Education Week - May 8, 2013 - 5

EDUCATION WEEK

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State-Appointed Board Gets
Federal Go-Ahead in El Paso
The El Paso school district’s state-appointed board of managers
will be sworn into office this week, after the civil rights division
of the U.S. Department of Justice said it would not oppose having
such a body run the Texas district for up to two years.
State Commissioner of Education Michael L. Williams appointed
the board in December to replace the district’s elected board of
trustees, after a cheating scandal that sent former Superintendent
Lorenzo García to jail. But under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the
power swap had to be approved by the federal agency.
The district’s interim superintendent, Vernon L. Butler, said
the new board would find a permanent schools chief and work
to re-establish public trust in a district that’s recovering from a
cheating scheme that affected dozens of students.
The 64,000-student district’s elected board has objected to the
state’s involvement, saying the board and district have made the
changes necessary to continue their work effectively.
But many of the board members were in office while Mr. García and at least six unnamed district employees adjusted students’
grade levels and placements—and encouraged some students to
drop out—in order to manipulate schools’ test scores so that school
leaders would profit, a scheme that ultimately led to Mr. García’s
conviction in a federal court on two counts of conspiracy to commit
mail fraud.
The new board will consist of Edmund G. Archuleta, the retired
head of El Paso Water Utilities; Carmen Arrieta-Candelaria, the
city’s chief financial officer; Dee Margo, a former Texas state representative; Blanca Enriquez, the executive director of a local
Head Start program; and Judy Castleberry, the district’s stateappointed monitor.
—JACLYN ZUBRZYCKI

Supreme Court’s 1966 ruling in
Miranda v. Arizona about the right
to remain silent and the right to
counsel, and that any statements
he made could be used against him.
The student, a juvenile identified
in court papers as N.C., was eventually expelled. He was charged with
felony possession and dispensing
of a controlled substance and was
sentenced to 45 days in jail.
His appeal to the state supreme
court argued that admitting his
statements to the assistant principal violated his 5th Amendment
right against self-incrimination.
—MARK WALSH

Chicago Students Skip
State Test in Protest
Students angry over the proposed
shuttering of more than 50 schools
in Chicago next year skipped the
second day of state testing last
month to protest the closures, according to local media reports.
The threat of hundreds of high
school students boycotting Illinois’
Prairie State Achievement Examination—a test high school juniors
must take in order to be promoted
to 12th grade and graduate—
alarmed Chicago schools officials
enough to send letters to parents
late last month, reminding them
of the exam’s importance.
The boycott was billed by some
student activists as a stance
against what they say is the overuse of testing for high-stakes decisions such as school closures and
teacher and principal evaluations.
About 300 students protested at

district headquarters on April 24,
according to a press release from
a group called Chicago Students
Organizing to Save Our Schools.

TEACHER QUALITY
“Systematic Sorting: Teacher
Characteristics and Course
Assignments”

Within schools, less experienced and minority teachers
are more often assigned classes
with lower-achieving students
than their more experienced
or white colleagues, according
to a paper published last month
in the journal Sociology of
Education.
Stanford University researchers Demetra Kalogrides and
Susanna Loeb, along with Tara
Béteille of the World Bank in
Washington, looked at a set of
data on teacher assignments
from the Miami-Dade County,
Fla., district from the 2003-04 to
the 2010-11 school years, linked
to the students and courses
taught by those teachers. They
also drew on a survey of some
6,800 teachers in the district.
They found that teachers with
10 to 20 years of experience had
students with higher average
prior achievement, relative to
students assigned to first-year
teachers, at both the elementary and secondary levels, as did
teachers who graduated from
more-competitive colleges. Black
teachers generally had the mostchallenging assignments, particularly when they taught in schools
with more white colleagues.
—STEPHEN SAWCHUK

—LESLI A. MAXWELL

SCHOOL FINANCE

Calif. Neglecting ELLs,
ACLU Lawsuit Claims
More than 20,000 Englishlanguage learners in California’s
public schools are not receiving
language instruction, and the state
department of education is failing
in its role to ensure that schools
educate such students, a lawsuit
filed by the American Civil Liberties Union charges.
The aclu of Southern California’s
lawsuit, filed last month, contends
the education department has neglected its obligation to monitor
English-language-acquisition programs for students in many of the
state’s more than 1,000 districts.
California’s public schools enroll
more than 1.4 million Englishlearners, roughly one in four of the
state’s K-12 population.
The Asian Pacific American Legal
Center and the private law firm of
Latham & Watkins also are representing plaintiffs in the suit, filed in
Los Angeles Superior Court.
Among other allegations, the lawsuit says some districts receive tens
of millions of dollars in state aid, as
well as federal Title III dollars, for
providing English-language instruction to ells but then don’t provide
the services. The state is not monitoring districts as required to ensure
those dollars are spent for that purpose, according to the lawsuit. —L.A.M.

