Education Week - March 27, 2013 - 5

EDUCATION WEEK

REPORTto these reports, go to
For links
ROUNDUP
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the vaccine have been introduced.
Both the District of Columbia and
Virginia require it for girls.
The hpv vaccine, recommended
for preteenage girls and boys by the
U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, is most effective
before children are sexually active.
—NIRVI SHAH

noted was similar to one he wore
during the shooting.
He wasn’t eligible for the death
penalty because he was 17 at the
time of the shootings. The judge
gave Mr. Lane sentences totaling
37 additional years for attempted
murder, felonious assault, and
using a weapon in the crimes.
—ASSOCIATED PRESS

Report Outlines Trends
In Open Resources
The Software and Information Industry Association says in a new report that open education resources
in K-12 schools and colleges are
“here to stay,” though the organization also warns that the content
may carry higher costs for schools
than are immediately obvious.
The report from the major
Washington-based trade association, released last week, provides
everything from the organization’s
take on definitions and terminology surrounding open education
resources to a description of current government policies supporting it to its breakdown of the
implications of those resources for
commercial publishers and others.
Currently, the overall presence
of free online materials is modest,
according to the report, “Guide to
the Use of Open Educational Resources in K-12 and Postsecondary
Education.” But their footprint is
likely to expand, the authors say.
While open education resources
initially will have little, if any, cost
for districts, they could bring significant costs if school systems or
colleges attempt to scale them up,
the paper contends.
Those costs include time spent
training teachers and others on
how to use the content provided,
supplementing the open resources,
and perhaps most significantly,
upgrading them over time to meet
changing academic needs, the association argues.
–S.C.

Ohio School Shooter
Gets Three Life Terms
The teenager who pleaded guilty
to killing three Ohio students was
sentenced last week to three life
sentences in prison.
T.J. Lane, 18, admitted to a
shooting at Chardon High School
near Cleveland in February 2012
that also wounded other students.
He told investigators he didn’t
know why he did it.
Before the case went to adult
court last year, a juvenile-court
judge ruled that Mr. Lane was
mentally competent to stand trial
despite evidence that he suffers
from hallucinations, psychosis, and
fantasies.
During the sentencing, Mr. Lane
was defiant, smiling and smirking, including while victims’ relatives spoke. After he came in, he
calmly unbuttoned his blue dress
shirt to reveal a T-shirt reading “killer,” which the prosecutor

Teacher Ed. Programs
Show Improvement
Teacher education programs are
using data, technology, and monitoring/tracking systems to improve, but still have a ways to go,
says a report from the American
Association of Colleges for Teacher
Education, released last week.
According to the aacte, progress
has been made, but obstacles to
improvement persist.
The organization based its report
on data from 95 percent of the organization’s more than 800 members.
The report says that teacher
education programs are admitting
highly qualified candidates into
their programs, with gpas averaging 3.24; requiring significant clinical experience of students; integrating coursework on technology
use in the classroom; and improving the tracking and monitoring of
candidates after they graduate.
Data, however, are limited on
how teacher-prep graduates are
affecting students in K-12 classrooms, particularly through valueadded measures. The report recommends that teacher education
programs improve their data collection in that area. —NORA FLEMING

Text Publishers Lose
In Copyright Case
The U.S. Supreme Court last
week issued a decision on copyright law that dealt a defeat to educational publishers but eased the
fears of teachers and libraries over
the use of books published overseas.
The justices ruled 6-3 that the
important “first sale” doctrine,
which holds that the purchaser
of a copyrighted item may redistribute it, applies to copyrighted
works that are lawfully published
outside the United States.
The decision was a victory for
Supap Kirtsaeng, a native of Thailand who was a U.S. college student
when his relatives back home sent
him cheaper, foreign-published versions of major college textbooks. Mr.
Kirtsaeng sold more than $900,000
of such foreign editions on eBay in
the United States, pocketing some
$100,000 in profits.
In its March 19 decision in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons Inc., the
Supreme Court concluded that Congress did not intend to restrict the
first-sale doctrine geographically.
The Association of American
Publishers issued a statement expressing its disappointment with
the decision.
—MARK WALSH

LANGUAGE AND DROPOUTS
“The English-Learner Dropout
Dilemma: Multiple Risks and
Multiple Resources”

English-language learners
are twice as likely to drop out
of school as their peers who are
either native English speakers
or former ells who have become
fluent in the language, concludes a report by the California
Dropout Research Project at the
University of California, Santa
Barbara.
Synthesizing much of the research over the past three decades on the reasons behind the
low academic achievement and
high dropout rates of Englishlearners, author Rebecca M. Callahan, an education professor at
the University of Texas at Austin,
finds that many English-learners
are still isolated in English-as-asecond-language programs that
focus little, if at all, on academic
content. That’s the case even
though most states and districts
will not reclassify a student as
fluent in English until he or she
has demonstrated proficiency in
both language and academic con—LESLI A. MAXWELL
tent.

