Education Week - December 5, 2012 - 5

EDUCATION WEEK

DECEMBER 5, 2012

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private school tuition for some students from low-performing schools. School system lawyers argue it diverts state money from local schools and from efforts to comply with orders in the 1965 desegregation case seeking equal treatment and funding for all students. —AP nearly 4-decade-old desegregation lawsuit against the school district. Last month, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund announced that the ethnic-studies program, which was canceled earlier this year, could be expanded in a joint plan crafted by the Tucson school district, the U.S. Department of Justice, and plaintiffs in the case. The plan—which is intended to bring “unitary status” to the 60,000-student Tucson district— involves numerous components related to student assignment, transportation, workforce diversity, academic programs, family and community engagement, dropout prevention, and discipline practices. Arizona’s schools chief, John Huppenthal, earlier this year threatened to withhold $15 million in funds because he maintained that the courses violate a —LESLI A. MAXWELL new state law. EARLY-CAREER TEACHERS
“Administrative Climate and Novices’ Attempt to Remain Teaching”

Many Youths With HIV Unaware of Infection
About one in 15 people living in the United States who has hiv is 13 to 24 years old—and more than half of them don’t know they have the disease, new estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show, and the agency says schools must work harder to prevent hiv’s spread. Those estimates, shared last week by the federal agency, are from 2009. In all, about 1.1 million people in the United States have hiv, the agency reported. The cdc estimates that about 70 out of 100,000 teenagers and young adults have hiv, and they accounted for 12,000 cases— about 25 percent—diagnosed in 2010. Meanwhile, 13- to 24-yearolds represent only about 20 percent of the total population. The majority of the new cases, about 60 percent, were among black teenagers and young adults. Another 20 percent of the new cases were among Latinos of the same age. —NIRVI SHAH

A study published in the Elementary School Journal finds that the main reason new teachers leave the profession is not the insane workload or the lack of resources but their principals. Researchers from Michigan State University, in East Lansing, and Wayne State University, in Detroit, surveyed 184 beginning teachers in Michigan and Indiana on factors that might influence them to leave or stay in the profession. Topping the list, the researchers found, was how well a school’s principal works with the staff. It was a stronger predictor of teachers’ intent to remain in the profession than factors related to workload, administrative duties, resource availability, or opportunities for professional development.
—ANTHONY REBORA

effectiveness of the mandate,” according to the report. It says that while the number of states requiring schools to provide physical education has risen since 2006, so has the number of states allowing exemptions or waivers from such requirements, growing from 18 in the 2005-06 school year to 28 in 2011-12. In all, 33 states permit schools to allow students to substitute other activities for their required physical education, the report says. —B.T.

campus. District rules also allow schools to expel students for arrests and other serious behavior problems off campus. While 64 percent of Chicago students who were never arrested eventually received a high school diploma, the graduation rate for students who had been arrested was 26 percent.
—SARAH D. SPARKS

STUDENTS WITH AUTISM
“Science, Technology, Mathematics, and Engineering Participation Among Students With an Autism Spectrum Disorder”

IMPACT OF ARRESTS
“Juvenile Arrest and Collateral Educational Damage in the Transition to Adulthood”

Districts Keep Surplus, Ark. High Court Rules
School districts that collect more in property taxes than state-mandated school funding levels can keep the money, a sharply divided Arkansas Supreme Court ruled last week in a decision that top officials said threatened reforms intended to provide equitable education funding across the state. The high court ruled 4-3 that state education officials cannot withhold excess money from the Eureka Springs and Fountain Lake school districts, where higher property-tax collections pushed the districts above total school funding levels set by state law. Chief Justice Jim Hannah wrote the dissent, warning the decision “obliterated” a school funding system that legislators hammered out to end a long-running court case.
—AP

TEENAGERS’ HEALTH
“Muscle-Enhancing Behaviors Among Adolescent Girls and Boys”

