Education Week - July 10, 2013 - 27

EDUCATION WEEK
GOVERNMENT POLITICS
&
Race-Related Cases Drew High Court Focus
Education advocates
mull rulings’ impact
By Mark Walsh
The U.S. Supreme Court’s recently
concluded 2012-13 term
included two major decisions affecting
how race plays out in the
nation’s school districts, among
a number of other rulings with
implications for K-12 and higher
education.
The most closely watched education
case was anticipated as
a chance for conservatives on
the court to launch a potentially
sweeping rollback of the use of
race in college admissions. But
the result in Fisher v. University
of Texas at Austin (Case No. 11345),
after eight months of internal
deliberation by the justices,
was much less.
In a 7-1 ruling, the court reaffirmed
key precedents that racial
diversity is a compelling educational
interest, but it gave opponents
of affirmative action fresh
legal ammunition to continue attacking
race-conscious programs.
Meanwhile, the court’s ruling
in Shelby County, Ala. v. Holder
(No. 12-96) invalidated the formulas
in the Voting Rights Act of
1965 that define which jurisdictions,
including school districts,
must get federal approval before
implementing any voting-related
change, such as redrawing electoral
districts or switching to an
at-large school board.
In the Fisher case, the justices
ruled that a lower court had failed
to hold the university’s race-conscious
admissions plan to the
demanding burden of “strict scrutiny”
as articulated in the high
court’s landmark decisions on
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JULY 10, 2013 www.edweek.org
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27
POLICY
BRIEF
NCLB Renewal Bills
Chart Varied Paths
Abigail Fisher, joined
by Edward Blum of
the Project on Fair
Representation,
leaves a news
conference in
Washington following
the U.S. Supreme
Court’s ruling on an
affirmative action
case. Ms. Fisher sued
the University of
Texas when she was
not offered a spot
at the university’s
flagship Austin
campus in 2008.
affirmative action in education.
The high court threw out a ruling
by the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the 5th Circuit, in New Orleans,
that upheld the flagship
University of Texas campus’s
“holistic review” program, which
takes race into account for roughly
one-quarter of places in the entering
freshman class. The other
three-fourths are filled under a
state law that guarantees admission
to high school students who
finish in the top 10 percent of
their graduating classes.
Abigail Fisher, a white applicant
from Sugar Land, Texas, who was
denied admission to UT-Austin in
2008, challenged the holistic-review
program as a violation of the 14th
Amendment’s equal-protection
clause. The Supreme Court’s June
24 decision allows Ms. Fisher and
her lawyers to return to the 5th
Circuit court to fight the university’s
justifications for the program.
Bench Dissent
Writing for the majority, Justice
Anthony M. Kennedy said the 5th
Circuit court had not complied
with Grutter v. Bollinger, the high
court’s 2003 decision upholding a
race-conscious admissions plan at
the University of Michigan’s law
school, by properly applying strict
scrutiny. Under that standard, a
government racial classification
must meet a compelling interest
and be narrowly tailored to
achieve that interest.
“Strict scrutiny does not permit
a court to accept a school’s assertion
that its admissions process
PAGE 28 >
Almost no one expects Congress
to finish the reauthorization of
the No Child Left Behind Act this
year, but there has been some
important—although partisan—
action in both chambers over the
past month on the long-overdue
overhaul. The recent discussion,
debate, and policy proposals
give education advocates
and school district officials a
sense of where Congress may
eventually end up when it
comes to the nation’s landmark
education law.
In June, for example, the U.S.
Senate education committee
approved its version of a bill
to renew the Elementary
and Secondary Education
Act, of which the NCLB law
is the current iteration. The
Senate panel’s vision shares
many similarities with the
policies pushed by the Obama
administration through its NCLB
waivers to states.
The measure, written by
Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the
committee’s chairman, would
direct nonwaiver states to submit
an ambitious accountability plan
to the Department of Education.
It would also ask states to
develop teacher-evaluation
systems that take studentachievement
data into account—
but schools would not have
to use the data for personnel
decisions, only for professional
development and to ensure that
highly qualified teachers are
equally distributed.
“This is not the heavy hand of
the federal government telling
you this is exactly what you
have to do,” Sen. Harkin said
during committee consideration.
“We’re saying ... let’s work
together to make sure we have
access and equity for our kids.”
Uneasy Resolution Reached in Md. Evaluation Feud
By Andrew Ujifusa
After an inconclusive fight over
teacher and principal evaluations,
Maryland education officials will
try to sort out their differences
with district superintendents and
union leaders, in light of possible
new flexibility from Washington on
when those evaluations must begin
to affect personnel decisions. But a
tough road lies ahead.
The details of new evaluations—
specifically the weight state assessments
will have in personnel decisions
in coming years—have been
at the heart of the feud, along with
the importance of local control. The
next school year is shaping up to
be a key one, as both Maryland’s
waiver from provisions of the No
Child Left Behind Act and its Race
to the Top grant deal are set to
expire, and as final preparations
begin for the implementation of the
Common Core State Standards and
the associated assessments.
The June 18 announcement by
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne
Duncan that 34 states that have
received waivers from provisions of
the NCLB law, including Maryland,
could apply to delay for one year
(until the 2016-17 school year) high
stakes for teachers’ evaluations may
relieve some tension. But the feud
in Maryland highlights the tensions
that surround policy changes driven
by Washington.
“Now we’re starting to see the
ascendancy of the old powers, the
forces of the establishment, who
have been kept at bay for years
because of Race to the Top money
and Race to the Top promises,” said
Andy Smarick, a partner at Bellwether
Education Partners, a research
and policy consultant group
with offices in Washington and elsewhere,
referring to unions and others.
“What’s happening in Maryland
is indicative of this bigger story.”
Deal or No Deal?
The Maryland fight stems from
the state’s $250 million grant from
the federal Race to the Top program,
as well as the state’s Education
Reform Act, that was passed in
2010 to pave the way for the grant.
That law required half a teacher’s
evaluation to be based on student
growth on objective measures, including
test scores.
In a June 5 letter to the Mary-
land State Education Association,
the 71,000-member state teachers’
union, Maryland schools Superintendent
Lillian M. Lowery wrote
that federal expectations under Race
to the Top clearly included “quanti-
n
tative measures that incorporate
at least 20 percent of state assessments
in grades and subjects where
these assessments are required.”
In the 2013-14 academic year,
those would be the Maryland
School Assessments; beginning in
2014-15, measures would be based
on the common-core-aligned assessments
from the Partnership
for Assessment of Readiness for
College and Careers. The 2013-14
school year would also be the first
year of high stakes for teachers
based on evaluations.
But several Maryland school districts
and the state union balked,
arguing that some local education
leaders had agreed to make state
assessment scores count for only 10
percent of a teacher’s evaluation.
They argued the state had no right
to toss out those agreements, and
PAGE 29 >
Meanwhile, the House
Education and the Workforce
Committee approved its own
radically different vision for
reauthorization.
The panel’s bill would
largely dismantle the federal
accountability requirements
at the center of the NCLB law,
maintaining the legislation’s
testing schedule, but getting
rid of the federal responsibility
for school improvement. And it
would jettison maintenance of
effort, which requires states and
school districts to keep up their
own spending at a certain level
in order to tap federal funds.
“The legislation will reduce the
federal footprint,” said Rep. John
Kline, R-Minn., the bill’s author,
during committee consideration.
The House bill—which
garnered only GOP support—
could be on the floor this month.
—ALYSON KLEIN
Charles Dharapak/AP
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Education Week - July 10, 2013

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