Education Week - August 7, 2013 - 4

4 EDUCATION WEEK AUGUST 7, 2013 www.edweek.org
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NEWS IN BRIEF
Student-Loan Measure
To Drop Rates, for Now
A bipartisan bill that would
lower the costs of borrowing for
millions of students is awaiting
President Barack Obama’s signature.

The House last week gave final
congressional approval to legislation
that links student-loan interest
rates to the financial markets.
The bill would offer lower rates
for most students now, but higher
rates down the line if the economy
improves as expected.
Undergraduates this fall would
borrow at a 3.9 percent interest
rate for subsidized and unsubsidized
Stafford loans. Graduate students
would have access to loans
at 5.4 percent, and parents would
borrow at 6.4 percent. The rates
would be locked in for that year’s
loan, but each year’s loan could
be more expensive than the last.
Rates would rise as the economy
picks up and it becomes more expensive
for the government to borrow
money.
Rates on new subsidized Stafford
loans doubled to 6.8 percent July 1.
Without congressional action, rates
would have stayed at 6.8 percent.
–ASSOCIATED PRESS
Newtown, Conn., Votes
To Build New School
Residents of Newtown, Conn.,
have voted to use $750,000 in
grant money to begin construction
on a new Sandy Hook Elementary
School.
The grant money comes as an
advance from $50 million in funding
provided by the state of Connecticut.
After a quick town-hall
meeting last month, the overflow
crowd of about 200 approved the
spending by unanimous voice
vote, according to The NewsTimes
of Danbury.
The vote allows the preliminary
steps of construction—planning
and design—to move forward
before the town gets access
to the remaining $49.25 million
in October, pending another vote.
After last December’s massacre
at the elementary school left 27
dead, including 20 children, several
charities began accepting
donations for Newtown, but the
town and state have squabbled
over the distribution of those
funds.
–ROSS BRENNEMAN
Apple Found Guilty
In Price-Fixing Case
Technology giant Apple Inc.
“forcefully facilitated” a conspiracy
with other publishing companies to
fix the price of e-books and weaken
Amazon’s influence over the market,
a federal court judge has ruled.
In her decision last month in
the closely watched case, U.S.
District Judge Denise Cote cited
the statements and records of
Lawmakers in the state in recent
years have frozen teacher
salaries and dismantled a celebrated
teaching-fellowship
program that encouraged
promising high school students
to consider a teaching career.
—STEPHEN SAWCHUK
New Manager Named
For Detroit Schools
Jack Martin will become the third
emergency manager of Detroit’s
40,000-student school system.
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder made
the announcement just days before
the city filed for the largest municipal
bankruptcy in U.S. history last
month.
Mr. Martin will leave his post
as the city’s chief financial officer,
which he has held since May 2012.
Previously, he was the emergency
manager of the Highland Park,
Mich., school district.
He replaces Roy Roberts, who had
Cynthia Ramirez, right, a parent, hugs Parent Revolution organizer Doreen Diaz inside a newly
decorated classroom at Desert Trails Preparatory Academy in Adelanto, Calif., last week.
California ‘Parent Trigger’ School Opens Its Doors
The first school to come into being as a result of a
“parent trigger” law has opened its doors.
The Desert Trails Preparatory Academy, in Adel-
anto, Calif., welcomed students late last month after
a tumultuous process led by a group of parents who
said they wanted to change the leadership and direction
of what has been an academically struggling
school serving grades K-6.
The effort to create the new school roiled the community
and touched off a legal battle, in which a judge
ultimately ruled that the parents invoking the trigger
policy had met the legal standards to go forward with
their plans. The website of the former Desert Trails
Elementary School lists four other attendance options
for students for the 2013-14 school year.
Parent-trigger laws typically allow for the over-
haul of a low-performing school, and potentially the
removal of its administration and staff, if signatures
can be collected from a majority of parents of children
at the school who agree to take that step.
Backers of those plans see them as grassroots initiatives
to bring immediate and dramatic improvements
to schools that have resisted change and
