Education Week - October 15, 2014 - 5

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| TRANSITION |
Jim Blew has been named the new president of StudentsFirst,
the K-12 advocacy group founded by Michelle Rhee that pushes
for increased school choice and the end to seniority-based
employment decisions for teachers.
Mr. Blew has been the K-12 adviser for the Walton Family
Foundation, a major supporter of school choice, for more than a
decade. He is expected to take over at StudentsFirst within the
next few months.
A former schools chancellor for the District of Columbia, Ms. Rhee
announced earlier this year that she was leaving her position as
StudentsFirst's CEO, in order to spend more time supporting her
husband, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson.
sippi say they've collected enough
signatures to put a referendum on
the 2015 general-election ballot.
Pearl school board President
Sondra Odum said last week that
121,691 signatures of registered
voters have been certified. That's
above the threshold of more than
107,216 required for a referendum.
The referendum aims to prevent
lawmakers from underfunding public
schools, after a seven-year period
in which the state has fallen $1.53
billion short of meeting the amount
mandated by its school funding formula.
During that time, most districts
have increased local property
taxes and cut teacher jobs.
-AP
Indiana Eliminates Audits
Of Extracurricular Accounts
Indiana has stopped auditing
extracurricular accounts at
school systems because of a lack of
manpower, raising concerns that
the absence of oversight could
contribute to new problems with
accounts already prone to lax financial
controls.
The State Board of Accounts
saw its annual budget drop from
$22 million to $17.5 million and
its staff shrink by 110 as part of
cuts from 2007 to 2009. The agency
is also replacing retiring field examiners,
who had 30 to 40 years of experience,
with inexperienced hires.
The audits have proved invaluable
in identifying problems with extracurricular
accounts. For example,
the last audit in Muncie found a lack
of controls at Central High School,
whose athletic department, softball
team, track team, band, student
publications, and student council
conducted fundraisers that all resulted
in losses.
-AP
Teachers Sue Over Gag Rule
About Test Questions
New York state's largest teachers'
union claims in a federal suit
filed last week that the state education
department is violating the
free-speech rights of teachers by
barring them from speaking about
questions and answers on state
tests after students take them.
Officials of New York State
United Teachers say the ban on
talking about the content of the
tests has been accompanied by
"threats of discipline, including
dismissal, license revocation, and
criminal prosecution."
State officials have said that the
way the tests are developed-some
questions are field-tested and reused-prohibits
them from releasing
more questions. The state board
of regents has sought more money
from the legislature to change the
way the assessments are developed
so that the entire tests can be publicly
released.
-McCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
SCHOOL GRADING SYSTEMS
"Making Sure All Children Matter: Getting
School Accountability Signals Right"
Do the new "A through F" and similar accountability
systems states designed under the
Obama administration's No Child Left Behind
Act waivers do a good job of recognizing how
schools are doing when it comes to educating
poor and minority students?
Not so much, according to a report released
last week by the Education Trust, a Washington
organization that advocates for such students.
The Education Trust took a look at the A-F-type
systems in three states-Florida, Kentucky,
and Minnesota. It found that in all three cases,
school ratings are "not a powerful signal of the
performance of every individual group of kids."
For instance:
* In Florida, which rates schools on an A-F
scale, the average proficiency rate for AfricanAmerican
students in "A" schools is lower than
for white students in "C" schools.
* Similarly, Kentucky puts schools in one of
three baskets: "distinguished," "proficient,"
and "needs improvement." African-American
students in Kentucky schools earning "distinguished"
ratings have a lower math proficiency
rate than white students in schools deemed as
"needs improvement."
* And in Minnesota, schools designated "celebration
eligible" or "reward" schools did about
as well in math results for African-American
students as schools singled out for improvement
did on results for white students.
-ALYSON KLEIN
TEACHER EXPECTATIONS
"The Power of the Pygmalion Effect"
A new study from the Center for American
Progress concludes that teachers' expectations
for their students are strongly correlated with students'
graduation rates.
Conversely, the study also says that teachers
don't necessarily have high expectations for all
their students, especially poorer students and those
of color.
The study focuses on the Pygmalion effect, the
theory holding that higher expectations of a person
leads to higher performance. The opposite can also
be true: If low expectations are placed on someone,
they're more likely to perform poorly.
