Education Week - October 2, 2013 - 12

BLOGS www.edweek.org/go/blogs
Students Quickly Outwit iPad Security
| DIGITAL EDUCATION_News | Hundreds of teenagers in the 7,500-student
Center Grove, Ind., school district circumvented the security mechanisms
on district-issued iPads within hours of receiving them, according to a
report last week in the Daily Journal.
Between 300 and 400 students found ways to reprogram the iPads so
they could download games and apps for social media sites, according to
the report, which quoted Center Grove officials as attributing the problem
to their security program not being able to handle the number of devices—
more than 2,000—that were distributed.
Districts are also facing increasing threats from outside hackers.
Keith Krueger, the CEO for the Consortium for School Networking, said
such problems are increasingly common as districts deploy a growing
number of devices.
The best strategy, Mr. Krueger said, is to combine the best possible
security filters and other technology measures with a comprehensive
acceptable-use policy and a commitment to enforcement.
“It’s not surprising that a school district would have some breaches,” he
said. “The question is how do you leverage it into a teachable moment?”
—BENJAMIN HEROLD
Ravitch’sReign of Error Hits Bookstores
| BOOKMARKS_News | Diane Ravitch, the scholar and education pundit,
published a new book last month that is garnering a range of responses
from the education community and beyond. Reign of Error: The Hoax of the
Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools is a
critical look at the state of education reform and how federal policies and
trends of the past decade have encroached on the public nature of public
schools, thus damaging them.
The book is a follow-up to The Death and Life of the Great American
School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (Basic
Books, 2010).
A number of bloggers on Huffington Post, including two teachers, mostly
offered favorable reviews. UC-Berkeley’s David L. Kirp mentioned the book
favorably in an essay he wrote for Slate, but suggested that Ms. Ravitch
soft-pedals some problems, including slipping U.S. college-graduation rates
and the difficulty some districts experience trying to fire incompetent
teachers.
Ms. Ravitch’s book tour has also resulted in a debate of sorts with her
nemesis, Michelle Rhee, over public school troubles in Philadelphia.
Edweek.org opinion bloggers have also joined the conversation: Anthony
Cody, a co-founder with Ms. Ravitch of the Network for Public Education,
writes: “What Daniel Ellsberg was to the Vietnam War, Ravitch has
become to the battle raging over public education—a truth-teller with the
knowledge that comes from decades on the inside of the education ‘reform’
movement.”
In contrast, Sam Chaltain—who blogs at Of, By, For: In Search of the
Civic Mission of K-12 Schools—sees Ms. Ravitch as more divisive than
inspiring. While recognizing the need for public figures and voices to act
as lightning rods in education, Mr. Chaltain concludes, “Reign of Error
is a must-read book, but its research is diminished by its reductive
characterizations of how we see, think, and believe.”
Ms. Ravitch co-authored the edweek.org opinion blog Bridging
Differences with Deborah Meier from 2007 to 2012.
Online Petitions Support School Causes
| K-12 PARENTS AND THE PUBLIC_News | Parents passionate about schoolrelated
issues—from the prohibition of dreadlocks to school name
changes—have been turning to online petitions recently to gain public
support and media attention for their causes.
Some of the petitions on Change.org that generated the most buzz are:
• A 7-year-old Tulsa, Okla., girl was sent home from school because her
dreadlocks violated the private school’s dress code. Her father’s petition to
allow her to keep her hairstyle and return to class received 1,871 signatures.
• A Jacksonville, Fla., father is trying to gain support to pressure the
Duval County district to change the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest High
School. Forrest was a founding member of the Ku Klux Klan. The petition is
picking up steam with some 86,000 signatures.
• More than 90,000 people are supporting a petition to reinstate a
Catholic high school English teacher who was fired from his job in
Glendora, Calif. Ken Bencomo lost his job after a feature article in a local
newspaper about his marriage to his longtime same-sex partner.
Change.org is a petition platform that allows people around the world
to seek support for a range of issues. According to the nonprofit, there are
more than 45 million Change.org users in 196 countries.
With up to 1,000 new petitions launched each day, roughly 25,000
a month, education-related campaigns continue to be among the
most popular, and most successful, on Change.org, a spokesman said.
—KARLA SCOON REID
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12 | EDUCATION WEEK | October 2, 2013 | www.edweek.org
Florida Curtails Role in Testing Coalition
Action raises questions about reach of common assessments
By Andrew Ujifusa
Florida’s recent decision to sharply
curtail its role in a state consortium
developing assessments aligned with
the Common Core State Standards
has called into question the prospects
for the tests and whether more states
will decide to chart their own course.
