Education Week - October 14, 2015 - 4

NEWS IN BRIEF
White House Initiative
To Target Absenteeism
The Obama administration last
week launched an initiative aimed
at reducing chronic absenteeism in
public schools.
The effort, Every Student, Every
Day, will bring together officials from
the White House and the U.S. departments of Education, Health and
Human Services, Housing and Urban
Development, and Justice.
Among its features will be the firstever school-level data on all students
who missed at least 15 days of school
during the 2013-14 school year. The
information will come from the latest
Civil Rights Data Collection, set to be
released in the spring, and a national
summit will follow the release of
the data.
-EVIE BLAD

A new Harvard University initiative, Transforming Teaching, will
oversee projects to boost the coherence of the nation's systems for scaling up great teaching.
The impetus behind the network
is what a white paper, released by
the group last week, calls the United
States' "nonsystem" for supporting
high-quality teaching. It argues, for
instance, that there is virtually no
coherent research-and-development
system for studying teaching and
learning, and that there's a drastic
mismatch between what teachers
learn in their preparation programs
and in subsequent professional development.
Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers and Steven Farr of Teach For America are
among the many who have signed on
to the effort.
-STEPHEN SAWCHUK

Harry Hamburg/AP

Harvard Network to Tackle
Teaching-Quality 'Nonsystem'

AFTER THE STORM
Boys play with surfboards
in the streets of Carolina
Beach, N.C. Schools
closed last week because
of the heavy rainstorms
that ravaged the
Carolinas, killing
at least 19 people
and destroying
millions of dollars
in property.

In Wake of Errors, Chicago
Lowers Graduation Rate
Chicago public school officials have
slightly lowered the district's touted
graduation rate after statistical errors were discovered.
The district announced this
month that the rate was actu-

ally 66.3 percent, not 69.4 percent.
It was cut roughly 3 percentage
points in every academic year back
to 2011.
The changes follow a district
inspector general report and an
investigation by Chicago's WBEZ
public-radio station and the Better
Government Association.
District schools CEO Forrest Claypool deemed it a "relatively minor
modification" and said the overall
trend still shows the rate going up.
-ASSOCIATED PRESS

N.J. Officials Loosen Grip
On State-Controlled District
The New Jersey board of education has voted unanimously to return more control of Jersey City's
public school system to the local
school board after more than a quarter-century of state oversight.
Personnel and operations departments will go back to the local board,
which previously regained control of
school governance and finance.
The state board also agreed to form

California Dismisses Exit Exam for Students Back to 2003-04
A bill signed last week by Gov. Jerry Brown lets
tens of thousands of California students graduate
even though they never passed the state's high school
exit exam.
The state has no clear fix yet on the precise number
of students affected. But news media reports put the
figure around 32,000.
About 5,000 students were unable to graduate last
year because the state decided to suspend the testing
contract, depriving seniors who hadn't yet passed the
test of their last opportunity to take it.
Lawmakers passed emergency legislation allowing seniors in the class of 2015 to earn diplomas
without the exam since the state had caused the
problem.
Days after that bill was signed, lawmakers amended
a related measure to significantly expand its reach.
The new measure requires districts and the state to
grant a diploma to any student who completed grade
12 in the 2003-04 school year or later and has met all

4 | EDUCATION WEEK | October 14, 2015 | www.edweek.org

applicable graduation requirements other than passing the exit exam-until July 31, 2018.
Georgia and South Carolina have made similar
moves, enacting laws that award diplomas retroactively to students who didn't pass their exit exams.
Robert Oakes, a spokesman for California Sen.
Carol Liu, the bill's sponsor, said she made the legislation retroactive because her office received calls
from districts that had been getting inquiries from
students who had failed-or never taken-the exam
years ago.
"If someone met all the requirements for a diploma
[except the exit exam], and up to 11 years later, says, 'I
want to take the next step in my life, join the military,
get a professional certification, go to college; I want to
pass the exit exam,' but it doesn't exist anymore, why
should you prevent someone who wants to succeed
from doing that?" Oakes said. "For Carol, it was a matter of fairness. She wants people to succeed."
-CATHERINE GEWERTZ

a working group to determine how
to return authority over the remaining area-instruction and programming-to the 29,000-student district.
The state seized control of Jersey
City schools in 1989, citing "total educational failure." It later took over
the Newark and Paterson schools
for similar failures.
-COREY MITCHELL

Pennsylvania Audit Slams
State Education Department
Pennsylvania's auditor general last week assailed the state
education department as slow to
change, beset by apathy, and mired
in what he called "bureaucratic ineptness."
In an 81-page report summary,
Eugene DePasquale slammed the
department for doing little or nothing to help improve 561 schools
it identified as low-performing
two years ago, not updating its
master education plan in 16 years,
and letting a former education secretary collect a $140,000 consulting
paycheck for essentially doing no
work.
A department spokeswoman said
officials had reviewed the findings
and would be taking steps to implement corrections. -TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE

Ohio Probe Reveals Fraud
In Tutoring Program
Private tutors faked attendance
at their sessions for hundreds of Columbus, Ohio, students, bilking taxpayers out of more than $800,000,
according to a state audit of a nowhalted federal program.
State Auditor Dave Yost revealed
the findings of a four-year investigation into tutoring fraud last week.
Investigators found 382 students didn't attend all the tutoring
claimed, and 21 providers billed and
received payment for tutoring after
students had already withdrawn
from schools. Columbus schools
received more than $3.7 million
in federal grants before the state

opted out of the Supplemental Educational Services program, in part
because of widespread fraud. -TNS

National Principal of Year
Goes to R.I. School Leader
Alan Tenreiro, a Rhode Island high
school principal, has been selected as
the 2016 National Principal of the
Year by the National Association of
Secondary School Principals.
Under Tenreiro's leadership, Cumberland High School in Cumberland, R.I., has doubled its Advanced
Placement offerings and expanded
the number of STEM courses. The
fourth-year principal also established a system that allows for
clearer teacher-student feedback,
more-uniform expectations for students, and a focus on what students
have learned, not just what they've
done, according to the NASSP.
Tenreiro previously worked as
a social studies teacher and assistant principal in Rhode Island. He
is the co-founder and moderator of
#edchatri, a weekly Sunday-night
Twitter chat in which teachers and
administrators discuss education
trends and developments in Rhode
Island and across the nation.
-C.M.

Ex-Smarter Balanced Chief
Joins NAEP Governing Board
Joe Willhoft, who led the Smarter
Balanced Assessment Consortium,
has joined the panel that sets policy
and content for the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Also appointed last week to the National Assessment Governing Board
are: Alberto Carvalho, the superintendent of the Miami-Dade County,
Fla., district; Carol Jago, the associate director of the California Reading
and Literature Project at the University of California, Los Angeles; and
Linda Rosen, the CEO of Change the
Equation, which advocates strong science, math, and technology preparation for K-12 students.
Three others were reappointed to

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Education Week - October 14, 2015

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