“Revenues and Expenditures for
Public Elementary and Secondary
School Districts: School Year
2009-10”

Even while school districts
tightened their belts and made
program cuts toward the end of
the Great Recession, the latest
report from the National Center for Education Statistics indicates that the median expenditure per student for all the
nation’s districts did not decline
during the 2009-10 school year.
Instead, that figure rose by 1
percent from the previous year, to
$9,989.
The New York City schools
spent the most, averaging $19,184
for each pupil. It was followed by
the Boston city schools, which
spent $19,169, and the Montgomery County, Md., school system, at $14,711 per student. In
comparison, Utah’s Alpine school
district spent less than a third of
what New York spent on its students—$5,528 for each pupil.
Local agencies fueled the biggest portion of the $599.9 billion that schools received for
2009-10, contributing $265.8
billion, or 44.3 percent of spending, while state governments
accounted for $258.9 billion,
43.1 percent of schools’ revenue.
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MAY 8, 2013

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NAEP Economics Results
Highlight Proficiency Gaps
“The Nation’s Report Card: Economics 2012”

More than half of American 12th graders lack proficiency in
economics, according to new results from “the nation’s report
card,” with no overall change in performance when compared
with results from 2006, the last time the assessment was
administered.
In all, 43 percent of high school seniors scored “proficient” or
above on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in
economics, which covers such topics as personal finance, business, government policy, and international trade. The results
were released last month.
While the average score of 12th graders held steady, the
data show some improvements from 2006. For instance, the
percentage of students scoring below the “basic” level decreased from 21 percent in 2006 to 18 percent six years later.
The percentage of Hispanic students scoring at or above basic
grew from 64 percent to 71 percent, but that growth was not
considered statistically significant.
In a conference call with reporters, National Center for Education Statistics Commissioner Sean P. “Jack” Buckley suggested that
Hispanic students’ improvement may be explained by improved
literacy skills rather than better understanding of economics.
The data show a persistent gender gap in economics, with
boys on average scoring 6 points higher than girls on the naep
scale of 0 to 300.
The results also show big gaps by race, ethnicity, and income, consistent with the patterns across all naep subjects.
For example, 53 percent of white students scored proficient
or above, compared with just 17 percent of African-American
students and 26 percent of Hispanic students. Looked at another way, four out of 10 black students scored “below basic,”
as compared with one in 10 white students.
The new naep economics results came just a week after the
Council of Economic Education issued a set of national standards for financial literacy at the K-12 level.
—ERIK W. ROBELEN

Federal funds amounted to 12.5
percent, or $75.3 billion—up
32.7 percent from the previous
school year, before the federal
economic-stimulus law was enacted.
—ALYSSA MORONES

scores, study co-author Daphna
Bassok of the University of Virginia said in a press release.
“We were surprised that at
age 4, kids who end up delaying kindergarten looked just as
‘ready’ for school as their peers,”
she said.
—JULIE BLAIR

EARLY CHILDHOOD
“ ‘Academic Redshirting’ in
Kindergarten”

The practice of “academic redshirting”—delaying kindergarten entry to give a child more
time to mature—may be less
prevalent than is commonly believed, according to a study published last month in the journal
Educational Evaluation and
Policy Analysis.
Nationwide, the study published last month found, between 4 percent and 5.5 percent
of children are kept back from
kindergarten each year, and
the practice is more common
in certain demographic groups.
Nearly one in four pupils from
prosperous communities is redshirted, while such occurrences
are “extremely unlikely” in less
wealthy communities, the study
says.
The reseachers also looked
at whether the children whose
entry to kindergarten was delayed lagged behind their peers
academically or socially as
judged by their preschool teachers, parents, or district test
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SCIENCE EDUCATION
“Opportunity to Learn Science?”

Students in high-performing
schools have more and deeper
opportunities to learn science
than those in struggling schools,
according to a Massachusetts
course audit released by the
Rennie Center, a Boston-based
school improvement group.
The audit found high-performing schools were more likely to
have teachers certified to teach
science, and to have positions
for instructors who teach only
science, even in elementary
grades.
Students in high-performing
schools had, on average, 60 minutes more of science instruction
each week than students in lowperforming schools, and they
were also more likely to have access to Advanced Placement and
other honors courses in science.
High-performing schools were
also more likely to offer science
fairs, clubs, and other sciencebased extracurricular activities.
—SARAH D. SPARKS

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Education Week - May 8, 2013

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