Education Week - November 14, 2018 - 4

NEWS IN BRIEF
School Chief's Plan Would Separate
Los Angeles District Into 32 'Networks'

One on One

Los Angeles schools chief Austin Beutner is working on a plan to radically reshape the nation's secondlargest district by shrinking the central bureaucracy
and moving decisionmaking closer to campuses.
Under a proposal being developed confidentially,
Beutner would divide the system into 32 "networks."
He is expected to make his plan public next month.
Officials say they have collected input from about
1,500 parents, teachers, administrators, and community members in a series of meetings since August.
Some specifics of the plan probably will change,
but what appears to have emerged are: The networks would be based mainly on geography; each
network would include elementary, middle, and
high schools, with cohesive academic programs for
students as they progress through the system; each
network would report to one of several regional

Corinne Gaby works
with her teacher, Linda
Geary, at Notch Peak
Elementary in rural
Albany County, Wyo.
The 10-year-old is the
only student in the
school, which Albany
County School District
No. 1 established for
her when she was
in kindergarten. The
school is housed in a
horse barn two miles
from Gaby's home.
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headquarters; staffing and authority at the central
office would be sharply reduced; and schools and
their networks would get more control in key areas
such as hiring and budgets.
-TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE

U.S. Attorney General Forced to Resign,
Battled With Civil Rights Community
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions-who has
clashed repeatedly with the civil rights community
over transgender students, affirmative action, immigration, and more-has resigned his post, President
Donald Trump announced on Twitter last week.
Matthew Whitaker, Sessions' chief of staff, will
take over as acting attorney general.
In one of his first acts as attorney general, Sessions teamed with U.S. Secretary of Education
Betsy DeVos to rescind Obama-era guidance on the
rights of transgender students in public schools.
Over this past summer, the two agencies ditched

Obama-era guidance calling on school districts and
universities to consider race as a factor in diversifying their campuses.
Sessions also played a role in the legal battle over
the future of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama-era program that gives protection to
an estimated 700,000 immigrants who came to the
United States illegally as children. In September
2017, he announced the order to end DACA, but
federal courts have blocked the move. -ALYSON KLEIN

Amazon Initiates Program to Bolster
Pursuit of Computer Science Careers
Amazon is launching a "childhood to career" program that aims to spur underprivileged children and
young adults to pursue careers in computer science.
With the Amazon Future Engineer program, the
technology giant will try to reach more than 10
million students each year through coding camps,
online lessons, and introductory and Advanced
Placement courses in computer science. It will also
award computer-science-related scholarships and
internships at Amazon.
For K-8, the company will fund online computer
science classes as well as camps. For grades 9-12,
Amazon will provide funding to schools, primarily
Title I and rural schools, to offer Intro to Computer
Science and AP Computer Science courses. And
for college students, it will offer four-year, $10,000
annual college scholarships for individuals from
underserved communities who are pursuing an
undergraduate degree in computer science. College
freshman who received a scholarship from Amazon
will be eligible for a paid software-development internship at the company.
-LAURAINE GENOTA

Shannon Broderick/Laramie Boomerang via AP

Tool Launched to Help Policymakers
Evaluate Education Programs' Value

Report Roundup

The Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness is offering a new tool to make evaluations
of education programs more transparent for both
researchers and education policymakers.
The Registry of Efficacy and Effectiveness Studies allows researchers to lay out the methods and
other details of their evaluations in advance, to ensure the studies can be tracked and replicated.
It comes as states and districts seek effective
school interventions under the Every Student Succeeds Act amid continued debates in the research
world about high-profile education studies that
have not repeated their results over time.

www.edweek.org/go/rr

SCHOOL CLIMATE
"Effects of Ambient Noise on the Measurement
of Mathematics Achievement for Urban High
School Students"
Urban schools can be noisier than suburban and rural schools, and a new study in
the journal Urban Education suggests that
background noise can significantly distract
students during testing time.
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, researchers tracked 122 high school students'
reactions to background noise in a large,
high-poverty urban school district. In more
than 250 sound tests over two days, the researchers found the average noise level in
the schools was 63.7 decibels, and never got
below 35 decibels, the recommended limit
for classes.
Forty percent of the students said the
noise bothered them while taking a standardized math test, and the more bothered

they were, the lower their scores. In fact, differences in students' reactions to the noise
accounted for 10 percent of the gap in students' test scores.
-SARAH D. SPARKS
SELECTIVE SCHOOLS
"It's Not Only Who You Are But Who You Are
With: High School Composition and Individuals'
Attainment Over the Life Course"
Selective schools with a higher average
achievement level may exert a negative influence on students' long-term success, finds a new
longitudinal study of data from Project TALENT.
The nationally representative, longitudinal
study of over 377,000 high school students found
that while students who attend socioeconomically advantaged high schools tend to complete
more schooling, earn higher annual incomes, and
work in more prestigious jobs 11 and 50 years
later, those who attend selective, high-achieving
schools tend to experience the opposite.

4 | EDUCATION WEEK | November 14, 2018 | www.edweek.org

The report, from the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that students in highachievement schools, who might have been top
students in a more academically diverse school,
may develop a lower self-image when all of their
classmates are high-achieving.
-SASHA JONES
ENGLISH-LEARNERS
"Literacy as Social (Media) Practice: Refugee
Youth and Native Language Literacy at School"
Guided use of social media in classrooms
can boost language development of Englishlearners, finds new research from the University of Minnesota.
In a voluntary five-day summer school session on critical media literacy, researchers
gave refugee students opportunities to write
about themselves using Facebook-a familiar
medium for many of the students-and lessons in English and Somali, their native language. While the researchers did not assess

literacy growth, they found writing and sharing in an online space sparked more extensive
use of written English and rich, interactive
group learning experiences.
-COREY MITCHELL
EARLY EDUCATION
"Understanding Infant and Toddler Child-Care
Deserts"
The problem of child-care scarcity is largely
due to a lack of care for infants and young toddlers rather than for children ages 3 to 5, finds
a new study by the liberal think tank Center for
American Progress.
The study examined available licensed child
care in nine states and the District of Columbia and found that there are more than five
infants and toddlers for every licensed childcare slot, which is more than three times the
ratio for children ages 3 to 5. Shortages were
especially acute in rural areas and in low-income communities.
-MARVA HINTON

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Education Week - November 14, 2018

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