Education Week - August 5, 2015 - 16

GOVERNMENT & POLITICS

New Federal Tool Maps Attendance Boundaries By School
Resource may help smooth
highly contentious process

LOOKING AT SCHOOL
ENROLLMENT ZONES:
WHO'S LEFT OUT?

By Sarah D. Sparks
Forget the common core or teacher salaries.
Attendance zones may be the education topic
most guaranteed to launch a debate in any
school district in the country.
More than 4 out of 5 U.S. students attend the
schools to which they were assigned by neighborhood. Many districts make at least some
attendance-zone changes every few years.
"Every time you make a boundary change,
someone is going to get angry," said Tom
C. Marshall, a Leesburg, Va., real estate
agent. He served on the school board for the
now-70,000-student Loudoun County district
from 2007-11, a time when it gained about
10,000 students in four years. "A lot of people
don't understand the reasons a boundary is
drawn. ... They think somebody just makes a
decision behind closed doors."

Added Transparency
Understanding who goes to which area
school and why may soon become a lot easier
for education officials and community members
alike. The U.S. Department of Education plans
to release the first nationwide map of school attendance boundaries this summer. Starting in
November, school districts will be able to use an
online tool to draw or upload their own maps
and download or tweak existing maps.

Actual zones

School attendance boundaries
often do not include students only
from the closest neighborhoods,
but increasingly complex borders
can leave out groups of students
and make individual schools
less diverse. One recent study
compares the actual attendance
areas (left) of Loudoun County, Va.,
a rapidly growing outer suburb of
Washington, with a depiction of
how those boundaries would look
without gerrymandering.

Model zones

SOURCE: Meredith Richards

In the process, districts will create the most
detailed picture yet of how American schools
define their communities. Education officials
will also have tools to plan new schools and
transportation routes, and to identify equity
problems across a district. In Georgia, for example, state education officials are considering using the data to track where foster children attend school. This could help the state
provide more support for such students.
"I think there are very practical reasons

schools want to be able to show where their
boundaries are," like qualifying for federal or
state programs or relief after a disaster, said
Meredith P. Richards, an assistant professor
in education policy at Southern Methodist
University in Dallas.
"It is very difficult to create a [geographicinformation system] map from scratch," said
Ms. Richards, who studies geographic issues
in education. "Having a tool that will allow
them to do this is fantastic."

The new data can also help researchers and
school leaders pinpoint equity problems in districts. Gerrymandering-the tactic by which
state legislatures configure electoral maps to
create safe seats for a particular party-can
be common in schools, too.
"People are talking so much about school
choice, but the most common form of school
choice is still residential choice," said
Ms. Richards. "Everybody's concerned
about political gerrymandering, but nobody

States in Holding Pattern on English-Learner Waiver Requests
By Alyson Klein
The U.S. Department of Education may have given Florida unprecedented flexibility when it comes to
English-language learners and accountability, but so far, other states
haven't been able to get similar leeway, even though they have tried.
Federal officials last year agreed to
Florida's request to give its ELL students two years in a U.S. school before
factoring in achievement on annual
English/language arts and mathematics tests into school grades under the
No Child Left Behind Act.

Florida's Precedent
As part of its waiver from some
requirements of the law, Florida
had sought the two-year testing
timeline, a departure from current
law, which calls for ELLs' test scores
to be included for accountability
purposes after they have been enrolled in U.S. schools for at least one
year. Florida's win came only after
the state spent months cajoling the
Education Department and even
threatening legal action.
Now, at least seven other states-
including New York, Ohio, Rhode
Island, Connecticut, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Delaware-have
asked for new leeway in testing Eng-

lish-learners and holding schools accountable for the results.
But, so far, Delaware, New York,
and Rhode Island have been denied
requests for flexibility on ELL testing
and accountability. And Massachusetts, which also asked for flexibility
when it comes to testing of ELLs, was
approved for only part of its request.
Connecticut, Colorado, and Ohio are
still waiting for their renewal requests
to be approved. Still, it seems like a
long shot that the department will
grant the pending requests, given that
it's already turned down similar asks
from three other states.
Delaware, for instance, had wanted
to make gradual changes to when
"recently arrived" students would be
counted for accountability purposes
and when they would take tests.
Under the state's proposed plan, tests
and accountability would be phased in
until an English-learner had enrolled
in school in the United States for four
years, at which point that student's
growth and achievement would count
the same as that of any other student.
But Delaware was told that its pitch
wasn't consistent with the waivers,
which don't specifically touch on this
issue, and that the department wasn't
considering further flexibility on English-learner accountability right now.
At the department's suggestion, Delaware decided to take the ELL request

16 | EDUCATION WEEK | August 5, 2015 | www.edweek.org

out of its waiver-renewal application.
The department is looking at each
state's request for flexibility on English-learner testing and accountability on a case-by-case basis, said Dorie
Nolt, a spokeswoman for the department. Still, there are general parameters: Any approach a state takes must
ensure that recently-arrived ELLs get
the resources, instruction, and interventions they need to make progress
in learning English and mastering
content standards.

Timeliness a Concern
The National Council of La Raza, a
civil rights organization in Washington focused on Hispanic-Americans, is
worried that if states wait a long time
to fully count ELLs in their accountability systems- say, four years, as
under Delaware's plan-those students will get swept under the rug.
"A one-year exemption [on accountability] is an absolute hard
line for us," said Leticia Bustillos,
the associate director of the education policy project at the organization. And it doesn't sound like NCLR
officials are thrilled that the Obama
administration gave Florida an exemption in the first place. "It is concerning that one state was given a
two-year exemption. We run the risk
of not having enough timely infor-

mation for us to take action for our
students."
As Congress is working on a rewrite
of the NCLB law, waivers could form an
important precedent, Ms. Bustillos
added.
"Waivers are the law of the land
until things change," she said. "And
if the door for one state is open that
definitely opens the door for others."
The states that were already rejected for English-learner testing
flexibility were asking for a range of
changes. Rhode Island, for instance,
wanted a one-year delay in testing of
English-learners in mathematics-
the state already has one for the testing of those students in reading.
And New York wanted to exempt
English-learners who have been enrolled in school in this country for less
than two years from having to take
state reading tests. Instead, the state
wanted to develop a performance
index for students who are new arrivals, and give them the state's Englishlanguage-proficiency test instead for
accountability purposes.

on tests during students' second year
in schools in the country. But New
York's proposal was to temporarily
exclude of these students.
"We can't afford to let recently arrived English-learners slip through
the cracks; schools should be held accountable for their learning," said Ms.
Nolt, of the Education Department.

Still Waiting

Among the three proposals that are
technically still on the table, Colorado
and Connecticut want to wait to count
English-learners for accountability
purposes until they've been enrolled
in U.S. schools for at least two years.
Ohio is seeking similar flexibility with caveats. It wants to
exempt newly arrived Englishlearners from being considered for
accountability purposes until they
have completed at least two years
of schooling in the U.S. Students
would still need to take state tests,
however. And in a shift for the state,
first-year English-learners would
have to take the English Language
Arts tests. Their results wouldn't
Growth or Proficiency
count for accountability purposes,
It's worth noting that those re- but it would help provide a basequests differ somewhat from Flori- line so that schools could see how
da's. The Sunshine State was given much those students had grown beapproval to substitute growth on tween their first and second years
reading assessments for proficiency of American schooling.

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Education Week - August 5, 2015

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