Republican Gov. Rick Scott last
week served notice that Florida
would leave the Partnership for Assessment
of Readiness for College
and Careers (which includes 19
states and the District of Columbia)
and relinquish its role as the financial
representative for the consortium,
while simultaneously initiating
a new search for common-core
assessments aside from the ones
PARCC is developing.
In a Sept. 23 letter to U.S. Secretary
of Education Arne Duncan, Gov.
Scott expressed fundamental concerns
about the federal government’s
involvement in the consortium.
“Unfortunately today, PARCC has
become a primary entry point for
the involvement of the federal government
in many of these state and
local decisions,” he wrote. The governor,
however, did not highlight in
this letter any specific examples of
federal intrusion into state schools
through PARCC.
Cost, Usefulness
—CATHERINE A. CARDNO
Gov. Scott also cited concerns expressed
over the summer by two Republican
state lawmakers, Florida
state Senate President Don Gaetz
and Speaker of the House Will
Weatherford, about the PARCC tests,
including their cost and the usefulness
of the results for teachers.
Officials from PARCC have said
these concerns are not based on accurate
information. A cost analysis
by the think tank Education Sector
determined that PARCC’s tests would
save Florida money on assessments.
In a separate letter to the state
board of education, Gov. Scott
seemed to signal tepid support for
the common core.
The words and actions from Gov.
Scott last week are “going to have
outsized significance, and it’s going
to sting more” for common-core advocates
than if the same thing had
happened in another state, said
Frederick M. Hess, who oversees education
policy studies at the American
Enterprise Institute, a Washington
think tank. That’s because
Florida is home to former Gov. Jeb
Bush, a high-profile Republican and
a vocal common-core champion.
But supporters of PARCC say that
work on the new assessments will go
on unhindered. In fact, Florida has
not been actively involved in PARCC
for months, said Massachusetts
education Commissioner Mitchell
“
deciding on a common-core assessment
in March of 2014, and she said
Mr. Scott’s announcement did not
change that timeline.
“We’ll be examining all options,”
Ms. Stewart said.
Winning Strategy?
Gov. Scott is clearly “playing to
his base” and trying to quell political
opposition to the common core
itself among conservatives with his
decision about PARCC, said Michael J.
Petrilli, the executive vice president
at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute,
a Washington-based think tank that
supports the standards.
But he argued that officials who
Unfortunately today,
PARCC has become
a primary entry point
for the involvement
of the federal
government in many
of these state
and local decisions.”
GOV. RICK SCOTT
D. Chester, the chairman of PARCC’s
governing board.
“I’ve believed all along that no
single state will make or break the
future of PARCC,” he said.
There was some initial confusion
last week about whether Florida was
formally leaving PARCC altogether. Although
Gov. Scott said publicly that
the state was withdrawing, the state
is technically remaining a member
of PARCC’s governing board (although
not as the fiscal agent) pending its
final decision about which assessments
to use for the common core,
said Florida department of education
spokesman Joe Follick.
In September, Florida Commissioner
of Education Pam Stewart
and board members had discussed
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try to distance themselves from
certain policies related to the standards,
while keeping the common
core itself in place, may not appease
the common core’s conservative critics,
citing Georgia as an example.
In August, after that state had left
PARCC, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, a
Republican, ordered the state school
board to conduct a review of the common
core in response to opponents to
the standards in the state who had
raised concerns about the “reading
exemplars” (essentially recommended
texts) that accompany the standards.
“The politics are terrible on the
right,” Mr. Petrilli said.
On the common core itself, Gov.
Scott argued in a separate letter last
week to Gary Chartrand, the president
of the Florida board of education,
that what people needed to
know is “not whether our leaders are
‘for Common Core’ or ‘against Common
Core,’” but whether the state
had the “highest standards” while
rejecting federal intrusion.
This year, both Georgia and Indiana
have announced their departures
from PARCC. Oklahoma has
decided not to use the PARCC assessments,
but it has not left the group,
and Pennsylvania has said it will not
use tests from PARCC or Smarter Balanced,
the other multistate commoncore
testing group, though it hasn’t
left either group.
Associate Editor Catherine Gewertz
contributed to this article.
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Education Week - October 2, 2013

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