Education Week - May 21, 2014 - 24

LETTERS to
the EDITOR
Early-Childhood Suspensions
Hurt Children in Distress
To the Editor:
Framework for Data Management
Already Available to Schools
To the Editor:
I have just read the article titled "Data-Sharing
Challenges in Spotlight as inBloom Sputters to a
Shutdown" (Education Week, May 7, 2014).
While I agree with the general public's new
focus on data exchanges in education, the
entire marketplace has been actively providing
solutions for the past two decades, and it was
missed in your piece.
The Systems Interoperability Framework-
known in North America as the Schools
Interoperability Framework, or sif-is a
nonprofit membership organization made
up of thousands of schools, districts, state
educational agencies, federal agencies, and
vendors in North America, the United Kingdom,
and Australia. These diverse stakeholders-in
the management, movement, and usage of
education data-have together built openly
developed and freely acceptable technical
blueprints that allow for the safe and secure
sharing of data .
The sif community does not collect data or
have anything to sell, which differs from all of
the other data initiatives outlined in the article.
The sif data model and infrastructure are in
use in hundreds of marketplace products and
in thousands of schools in every state in the
union. Sif also has a quality-control-certification
program, providing quality assurance to the
marketplace, that grows every day.
Our community has the experts in building
and implementing these systems and has been
addressing these issues for years.
Larry Fruth II
Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer
SIF Association
Washington, D.C.
Barbara Oehlberg
Education and Child Trauma Consultant
Solon, Ohio
A recent evening news program on public
television carried a report on the U.S.
Department of Education's office for civil
rights and a litany of racial disparities in
education. This report was also covered to
a lesser extent in Education Week, first in
"U.S. Comes Up Short on Education Equity,
Federal Data Indicate" (March 26, 2014)
and then in "Pre-K Suspension Data Shines
Spotlight on Interventions" (April 2, 2014).
The pbs segment and latter Education Week
article focus heavily on suspension data for
4- and 5-year-olds.
Suspending pre-K and kindergarten
pupils seems unthinkable to me. Most
importantly, it indicates their earlychildhood
teachers are totally unaware of
the root causes of unacceptable behaviors.
Research shows that acting-out behaviors
are an expression of stress and anxiety that
may result from early brain changes due
to weak attachments and a lack of security.
These brain alterations greatly diminish
the neural development of self-regulation
skills and can easily result in automatic
fight-or-flight reactions to perceived threats
and fears.
To make certain that standard disciplinary
policies do not unintentionally set the
foundation for "school to prison" pipelines,
teachers need to be informed of neurobiology
and how to establish emotionally secure
relationships with students that respect
their toxic stress. Standard disciplinary
actions do not strengthen self-regulation
skills in distressed children; instead they
exacerbate student anxiety and make
learning less likely.
Children who have experienced trauma
require developmentally appropriate
early-childhood education that meets
their learning and behavioral needs and
incorporates trauma-informed practices.
Catholic Schools Cannot 'Convert'
To Charter School Status
To the Editor:
Talk about a misleading headline! "Catholic
Schools Benefit From Converting to Charters"
was a totally inaccurate statement (News in
Brief, Education Week, May 7, 2014).
The purpose and underlying philosophy of
Catholic schools is the transmission of Catholic
doctrine and values throughout the day, in the
curricular and extracurricular life of students.
Charter schools cannot do that and, as such,
cannot benefit Catholic education.
To report that Catholic schools that
shut down and then were rented to public
charter schools "flourished" is a complete
misstatement, and I cannot conceive of how
the Friedman Foundation would make that
conclusion as reported in Education Week.
The fact that charter schools mimic Catholic
schools in cosmetic areas such as uniforms and
local control is admirable, but where's the beef?
A charter school simply cannot be a Catholic
school, nor vice versa, because the core and
purpose of the Catholic school isn't there. Those
who would propose such an idea simply don't
get it.
Sister Carol Cimino
Superintendent of Schools
Diocese of Buffalo
Buffalo, N.Y.
Putting Heart
Into High School
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 28
stock of student gains in sel offers one
more argument for performance-based
assessments.