shown no signs of improving soon. But detractors say
trigger policies divide communities—they cite the
Desert Trails fight as an example—and leave parents
at the will of outside operators who potentially have
little investment in producing a better school.
California was the first state to approve a parent-trigger
law, in 2010. The initial undertaking
to use the state law to redesign an academically
struggling school, in the Southern California community
of Compton, disintegrated in political and
legal turmoil.
Despite the fights on display in California, legislators
in other states have been drawn to trigger laws.
As of spring, at least 25 states had considered parenttrigger
policies, and seven of them had adopted laws
establishing the policies, according to the National
Conference of State Legislatures.
—SEAN CAVANAGH
been appointed to a one-year term
in 2011, and then another yearlong
term in 2012.
The Associated Press reports that
Mr. Martin graduated from the Detroit
schools, ran his own accounting
firm, and served in the U.S. departments
of Education and Health
and Human Services and the Selective
Service System, during three
presidents’ administrations.
–J.Z.
Layoffs, Lawsuits Vex
Chicago District
Chicago school officials announced
they have eliminated jobs
for more than 2,100 employees—
roughly 1,000 of them teachers—in
the budget-strapped district.
Those layoffs last month come
on top of the 850 teachers and staff
members who lost their jobs in
June—cuts that mostly stemmed
from the district’s closure of nearly
50 elementary schools.
officials from a number of publishing
companies who said that
Apple helped rally them to the
cause of taking on Amazon and
its comparatively low prices,
with the intent of “altering the
landscape” of the market. The
judge also cited the statements of
the late founder and CEO of Apple,
Steve Jobs, as having revealed
the company’s motives in shaping
the market.
Judge Cote said she found compelling
evidence that Apple had
encouraged other publishers to
join with the company in taking
on Amazon.
—SEAN CAVANAGH
Memphis-Area Towns
Reject Merged District
Residents of six suburbs near
Memphis, Tenn., have voted
to create their own school dis-
tricts. The votes came weeks
after the Memphis school system
and Shelby County district
had officially merged into one
140,000-student system, in one
of the largest school mergers in
the nation’s history.
The new districts would
be located within the boundaries
of the former Shelby
County school system. The
towns voted last fall to create
their own school systems,
but a federal judge invalidated
the action. A newer state
law allowed the latest votes.
Racial differences have
haunted the conversation about
the merged district.
Shelby County and Memphis
students will attend the
merged system for the 2013-14
school year, but it is now likely
that separate systems will
serve students next school year.
—JACLYN ZUBRZYCKI
N.C. Teachers to Lose
Tenure, Salary Bumps
North Carolina’s teaching
force will no longer be eligible
for tenure or to receive the pay
bump that accompanies earning
a master’s degree, reports The
Wall Street Journal.
Top-performing teachers in
the state will still be able to
receive four-year contracts, but
otherwise, continued employment
will be on one- or two-year
contracts.
Teachers still can’t be dismissed
during the middle of
a contract year unless it’s for
“cause,” established during a
hearing.
In what may be a first, North
Carolina is also doing away with
the salary premiums for teachers
who hold master’s degrees,
the newspaper reports.
Officials in the 405,000-student
district say they must address a
$1 billion deficit, a large chunk of
which is the result of rising pension
obligations.
A lawsuit against the district
challenging the closing of 10 of
the schools—which claimed the
district did not follow its own
guidelines for such closures—
was rejected by a Cook County,
Ill., judge last week. Meanwhile,
two federal lawsuits are pending
that were brought by the Chicago
Teachers’ Union challenging the
closures on behalf of parents.
.
—LESLI A. MAXWELL
Schools Help Bolster
U.S. Computer Market
While the worldwide demand for
personal computers continues to
decline, the market for those devices
has remained relatively stable
in the United States, bolstered
partly by schools’ continued reli-
Gary Friedman/Los Angeles Times/MCT

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Education Week - August 7, 2013

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