Education Week - July 10, 2013 - 5

EDUCATION WEEK
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JULY 10, 2013 www.edweek.org
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5
REPORT
ROUNDUP
ble in the case because it removed
any record of discipline from the
student’s file and has speech and
anti-bullying policies that respect
students’ First Amendment rights.
—MARK WALSH
Four States Adopt
Science Standards
The Next Generation Science
Standards are starting to build
steam, as state boards of education
in four states voted in June
to adopt them. Kansas, Kentucky,
Maryland, and Vermont join Rhode
Island, where the standards were
approved in May.
The K-12 standards were issued
in final form this spring. Key tenets
include providing a greater
emphasis on depth over breadth
in science education and asking
students to apply their learning
through the practices of scientific
inquiry and engineering design.
The Thomas B. Fordham Insti-
tute, a Washington think tank,
last month gave the standards
a C based on its review, and suggested
that states are better off
looking elsewhere should they
wish to overhaul their standards.
—ERIK W. ROBELEN
FCC’s E-Rate Plan
Moves Forward
The acting chair of the Federal
Communications Commission recently
took initial steps in what is
expected to be a broad effort to remake
the federal E-rate program
and provide schools with faster online
connectivity.
Mignon L. Clyburn unveiled a
proposal last month that calls for
not only improving technology
infrastructure, but also making
changes to the program’s purchasing
and the administrative oversight,
according to a senior commission
official.
While any changes to the E-rate
would have to go through a federal
rulemaking and public-comment
process, the proposal represents
a road map for refashioning
the program, the official said.
—SEAN CAVANAGH
Reteaching an Issue
After Summer Break
Two-thirds of teachers polled in
a recent survey said they spend at
least a month reteaching students
old material when they return
from summer vacation.
The survey by the National
Summer Learning Association
asked 500 teachers how much
time they typically spend teaching
students skills they should
have learned and retained from
the previous grade. Nearly onefourth
said they devote at least
five to six weeks at the beginning
of the new school year going over
the material, while two-thirds
CORRECTIONS:
A story in the June 5, 2013, edi-
tion of Education Week misspelled
the name of Robert Fayfich, the executive
director of the Pennsylvania
Coalition of Public Charter Schools.
In the same issue, a story about
museums focusing on math misspelled
the names of J. Shipley
Newlin Jr., the director of physical
sciences, engineering, and math at
the National Museum of Mathematics,
and Justin Burgher, a 7th
grade visitor to the museum.
claimed at least three to four
weeks of reteaching.
Existing research shows summer
learning gaps disproportionately
affect low-income students.
—NORA FLEMING
Oklahoma Drops Out
Of Common Tests
Oklahoma state Superintendent
Janet Barresi signaled last week
that the state will not use the common-core
assessments being developed
by the PARCC testing consortium
and will work on its own with
a testing company to develop tests
pegged to the math and literacy
standards, the Tulsa World reports.
The news comes several months
after Alabama announced that it
was withdrawing from both state
testing consortia that have been
working, supported by more than
$350 million in federal dollars, to
develop assessments aligned with
the common-core standards.
Oklahoma may remain a member
of the consortium. It became a “governing
state” in 2011. It still can remain
a “participating state.
Including Oklahoma, PARCC, the
Partnership for Assessment of
Readiness for College and Careers,
has 21 state members, plus the District
of Columbia.
—E.W.R.
Detroit District Hopes
To Lure Back Students
In Detroit, a new budget optimistically
assumes that the school
district will be able to lure 5,000
students back to its schools after
years of declining enrollment.
The charter sector in the city has
been growing, and the Education
Achievement Authority, a staterun
district, began running a dozen
schools in the city in the 2012-13
school year. Still, the district says
that a school-level marketing campaign
will bring families back.
A district spokeswoman said that
budget projections—which did not
include any teacher layoffs in the
current iteration—may change if
fewer students return to the district.
Meanwhile, the education authority’s
spending on students will
increase this year, as it is receiving
more Title I money from the federal
government and has received $1.5
million in gifts and donations, the
Detroit Free Press reports.
—J.Z.
For links to these reports, go to
www.edweek.org/go/rr.
EARLY COLLEGE
“Early College, Early Success”
Students who attended an earlycollege
high school were more
likely than their peers to earn
a high school diploma and later
a college degree, according to
a new randomized longitudinal
study of 10 schools in the
Gates Early-College High
School Initiative.
The initiative—launched in
2002 by the Seattle-based Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation,
which also supports coverage of
the education industry and K-12
innovation at Education Week—
assists dual-enrollment schools
targeted to students from backgrounds
that are historically
underrepresented in college. Independent
researchers tracked
students who applied by lottery
to an early-college high school
from 2005-06 to 2007-08 and
compared the academic track records
of the 1,044 students who
got into the schools versus the
1,414 who didn’t.