Drawing on the results of a long-term study by
the National Center for Education Statistics, the
CAP analysis finds that students whose high school
teachers had high expectations of them graduated
from college at three times the rate of those whose
teachers had low expectations.
Teacher expectations, according to the study,
turned out to be more predictive of students' futures
than student motivation or effort. Teachers, the study
found, were also able to predict a student's college
success with greater accuracy than parents or even
the students themselves.
However, the study also reports that secondary
teachers viewed high-poverty students as 53 percent
less likely to graduate from college than their
classmates from wealthier backgrounds. Black and
Hispanic students were also deemed 47 percent and
42 percent less likely, respectively, to graduate than
white students.
-JORDAN MOENY
EARLY-CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
"Building a Skilled Teacher Workforce"
PRINCIPAL OF THE YEAR
Jayne Ellspermann, the principal of West Port High School in Ocala, Fla.,
has been named the 2015 Principal of the Year by the National
Association of Secondary School Principals. Under her leadership, the
course-failure rate has nearly disappeared, the graduation rate has gone
up 15 percentage points, and students' participation in co-curricular
activities has risen from 10 percent to 70 percent in the past three years.
Preschool teachers are less likely to be white and
more likely to be women than teachers in elementary
and secondary school, says a report on early-education
teachers.
One-third to one-half of early educators are people
of color, according to Marcy Whitebook, the director
of the Center for the Study of Child-Care Employment
at the University of California, Berkeley.
That's a good thing, Ms. Whitebook argues in the
Study Weighs Special Training
Vs. Effectiveness for Teachers
"Is a Good Teacher a Good Teacher for All?"
Want to find a better teacher for English-language
learners? A new report suggests schools might start
by looking for teachers who add the most value for
any student, rather than limiting the search to those
with specialized training to work with ELLs.
In an online preview posted this month in the journal
Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a trio of Stanford
University researchers write about using a valueadded
measure to look at the effectiveness of teachers
both with and without bilingual certification in Florida's
Miami-Dade County public schools. They analyzed data
on teachers' effectiveness in reading and in math, with
English-learners (both current and those who had been
considered not proficient in English within the last three
years) and those fluent in English.
Separate analyses of English-learners and non-ELLs in
the same school and the same classroom were conducted
to correct for potential differences in how schools sort
students by teacher.
The researchers found that, generally, a great
teacher is great for all students, and an ineffective
teacher is ineffective for all, too. In math, for example,
nearly 6 in 10 teachers who rated in the top 20 percent
of effectiveness for students fluent in English
were also in the top quintile for English-learners.
English-learners still benefit from having a teacher
who specializes in teaching students learning a new
language. The study found teachers who were fluent
in Spanish, or had a bilingual certification, were more
effective with ELLs than those who were not as familiar
with students' native language and teaching ELLs,
all else being equal.
-SARAH D. SPARKS
report out last month, because "minority teachers
typically hold higher expectations for minority
children and are less likely to misdiagnose them
as special education students."
And she adds: "Minority teachers often are more
attuned to the challenges related to poverty, racism,
and immigration status that many children of color
face in their communities."
-LILLIAN MONGEAU
NATIVE AMERICAN STUDENTS
"The State of American Indian and Alaska Native
Education in California 2014"
Some California colleges are seeing a decline in
American Indian enrollment, and those students
continue to lag behind their peers in academic
achievement, according to a recent report.
The report from the California Indian Culture
and Sovereignty Center at California State University,
San Marcos, examines high school graduation
rates, college-enrollment rates, academic
achievement, and other data on the state's Native
American students.
It found that from 2011 to 2012, the enrollment
rates for Native American students at the state's
community colleges and universities dropped,
while the University of California system saw a
67 percent increase in enrollment of Native Americans.
Educators and officials from several state
colleges told the report's authors that declining financial
support may be among the contributors to
the overall declines in American Indian enrollment
numbers.
The authors also concluded that college readiness
and student retention may be contributing factors.
In 2012, only 41 percent of Native American 11th
graders in California scored at "proficient" or "advanced"
levels on the state English exam, compared
with nearly 70 percent of Asian students and 63 percent
of white students.
Statewide, American Indian students, who make
up less than 1 percent of California's student population,
also graduate from high school at lower rates
than their non-Native peers.
-JACKIE MADER
EDUCATION WEEK | October 15, 2014 | www.edweek.org | 5
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Education Week - October 15, 2014

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