Education Week - October 5, 2016 - 5

oldest public school didn't sufficiently investigate racially charged
incidents and failed to address racial hostility, a federal civil rights
probe concluded last week.
U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said
the failure of Boston Latin School
administrators to adequately respond to a 2014 incident in which
a male student was accused of
using a racial slur and threatening to "lynch" a black female classmate while holding an electric cord
amounted to a violation of Title IV
of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The school's response to other allegations of racial hostility didn't rise
to the level of civil rights violations
but demonstrated that officials "paid
insufficient attention to issues of race,
the concerns of students of color, and
the school's racial climate in recent
years," Ortiz's office concluded.
Boston public schools Superintendent Tommy Chang said the district
has entered an agreement with
Ortiz's office to ensure racial-discrimination complaints are handled
better at Boston Latin, a prestigious
exam school founded in 1635.
-AP

Moody's Pushes Down
Chicago's Credit Rating
Moody's Investors Service pushed
the debt of the Chicago public
schools further into junk territory
on the same day last week the district's teachers threatened to strike.
In downgrading its debt from B2
to B3, Moody's called the district's
financial condition "precarious" and
"acute." The new rating is one notch

above the C level Moody's describes
as "speculative (and) of poor standing, and are subject to very high
credit risk."
Moody's said its revised rating "reflects the expectation that the district's credit pressures will intensify
in the current fiscal year."
-AP

No Lockers for Students
In New School Buildings
A middle school under construction in Horry County, S.C., will have
48 classrooms, a gym, and a cafeteria but no lockers.
Robert Ferris, the CEO of First Floor
K-12 Solutions in Raleigh, N.C., says
most schools the company is designing no longer have lockers. The firm is
building five schools in the county.
School board member Holly Heniford said lockers are not as much in
demand because with computers,
students don't have to lug the books
they had to carry in years past. All
middle school students in Horry
County get iPads.
-AP

Oregon District to Allow
Satanic After-School Club
The Portland, Ore., chapter of the
Satanic Temple has been approved to
bring an after-school program to an
elementary school in the city.
Finn Rezz, one of the group's leaders, says the program, which will
begin Oct. 19 at Sacramento Elementary School, focuses "on science
and rational thinking," and it will
promote "benevolence and empathy
for everybody."

named, 130,000-student urban district in the South
from the 1999-2000 to 2009-2010 school years.
Of the 100 to 200 teachers who were hired each year
after the first day of school, most went to schools that
were lower-performing, served mostly African-American
students, and had higher student-absenteeism rates.
The late hires were more apt to be male and AfricanAmerican, older, and to have entered the profession by
an alternative-preparation route. They were less likely
to have a master's degree or teaching experience.
The students with late-hire teachers paid a price:
They fell two months behind their peers whose teachers were hired over the summer.
The study was published in the fall issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. -BRENDA IASEVOLI
ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS
"To Be or Not to Be EL: An Examination of the Impact of
Classifying Students as English-Learners"
A University of Oregon study has found that designating early-elementary students who are close to
being proficient in English as English-language learners may actually do more harm than good.
Ilana Umansky, an assistant professor in the
university's college of education, argues that kindergartners who score at or just above the threshold
for ELL services are often indistinguishable from
those who score just below. However, students on the
cusp who are identified as English-learners end up
scoring significantly lower on math and English/language arts tests in grades 2-10, Umansky's research
determines.
The author blames the students' classification as
English-learners, and the diminished teacher expectations and social stigma tied to that status, for the

| TRANSITIONS |
Michael Martirano, the state
schools superintendent in West
Virginia, will resign his post
come June 30 to move closer to
his family in Maryland.
He was named schools chief
in September 2014.
A former science teacher,
Martirano previously worked
in a number of districts in Maryland, including as
the superintendent of the St. Mary's County school
system.

