Education Week - June 12, 2013 - 5

EDUCATION WEEK
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JUNE 12, 2013 www.edweek.org
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5
REPORT
ROUNDUP
cide what to do with the school.
Efforts are also being made to
secure federal money.
—AP
W.Va. School Authority
OKs Safety Measures
New schools built in West Virginia
will be required to have shatterproof
glass and exterior door alarms.
The requirements are among
several safety measures approved
last week by the West Virginia
School Building Authority.
Other changes require new
schools to have separate visitorentrance
and waiting areas. Administrative
offices must have a
direct view of the parking lot.
Common areas, like the cafeteria,
will be separated from the main
entrance and office by doors that
can be closed and mechanically
locked from the office area.The
policy also requires installation of
video monitoring software.
–AP
Judge Wants Closure
In 1964 Race Case
A desegregation lawsuit involving
the Richmond County, Ga.,
school system might soon be over,
after nearly 49 years.
In an uncommon judicial move,
Senior U.S. District Court Judge
Dudley H. Bowen Jr. has ordered
the lawyers and parties involved
to attend a hearing June 17, the
anniversary of the filing of Robert
L. Acree v. the Richmond County
Board of Education.
Each side will present reasons
to convince the judge that the desegregation
case should remain
open—or else it will be closed.
“It would hardly be a stretch to
say that the current level of integration
within the facilities, staffing,
elected school board, and student
population of the Richmond
County school system vastly exceeds
any likely expectation of the
original plaintiffs and their attorneys
at the time of the filing,” Judge
Bowen wrote.
The case has outlived many of
the original lawyers and plaintiffs.
—McCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
CORRECTIONS:
In the Diplomas Count 2013 special
report accompanying this edition
of Education Week, the executive
summary and an article about
challenges faced by dropouts returning
to school contain incorrect statistics.
The share of students in San
Bernardino, Calif., who dropped out
between 2001 and 2006 and later
attained a high school diploma was
fewer than one in five.
A photo caption for an article on
tornado safety in the June 5, 2013,
issue of Education Week contained
incorrect information about the
number of Oklahoma schools with
safe rooms built with federal funds.
The state education department
knows of 85 such schools.
For links to these reports, go to
www.edweek.org/go/rr.
ADVANCED COURSES
“Finding America’s Missing
AP and IB Students”
Students of color and those
from low-income families lag
behind their peers in enrolling
in Advanced Placement and
International Baccalaureate
courses, even if they show the
academic promise to succeed,
according to a new report from
the Education Trust.
The study by the Washingtonbased
group finds that middleand
high-income students at
schools with AP classes are three
times as likely to enroll in such
courses as low-income students.
Black and American Indian students
participate at about half
the rate of the national average,
while about 9 percent of Hispanic
students sign up.
The percentage of white students
who enroll in IB programs,
at 6.7 percent, is more than three
times that of black students (2.1
percent).
The authors say such gaps
translate to more than 640,000
low-income students and students
of color “missing” each
year from AP and IB participation.