While there were no significant
differences between the
groups in grade average or math
achievement, the early-college
students were 5 percentage
points more likely to graduate
from high school than the comparison
group—86 percent versus
81 percent.
—SARAH D. SPARKS
CHILD WELL-BEING
“Kids Count Data Book”
The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s
latest annual compendium of data
on child well-being finds nearly
one in four school-age children—
and more than one in four toddlers—lived
in poverty in 2011.
The data book, which tracks 16
LEARNING ALGEBRA
“Effectiveness of Cognitive Tutor
Algebra I at Scale”
Students who used a mathematics
program that blends online
learning and in-class instruction
in algebra significantly improved
their performance in the
subject, finds a new federally
funded study
More than 17,000 students and
375 teachers from 147 schools in
seven states participated in the
two-year study by the RAND Corp.
and Educational Testing Service.
The randomized, controlled experiment
focused on Carnegie Learning’s
Cognitive Tutor Algebra I.
While the first year showed
no significant results, in the
second year, the students who
were taught algebra through
the Carnegie Learning program
improved by 8 percentile points.
—ALYSSA MORONES
HPV VACCINES
“Reduction of Human
Papillomavirus Among Young
Women Following HPV Vaccine
Introduction in the United States”
A new study shows that the vaccine
against the types of human
papillomavirus—or HPV—that
indicators of economic, health, education,
and family support, found
mixed results for 2011:
• Two in five children lived in
families in which their housing
cost makes up more than a third
of the family budget, 3 percentage
points more than in 2005.
• 32 percent of children lived
with parents who lack steady
employment, 5 percentage points
more than in 2008.
• And 85 percent of children live
in families in which at least one
adult has a high school diploma,
up 1 percentage point from 2005.
—S.D.S.
commonly cause cervical cancer
in women has dropped by half
since the vaccine was introduced
in 2006.
The study, published last
month in the Journal of Infectious
Diseases, looked at the
prevalence of HPV infections in
girls and women before and
after the vaccine’s introduction.
It found that after the vaccine
was rolled out, the prevalence of
the HPV strain that is targeted by
the vaccine dropped 56 percent
among women ages 14 to 19.
The development of a vaccine
prompted some states to require
it for school admission, but an
initial flurry of activity has died
down, according to the National
Conference of State Legislatures.
—NIRVI SHAH
DISTRICT REFORM
“Evaluation of GE Developing
Futures in Education Initiatives”
A districtwide school improvement
program that incorporates
corporate management practices
has helped boost student
achievement in four districts
that have used it for at least four
years, according to a new report
from the Consortium for Policy
Research in Education.
The multi-university consortium
focused on Developing Futures
in Education, an initiative
launched by the Fairfield, Conn.based
GE Foundation in 2005. In
Jefferson County, Ky.; Cincinnati;
and Stamford, Conn.; student
achievement gains on end-of-year
tests in math corresponded with
the program’s introduction, the
study found. In Erie, Pa., where
GE support began later, test scores
stabilized after a prior downward
trend.
The foundation also underwrites
coverage of the implementation
of the Common Core State
Standards and the common assessments
in Education Week.
—A.M.
25-State Study Finds Charter Schools Improving
“National Charter School Study 2013”
Charter school students are outpacing their
peers in regular public school districts in reading
and performing at about the same level as traditional
public school students in mathematics,
according to a new multistate study by Stanford
University’s Center for Research on Education
Outcomes.
The study, which analyzes charter school performance
in 25 states, the District of Columbia,
and New York City, found that students attending
charter schools gain the equivalent of
an additional eight days of learning in reading
over the course of a year compared with regular
public school students. In math, charter school
students experience about the same amount
of learning gains as their regular public school
peers.
Both findings indicate an upward trend in
performance for charter school students, when
compared with the research center’s 2009 survey,
which looked at charter school student perfor-
mance in 16 states and found that those schools
lagged behind their regular public school counterparts
in both subjects.
The new and expanded study shows that a
quarter of charter schools outperformed regular
public school districts in reading, and 29 percent
did so in math, while 19 percent performed significantly
worse in reading and 31 percent performed
significantly worse in math.
The study also found academic gains in both
subjects in the 16 states studied in the 2009 report.
Researchers credit the gains to closures of
poor-performing charters and an overall drop
in performance in the regular public schools.
The Stanford researchers drew comparisons
between charter school students’ and regular
public school students’ performance through a
“virtual-control method” in which charter school
students were compared to demographically
and academically matched “virtual twins” who
attend regular public schools where the charter
students would otherwise have been enrolled.
—KATIE ASH
> > For links to these reports, go to www.edweek.org/go/rr
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Education Week - July 10, 2013

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