The Satanic Temple has been targeting schools that have a Good News
Club, which is put on by the Child
Evangelism Fellowship, "a Biblecentered organization composed of
born-again believers whose purpose
is to evangelize boys and girls with
the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ
and to establish (disciple) them in the
Word of God and in a local church for
Christian living."
-AP

CORRECTION
An article in the Sept. 28, 2016,
special issue of Education Week on
evidence standards under the Every
Student Succeeds Act misspelled the
name of Vivian Tseng, the vice president of the William T. Grant Foundation. The article also should have said
that Chiefs for Change has created an
ESSA working group of 15 experimentally minded state education leaders.

lower test scores.
The study is based on data from a large urban district in California.
-COREY MITCHELL
TEACHER QUALITY
"Evidence of Positive Spillovers From More Effective
Colleagues"
When an effective teacher joins a grade-level teaching team, student learning improves across the board
as other teachers in the grade raise their game, finds
a study of Miami-Dade County, Fla., schools.
Researchers from the University of Washington,
Stanford University, and Vanderbilt University examined teacher "spillover" effects using more than
a decade of administrative data on math teachers
in grades 3-8 and their students' standardized-test
scores in the Miami district.
Novice teachers were excluded from the analysis,
so the researchers could compare teachers already in
the school with those who were new to it but had previously taught the same grade level, based on their
previous students' test scores.
The researchers found strong evidence of positive
spillover effects: If a transfer teacher joined a gradelevel team and was one standard deviation more effective than an incumbent teacher, the students in
the incumbent teacher's class also saw an increase in
math scores, the data analysis found.
But the opposite did not hold true: When an ineffective teacher joined the team, it did not disadvantage
the incumbent teachers' students.
Therefore, mixing teachers with diverse performance levels in the same grade levels can boost
student achievement, the researchers conclude.

Veronica Garcia, a former
secretary of education in
New Mexico, has been named
superintendent of the Santa Fe
district.
She served as education
secretary under former Gov.
Bill Richardson before leading
the advocacy group New
Mexico Voices for Children.
Garcia also has worked as a teacher and as an
administrator in the Albuquerque district.

Poll: Dual Enrollment Vs. College-Ready
"Dual Credit: A Strategy for Accelerating Educational Readiness,
Progress, and Completion"
Students are flocking to dual-enrollment programs, hoping they'll
get a bigger academic challenge and maybe sock away some college
credits, too. But the superintendents overseeing those programs
aren't universally convinced that earning college credit means students are ready for college.
That's one of the findings of a new survey of school superintendents. Released last week, the survey was conducted in March by
Hobsons, which makes the Naviance career-and-college-exploration
program, and AASA, the School Superintendents Association. Its
aim was to find out how superintendents are using dual-enrollment
programs in their districts.
While nearly three-quarters of the 424 superintendents who responded to the survey "agreed" or "strongly agreed" that successful
completion of a dual-credit course signifies college readiness, almost
one quarter said they "disagreed" or were "neutral" on that statement.
Among those who answered neutral, some respondents made the
point that while completing a course for college credit might signify
intellectual readiness for college, it doesn't necessarily mean students
have the emotional maturity necessary for college, according to a
summary of the survey.
Another section of the survey explores the challenges and barriers
to implementing dual-credit programs. Many superintendents cited
costs for districts, colleges, students, or families as a problem. But
they said the biggest challenge was finding qualified teachers for the
courses, a struggle that's cast shadows over some programs.
Eighty-four percent of the superintendents reported that dual-enrollment programs were part of their strategic plans, and 95 percent reported that their districts offer the programs.
-CATHERINE GEWERTZ

DOES COMPLETION OF A DUAL-CREDIT COURSE SIGNIFY
COLLEGE READINESS? SUPERINTENDENTS WEIGH IN
No Response

2.0

Disagree

Strongly
Disagree

1.0

4.4

Strongly
Agree

19.0

Agree

50.7%
Neutral

22.9
SOURCE: Hobsons and AASA,
the School Superintendents
Association

-MADELINE WILL

EDUCATION WEEK | October 5, 2016 | www.edweek.org | 5

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Education Week - October 5, 2016

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