Our investigation underscores the
COMMENTARY POLICY
Education Week takes no editorial
positions, but publishes opinion essays
and letters from outside contributors in its
Commentary section.
For information about submitting an essay
or letter for review, visit
www.edweek.org/go/guidelines.
Confessions From the Field-Testing Ranks
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 23
ing the teacher, does this count on our grades?" my
daughter told me, her voice quavering.
"When the teacher said no, everybody just started
filling in all the answers randomly so they could get
done as fast as possible. One boy who was supposed
to write three paragraphs had written one, then he
just added two paragraphs with just letters.
"Everybody was talking about it afterward. No one
took it seriously." And that is when the tears began
to flow. "Except me. But everything took three times
as long. And the questions just kept getting harder,
and some of them didn't make any sense, and everyone
else was gone, and now I'm way behind everyone
else because they just filled in random answers."
When I suggested that perhaps she was taking it
a little too seriously and really they weren't testing
her, they were testing the tests, she remained
inconsolable.
"But, Mommy, if no one takes the tests seriously,
how will we know if they are any good?"
She's right, of course. There's no way to test these
tests without giving them to oodles of kids. But,
as is true with any mother, I feel that anyone who
stresses out my kid had better be doing it for a damn
good reason, or they'll have hell to pay.
I know. The tests are not the standards, but for
many kids and parents and teachers around the
nation, they are the clearest example of the common
24 | EDUCATION WEEK | May 21, 2014 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary
core in practice. And, according to my dutiful little
field-tester, they are not all there yet.
I have reason to believe her.
Full confession: A month ago, I went online to do
the practice questions for both major common-core
assessment consortia-Smarter Balanced and parcc
(the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for
College and Careers)-for her grade. Many of the
questions were difficult but wonderful. Others were
in need of a good editor. A few, however, were flat-out
wrong.
One Smarter Balanced question asked students
to finish an essay that began with a boy waking up
and going down the hall to talk to his mother. Then,
in the next paragraph, he's suddenly jumping out of
bed. A parcc reading-comprehension question asked
students to pick a synonym for "constantly" out of
five possible sentence options. I reread the sentences
10 times before I realized that no words or phrases
in those sentences really meant "constantly," but
that the test-writer had confused "constantly" with
"repeatedly." Any student who really understood the
language would be as confused as I was.
Hey, everyone makes mistakes, even a multi-million-dollar
testing juggernaut. But what disturbed
me was that these were the questions that the test
companies had chosen to share with the public.
If they are making mistakes like this in public,
what are they doing in the privacy of my daughter's
test? n
critical role that supporting structures
and practices play in secondary schools:
advisory groups, student choice, norms
of mutual respect among youths and
adults, intentional and inclusive community-building,
and more. Evidence-based
sel programs participate in that ecology,
we acknowledge, but their potential increases
when schools integrate them into
daily instruction in a systemic approach.
The convergence of academic, social,
and emotional learning serves all students
well, we found. It misses the point
to embrace sel largely as a behaviormanagement
or character-development
tool for at-risk students in urban schools,
though certainly such programs play a
part in closing the achievement gap. Our
five study schools demonstrate the power
of sel to enrich student learning, aspiration,
and engagement across the entire
spectrum of students.
We applaud the rising interest in restorative-justice
programs as an alternative
to harmful zero-tolerance policies. Yet
the students affected by them often need
much more than the chance to right their
wrongs and stay in school, however critical
these outcomes are. They usually need
help managing the chronic stressors that
underlie their defiance-worries linked
to family, health (mental and physical),
safety, and sometimes food and shelter,
too. Though cognizant of the limits of
what schools can do, we also know the
exorbitant costs of the consequences of
neglect and school failure.
Finally (though perhaps first of all),
teacher-preparation programs must
equip new teachers with the core competencies
necessary to foster social and
emotional learning. They need guidance
in creating the safe, respectful, motivating,
and engaging classrooms in which
young minds and characters can develop.
It goes without saying that embedding
those same characteristics in their professional
education would lay a strong
foundation for their success.
The vision of weaving social and emotional
learning into the daily fabric of
our nation's high schools seems understandably
daunting. We offer five proof
points that it can actually happen. n
Chris Whetzel for Education Week
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Education Week - May 21, 2014

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