GENDER GAPS
“Sex Differences in Mathematics
and Reading Achievement Are
Inversely Related: Within- and
Across-Nation Assessment of 10
Years of PISA Data”

An international study published in the journal PLOS-1
highlights nuances of the gender
gaps favoring girls’ achievement
in reading and boys’ achievement in mathematics.
The study, based on a decade
of data from 75 countries participating in the Program for International Student Assessment,
finds that the global reading gap
for boys is three times as large
as the math gap for girls.
Moreover, the largest math
gap worldwide is between highachieving boys and girls. For
reading, the gap for boys was
most pronounced among the
lowest-performing students.
Nations with a smaller gender
difference in math achievement
tended to have a larger reading
—ERIK W. ROBELEN
gap for boys.

MARCH 27, 2013

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U.S. School Facilities Given ‘D’
For Sustainability and Upkeep
“Report Card for America’s Infrastructure” and “2013 State of Our
Schools Report”

Many of the nation’s school buildings are in a state of disrepair,
two new reports say, and it would cost roughly $270 billion to
bring them up to date.
The American Society of Civil Engineers’ “Report Card for
America’s Infrastructure,” released every four years, analyzes the
condition of schools along with energy systems, bridges, and dams.
The 2013 report found that while American infrastructure overall
ticked up from a D grade in 2009 to a D-plus this year, schools
have remained flat, at D—a “poor grade.”
There is less information on the status of school buildings than
that of other types of infrastructure, such as roads or bridges, because federal data on school facilities have not been updated since
1999, the report says.
Total school construction and modernization spending has been
on the decline since 2004, falling from nearly $30 billion to a little
more than $10 billion last year, according to the report. Since
2009, however, there has been a minor increase in spending on
school additions and modernizations. Because school construction
is paid for primarily through local taxes, the report authors found
construction and maintenance budgets took an outsize hit in the
recent recession.
That dovetails with findings of a separate new report by the U.S.
Green Building Council’s Center for Green Schools. It estimates
how much schools should have spent on building upkeep between
1995 and 2008 and how much they actually spent. The gap was
$271 billion, it says. And that’s just for upkeep: Modernization
would cost $542 billion more, the report estimates. Almost half
the nation’s school buildings were built in the 1950s and 1960s.
Both reports call on the federal government to collect more
information and provide more regular updates on school conditions. The civil engineers’ group says the government should
work with states to create a national database of school conditions and available money and financing to improve them; the
building council suggests that information on school buildings
be collected in states’ longitudinal-data systems.
In a blog post, the Center for Green Schools’ director, Rachel
Gutter, said collecting such data would, she hoped, allow states
and districts to spot and then address safety, health, education,
and environmental concerns.
—JACLYN ZUBRZYCKI & SARAH D. SPARKS

DUAL ENROLLMENT

Brian P. An, an assistant professor in educational policy and
leadership, tracked the academic
paths of 8,800 students in the
National Educational Longitudinal Study. He found that
students who had taken part
in dual-enrollment programs
in high school were 8 percentage points more likely to earn
a postsecondary degree—and 7
percentage points more likely to
earn a bachelor’s degree, in particular—than students who had
not participated, after controlling for other student and school
characteristics.
Mr. An found dual enrollment
had an even stronger effect when
participants were compared with
other students who were not in
other accelerated programs,
such as Advanced Placement.

“The Impact of Dual Enrollment
on College Degree Attainment:
Do Low-SES Students Benefit?”

ENGLISH-LEARNER PARENTS

—SARAH D. SPARKS

Programs that allow high school
students to begin to earn college
credit can significantly boost the
likelihood that students in poverty eventually go on to earn a
college degree, according to a
University of Iowa study.

“English Language Learners and
Parental Involvement”

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A recent brief from the National Education Policy Center
outlines ways for policymakers, districts, and schools to im-

prove educational opportunities
for English-language learners.
Those students tend to be concentrated in schools serving
low-income populations and
lacking adequate instruction
or materials—a problem that is
exacerbated by communication
and cultural barriers between
schools and parents, it says.
School-based efforts to
strengthen parental involvement could help increase parental efficacy and advocacy, says
the brief, written by William
Mathis of the nepc. Improved
communication, collaboration
with families, and an embrace
of community culture, it says,
could help alleviate educational
challenges for ells. Providing
parents with avenues to learn
English would also help promote ell parent involvement
and encourage parents to read
and write with their children at
home.
For policymakers, adequacy
studies and identified financial inequities in serving ell
students, once reviewed and
updated, should be utilized for
improved legislation and budget allocations, the brief recommends.
—ALYSSA MORONES

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Education Week - March 27, 2013

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