Education Week - November 13, 2019 - 6

Everybody Supports 'Equity,'
But How Do They Define It?

WHAT THE

RESEARCH
SAYS

On K-12 funding, ESSA may fuel a long-running debate

Race of Gentrifying Families
Affects School Enrollment
"Gentrification, Geography, and the Declining Enrollment of
Neighborhood Schools"

Gentrification in the past decade is linked with declining
enrollment in neighborhood schools-but the race of
new families moving into the neighborhood changes the
equation, finds a study in the journal Urban Education.
In 2000, roughly 20 percent of urban schools served
neighborhoods with concentrated poverty, the study found.
Of those schools, about 1 in 5 gentrified by 2014, defined as
an influx of college-educated middle or upper-middle class
families and community reinvestment.
Overall, schools in gentrified neighborhoods serve 32,000
fewer students than similar schools in nongentrified areas.
But, while the decline in enrollment was sharpest when the
gentrifying families were predominantly or entirely white,
schools saw an increase in the number of black students
enrolled when the gentrification was driven by nonwhite
families.
-Christina A. Samuels

Mixed Computer Literacy Among
Teachers Worldwide
"International Computer and Information Literacy Study 2018"

Worldwide, teachers may struggle to help students learn
computer skills, finds a study of computer literacy rates
across a dozen countries.
The United States performed about average on the test
by the International Association for the Evaluation of
Educational Achievement, but achievement levels varied
more within than between nations. The study tested
students' ability to do things like edit digital photographs,
create a database, search for relevant information on the
internet, or judge whether to trust what they found.
Teachers weren't all proficient at some computer-literacy
skills. While 95 percent said they were comfortable using
the internet to find resources, just 57 percent were confident
in using digital tools to collaborate online.
-Alyson Klein

By Daarel Burnette II
Pursuing equity-however it's defined-has become a
rallying cry for K-12 educators and advocates alike. More than
half of America's 50 million students today are nonwhite, and
a growing number of them are English-language learners or
students with special needs. There are widespread and welldocumented disparities between the educational needs of
these student groups and their classroom peers.
Policymakers, researchers, district administrators,
and teachers have taken it upon themselves to push
for "equity" between student groups. At professional
conferences, in school posters, at administrative headquarters, and in school board's vision statements, equity
usually is understood to eradicate those disparities or
make "equal" academic outcomes between all student
groups. It has also come to mean equal access to gifted
programming, high-quality teachers, and high-quality
curriculum.
But in the purely fiscal world, the word "equity" has a
much muddier, complicated-and legally fraught-definition. And the issue is likely to come under renewed scrutiny
with the Every Student Succeeds Act's new requirement
for public release of school-by-school spending data as an
element of states' school report cards.
Many states pledge in their constitutions to provide an
"equitable" education, while rarely-if ever-spelling out
exactly what that means. (To complicate things even more,
many states also pledge to provide an "adequate" education, leaving that similarly murky as well.)
As a result, policymakers and the courts have long struggled to define equitable spending, most often focusing on
spending imbalances between districts.

Teachers and students differ on how much creative
learning goes on in class, finds a Gallup study. While
52 percent of teachers said students often work on
projects with real-world applications, 26 percent of
students agreed.
Students

Teachers

Students memorize
facts and definitions

58%

Students practice what
they've learned using
exercises and repetition

Students learn how to do
well on standardized tests

Students discuss topics
that have no right or wrong
answer
Students work on projects
or assignments that can be
used in the real world
Students decide how to
show what they've learned

SOURCE: Gallup, "Creativity in Learning"

6 | EDUCATION WEEK | November 13, 2019 | www.edweek.org

Equity Among Districts Elusive
Most states, for a variety of reasons, still have not
reached equitable spending between districts as defined
by their courts, or spending at levels that's enough to get
all student groups to meet state standards, as defined by
researchers.
Decades of research indicates that more money matters, but researchers have not concluded how that money
should be spent, or in what amount, to improve academic
outcomes. As a result, state legislatures and plaintiffs in
court cases have employed researchers to conduct expensive and often controversial studies to put a price tag on
equitable spending.
Advocacy groups have long complained about inexperienced teachers, leaky roofs, and fewer Advanced Placement programs at certain schools within districts. But they
often lacked evidence to quantify those imbalances.
Advocates hope that new spending data required under
ESSA, which is being released along with state 2018-19
report cards this year, will force courts to grapple again with

State ESSA Goals May Prove Elusive
By Andrew Ujifusa

How Creative Is Your Classroom?

For decades, courts pushed legislatures to make funding the same between districts. In more recent years, after
states established learning standards, courts have defined
equity to mean how much spending it would require to get
different groups of students-those of color, for example,
or English-learners-to meet the state's standards. But a
growing number of states' highest courts, such as Texas'
and Connecticut's, have determined that, while spending
patterns between districts was visibly inequitable, it was
not the court's role to dictate to legislatures how to spend
taxpayers' money.

One of the prominent elements
of the Every Student Succeeds Act is
the ability for states to set their own
long-term goals for academic achievement, graduation rates, and Englishlanguage proficiency. It marks a significant departure from the adequate
yearly progress demands of ESSA's
predecessor, the No Child Left Behind
Act. But what if states aren't on track to
meet those goals?
Under the law, the goals based on
graduation rates and student achievement on state exams must be "ambitious," although ESSA does not spell
out exactly what that word means.
Because of the variety of goals and
the reduced federal role from NCLB to
ESSA, it's not easy to keep tabs on how
all 50 states and the District of Columbia are doing when it comes to staying
on track. But if you think those goals
are important, you might have cause
for some concern.
Take the case of Idaho. Last month,
Idaho Education News reported that
for the second year in a row, the state's
students did not meet any of the interim goals laid out in the state's ESSA

plan that was approved by the U.S. Department of Education. If students hit
those interim goals, it means they are
on track to meet the long-term goals.
In fact, Idaho laid out 22 interim goals
for the 2018-19 school year, in English/
language arts and math for all students,
as well as for different demographics
of students. Idaho missed all of them.
Here's an example: From 2017-18 to
2018-19, the state's goal was for the
share of Hispanic and Latino students
scoring "proficient" on state math
exams to increase by 9.1 percent. In
fact, the share of those students achieving proficiency grew by just 0.7 percent.

'Big Concern'
"It's a very big concern," state board
of education member Linda Clark
told Idaho Education News. "We, as
a board, are committed and want to
make sure the districts and classrooms
have the kind of resources they need."
Connecticut, meanwhile, set longterm goals for English/language arts
and math performance for the 2029-30
school year, with interim targets for
three other years before that. The first
interim goals are set for the 2020-21
school year. For that school year, the

state expects "high needs" students
(a broad demographic including students with disabilities, those who
get free or reduced-price meals, and
English-language learners) to achieve
a score of 57.6 on the state's proficiency index in math. In 2017-18, those
students reached a score of 52 on that
index. In 2018-19, their score was 52.7.
So those students made progress toward that 2020-21 goal but not much.
Their improvement on that index will
have to accelerate dramatically for
2019-20 and 2020-21 to hit the interim
target. The news is similar for those
students in English/language arts, for
which students hit an index score of
57.5 in 2017-18 and 58.1 in 2018-19, with
a 2020-21 goal of 62.3.
Peter Yazbak, a spokesman for the
Connecticut education department,
stressed that statewide, students are
showing promising rates of improvement on the index and that high-needs
students were improving at a faster
rate than the state overall.
"When evaluated separately, students from low-income families,
English-learners, and students with
disabilities are also showing improvements," Yazbak wrote in an email.
ESSA does not levy penalties if

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Education Week - November 13, 2019

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