—CARALEE ADAMS
ACHIEVEMENT GAPS
“The Road to Equity”
OBITUARY
U.S. Senator Pushed for Sex Ed.
And Higher Drinking Age
U.S. Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg,
D-N.J., who spearheaded federal
legislation to raise the
drinking age to 21 and pushed
for comprehensive sex education
in the nation’s schools, died
June 3 of complications from
viral pneumonia. He was 89.
In 1987, the de facto national
drinking age became 21, under
legislation stipulating that states
that refused to raise the minimum
age for drinking alcohol
would lose part of their federal
transportation aid. Sen. Lautenberg
won over President Ronald
Reagan in the fight to pass the
measure, which has been credited
with saving thousands of
lives that would have been lost in
alcohol-related crashes.
Sen. Lautenberg’s proposed
Real Education for Healthy
Youth Act, reintroduced in February
with U.S. Rep. Barbara
Lee, D-Calif., seeks to expand
age-appropriate comprehensive
sex education programs, train
teachers to talk to teenagers
about unintended pregnancy
and the transmission of sexu-
ally transmitted diseases, and
expand sex education programs
at colleges. The bill would also
prevent federal funds from being
spent on what a press release
called “ineffective, medically inaccurate
sex education.”
Mr. Lautenberg announced earlier
this year
that he would
not seek reelection
after
his fifth term
in office, which
would have ex-
pired in January 2015.
His interest in education in-
cluded anti-bullying efforts. In
2011, he and others from the
New Jersey congressional delegation
recorded a message for
the “It Gets Better” Project, which
aims to give students who are lesbian,
gay, bisexual, or transgender
hope they will move beyond
any harassment they experience
as teenagers.
Mr. Lautenberg was the oldest
member of the U.S. Senate and
its last World War II veteran.
—NIRVI SHAH
Of the 75 districts whose demographics
qualify them for the
Broad Prize for Urban Education,
only six were found to increase
African-American students’ college
readiness by improving their
passing rates on Advanced Placement
tests while keeping their
participation rates steady, finds a
new Broad Foundation analysis.
To help address that challenge
for schools, the foundation identified
the strategies being used by
the six districts that succeeded in
narrowing those AP-participation
gaps. They include offering a rigorous
curriculum in the elementary
grades, identifying potential
AP students early, providing extra
academic and social support,
boosting AP course offerings, and
trying to instill confidence in students
about their college-going
potential.
—ALYSSA MORONES
TEACHER COLLABORATION
“Collective Pedagogical Teacher
Culture and Mathematics
Achievement”
Students whose teachers regularly
collaborate and participate
in professional communities
show more growth in
mathematics achievement than
those whose teachers are more
isolated professionally, says a
study in the April issue of the
journal Sociology of Education.
Report: For Many Students,
‘College-Ready’ Isn’t Enough
“The Reality of College Readiness 2013”
While academic readiness is important, it is not the sole factor at
play in college success, suggests a report from ACT Inc.
The study finds that about 19 percent of 2011 high school graduates
who took the ACT and were considered college-ready in at least
three of the four subject areas tested never enrolled or didn’t return
for a second year of college.
“We need to pay attention to multiple dimensions of readiness in
helping students achieve their educational goals,” Steve Kappler,
who heads postsecondary strategy for ACT, said in a statement from
the Iowa City, Iowa-based testing organization.
Of the wider pool of all 2011 graduates who took the ACT, 43
percent were not enrolled in college or their status was not known
by last fall.
The report also highlights the diverse choices being made by all
students in pursuing pursue higher education. Statistics show that
nearly 30 percent of college undergraduates delayed enrollment
for a year, 38 percent attend part time, and 30 percent are taking
courses online. Plus, many are moving from one institution to
another. Twenty-nine percent of community college students, for
instance, transferred to four-year colleges.
Just over 40 percent of college graduates received credits from
more than one institution.
ACT reports that despite significant efforts to increase student
success, college-retention rates in recent years have remained virtually
unchanged. Re-enrollment rates of 2011 ACT-tested high school
graduates at private four-year colleges are higher than rates for
those students at two-year colleges and public four-year colleges.
The report makes several recommendations on how policymakers
can improve college-retention rates, including promoting P-20
collaborations to develop integrated education systems, measuring
and rewarding individual student success, and revising policies
that keep the movement of students from one educational experience
to another from being visible.
—CARALEE ADAMS
The study also links teachers’
participation in such communities
to smaller learning gaps
between diverse racial and socioeconomic
student groups.
For their study, researchers
from the University of North
Carolina at Charlotte drew on
data from nearly 5,000 students
who took part in a federal longitudinal
study from 1998 to 2003.
—SARAH D. SPARKS
STAFFING SCHOOLS
“New York City Public School
Indicators”
While declining teacher satisfaction
nationwide has been an area
of concern, New York City seems
to be keeping teachers and school
leaders around longer, suggests
data from a new report.
According to the analysis from
the New York City Independent
Budget Office, both teacher and
principal retention in the district
has improved dramatically
in the past decade: Of teachers
who came on the job in 2000-01,
32 percent left after one year,
compared with 20 percent in
2010-11. Twenty-seven percent
of principals new to their jobs in
2000-01 had left the school system
within three years, while
only 8 percent of those who
began in 2008-09 were gone
three years later.
The budget office was required
to start collecting information on
> > For links to these reports, go to www.edweek.org/go/rr
the schools after the renewal of
mayoral control in the district
in 2009. The report looks at demographics,
student outcomes,
budget, principals and teachers,
school buildings, and class size in
city schools.
—JACLYN ZUBRZYCKI
BUYING TECHNOLOGY
“Evolving Ed-Tech Procurement
in School Districts”
Two organizations, in a new report,
are urging districts and
private-sector entrepreneurs to
work more closely together to
streamline and improve the process
through which school systems
choose and buy educational
technology.
In their report, Digital Prom-
ise, a nonprofit authorized by
Congress to support education
innovation, and IDEO, a design
firm, offer suggestions on how
districts can use procurement to
bring more innovative and more
useful technology products to
schools.
One recommendation is to make
the process more transparent,
and simplify it: Explaining the
process to school officials, vendors,
and the public through maps, case
studies, and other means would
increase their understanding of
how products enter K-12 systems.
The authors also suggest that
schools become more involved in
working with education-technology
entrepreneurs. —SEAN CAVANAGH
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
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Education Week - June 12, 2013

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