
Smarick, a partner at Bellwether
Education Partners, a nonprofit
consulting firm in Washington,
warned that the core waiver
would “upend 30 years of statebased accountability for schools.”
Under’s core’s accountability
plan, schools would be graded
across three broad domains: academic, social/emotional, and culture and climate. The districts
would set common goals across

the three domains that would replace the 100 percent proficiency
requirements in the nclb law.
“We are really asking for much
more accountability,” said Rick
Miller, the executive director of
core.
In the academic category, schools
would be judged on how students
achieve and grow on math and
reading assessments, as well as
science and social studies. Graduation rates and persistence rates
would also be measured.
Notably, core’s plan calls for
using only student test scores
from a school’s highest grade level
to judge whether an entire school
is meeting goals for accountability
purposes.
In the social/emotional category,
schools would be measured on
factors such as how they address

uneven suspension and expulsion rates and chronic absenteeism, while the culture and climate
component would draw heavily on
feedback collected in student, parent, and staff-member surveys.
Struggling schools would be
paired with a coaching team from
a high-performing school with
similar demographics for technical
assistance and support, and those
that don’t improve would undergo a
more traditional state intervention,
said Michelle Steagall, the chief
academic officer of core. The districts would also reclaim a collective
$109 million in federal Title I money
annually that they currently must
set aside to pay for transporting students to higher-performing schools
or providing them tutors.
The other core districts are Clovis, Garden Grove, Sacramento,
Sanger, and Santa Ana. Garden
Grove joined core last month and
had not yet signed onto the waiver
plan.

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Education Week - March 6, 2013

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