Education Week - September 30, 2015 - 1

Education Week

VOL. 35, NO. 6 * SEPTEMBER 30, 2015

edweek.org:

BRE AKING NEWS DAILY

Choice Advocates
Seek Expansion
Of Private Schools
Charters Are Model for Growth

Mark Abramson for Education Week

By Arianna Prothero

Preschoolers Liezel, 4, left, and Ryan, 4, walk the hall at a prekindergarten center in the Windsor Terrace neighborhood in Brooklyn. To
accommodate expanded enrollment, New York City places children in new pre-K centers, traditional schools, and community-based organizations.

N.Y.C. Pushes to Meet Promise of Universal Pre-K
65,000 Enroll in Second Year
Despite Some Growing Pains
By Christina A. Samuels
New York

This fall, about 65,000 4-year-olds-enough
children to make a sizable school district of
their own-started full-day prekindergarten
in New York City.
The enrollment more than triples the number of full-day pre-K seats that were available
just two years ago. Mayor Bill de Blasio campaigned on a promise of universal preschool
and convinced the state legislature to provide
$300 million to help launch it.
Ramping up so quickly turned into something akin to a political campaign, as the city
blanketed communities with advertisements
for the program, made person-to-person

CUSTOMIZING SUPPORT:
Teacher PD in the
Common-Core Era
This new special report
explores the ways
schools and districts
are reimagining
professional
development in order
to personalize training
and help teachers
adapt to instructional
change.
See the pullout section
opposite Page 12.

phone calls, went directly to local colleges to
recruit the 2,000 new teachers needed for the
effort, and sought classroom space in any location that could be made safe and appropriate
for early learning.

Managing Growth
But the city's effort has had ripple effects
that are still being managed. For example,
teachers working in district-run prekindergarten programs currently earn more than
teachers based in community programs,
though they have the same qualifications.
There's also competition for the city's 100,000
4-year-olds, with some private and community organizations feeling like they're losing
out to district-run programs.
Some of the sharpest criticism has come
from a University of California, Berkeley,
education professor, who says that only pro-

grams targeted at poor children will close
the academic gap, unlike the city's program,
which is available to all. City officials and
other early-education experts vigorously
dispute that assertion.
That criticism speaks to a deeper philosophical debate about city's efforts, said Josh Wallack, the deputy chancellor of strategy and policy at the city's education department. He said
creating a pre-K program for children from
poor families would have been akin to targeting any other regular school grade for a specific
population, which no one would suggest.
"We see pre-K as a central part of the public
education system in New York," Wallack said,
and prekindergarten is for all children.
So how does a city move from 20,000 fullday prekindergarten seats in 2013-14 to more
than 65,000?
One important first step is finding a

Parent Meetings
Get a Makeover
By Sarah D. Sparks
Two years ago, back-to-school night
at Ruth Hill Elementary School
looked like most open houses.
"You would come to your teacher's
class, meet the teacher, look at what's
on the walls, see what's in the SOAR
[behavior rules] report, and that's about
it," said Lucia Woods, Ruth Hill's counselor. "That was our traditional communication method for years and years."
That was before the Newnan, Ga.,
school was tapped in 2014-15 as one

As large-scale private-school-choice programs
mature in more than two dozen states, a persistent question dogging the private school sector is
whether it will have the resources and political
backing to expand in the same way that charter
schools have.
Private school vouchers and charter schools
were among the game-changing school choice
laws that hit U.S. public education systems in
the early 1990s. But charters have not only
grown at a dramatically faster pace than vouchers, they have helped contribute to the closing of
many urban Roman Catholic schools-the backbone of private-school-choice initiatives.
But now, as new private-school-choice programs continue to emerge-most prominently
in Nevada, where all public school students
are eligible to participate-some advocates are
pushing the private-school-choice movement
to look to its charter brethren for strategies
on how to recruit talent, fund new schools, and
ultimately, survive.
"How do we create the types of private schools
that can support poor children?" said Howard
Fuller, a longtime school choice advocate who
was the superintendent of the Milwaukee school
district from 1991-95 when the nation's first
PAGE 11 >

K-12 Funding Fights
Roil State Landscape
At School Year's Start
By Andrew Ujifusa

of 10 schools in the state to pilot academic parent-teacher teams, a model
developed by WestEd researcher
Maria C. Paredes five years ago to
build more goal-focused, academically oriented relationships among
teachers and parents, and among the
parents themselves.
Academic parent-teacher teams
are one way educators are starting to
reimagine that autumn classic, the
parent-teacher conference.
In spite of emerging online and textmessaging communication methods,
the general meeting is still the most
common-and for some parents, the
only-contact with teachers during
the year, and more school and district

A variety of legislative disputes, court rulings,
and a budget fight that has been stalled in noman's land for months loom large for education
finance around the country as the new school
year gets underway.
Perhaps the most turmoil for schools is taking
place in Pennsylvania, where schools were operating in the 2014-15 academic year without any
state funding due to an ongoing budget stalemate. But in other states, long-running legal
battles over K-12 spending have either reached
their conclusion or are getting close to the
finish line.
And in a relatively quiet year for state elections, dueling ballot initiatives in Mississippi
could provide some of the biggest headlines in
a state that typically ranks near the bottom in
per-pupil expenditures.
In Washington state, the ongoing dispute
over school spending has more than a theoretical cost.
Although the state increased K-12 spending by $1.3 billion for the 2015-17 biennial
budget, last month the state's supreme court
announced it was fining the state $100,000
until it satisfied the court's 2012 ruling in the
McCleary v. Washington case and further in-

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Education Week - September 30, 2015

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