A minor student’s arrest may be wiped clean at 18, but it may already have permanently harmed his or her chances of graduating from high school and going on to college, according to a new study from the University of Texas at Austin. Researchers tracked cohorts of Chicago 12-year-olds and 15-year-olds from 1990 to 2005, cross-referencing enrollment and dropout data with student arrests between 1995 and 2001. Their study, to be published in the January 2013 issue of Sociology of Education, finds that school staff often find out about students’ arrests—a quarter of them in Chicago happened on

A new study confirms that students with autism spectrum disorders tend to major in the stem fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics if they make it to college. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis found that about 34 percent of students with an autism spectrum disorder chose stem majors, compared with 23 percent of students without disabilities. The study, published online last month in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, also found that young adults with the disorder have one of the lowest college-enrollment rates among students with —NIRVI SHAH disabilities.

Funding Call Delayed For Head Start Grants
A decision about whether more than 130 Head Start providers will continue to receive federal funding to provide preschool services to low-income 4-year-olds has been put off until spring. A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said that the expected December announcement about new Head Start grants would be delayed. Under a new competitive-rebidding process known as “designation renewal,” 132 Head Start providers that were earlier found to have deficiencies had to write new proposals to keep their funding. It’s the first time in the federal program’s history that long time Head Start grant recipients had to recompete to keep receiving their funds, including in Los Angeles County and New York City. —LESLI A. MAXWELL

Both teenage boys and girls are engaging in muscle-enhancing behaviors far more than previously known, according to a study published online last month in the journal Pediatrics. Researchers from the University of Minnesota and Columbia University examined data from 2,793 youths at 20 urban middle and high schools taken during the 2009-10 school year. They set out to determine the prevalence of five muscle-enhancing behaviors: changing eating habits, increasing exercise, and using protein powder, steroids, or other muscleenhancing substances. Almost all students reported doing at least one of the five behaviors. Nearly 12 percent of boys and 6.2 percent of girls said they engaged in three or more of the five practices. —BRYAN TOPOREK

Analysis Finds Wide Variation In Effectiveness of L.A. Teachers
“SDP Human Capital Diagnostic”

CORRECTIONS
• A story in the Oct. 12, 2012, issue of Education Week about arts education in Los Angeles provided an incorrect figure for the number of arts specialists in the district. In addition to employing 204 elementary arts specialists, the district also employs 1,014 arts teachers at the secondary level. • An article on researchers’ concerns with educational testing practices in the Nov. 14, 2012, edition gave an outdated name for an assessment being designed to measure student comprehension. The correct name for the test is now the Global Integrated ScenarioBased Assessment.

PHYSICAL EDUCATION
“2012 Shape of the Nation Report”

Ethnic Studies Eyed In Ariz. Deseg. Case
After a long, tumultuous fight, a popular Mexican-American studies program is poised for a comeback in Tucson, Ariz., as part of a plan to settle a

Of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, just 38 require schools to provide students with physical education in elementary, middle/junior high, and high school, according to a report released last month by the National Association for Sport and Physical Education and the American Heart Association. However, a majority of those states allow exemptions, waivers, and substitutions that permit students to satisfy the physical education requirement in alternative ways, which “reduce[s] the
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Los Angeles has an unusually wide spread in the relative effectiveness of its teachers, according to an analysis released last month by the Strategic Data Project, an initiative housed at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University. The study looks primarily at mathematics teachers in the district who were teaching in grades 3-8 from the 2004-05 to the 2010-11 school years, and uses a student test-score growth measure to arrive at the calculations. Among the findings: • The difference in performance between top- and bottom-performing elementary math teachers was one-quarter of a standard deviation, or nearly eight months of learning, a figure the report characterizes as larger than in other districts that have been studied. • Teachers who entered the district through Teach For America or the district’s career-ladder program, which helps paraprofessionals obtain full teaching positions, were slightly better on average than other teachers in math, giving students a boost of roughly one to two months of learning. But the career-ladder teachers were much more likely than those in tfa to stay in the district. • Extended substitutes were generally more effective than new hires. The report notes that such teachers are often former district teachers and encourages more study of this population. • Novice and early-career teachers were disproportionately assigned to lower-achieving students. • Over his or her first five years in the district, the average math teacher improves enough to be able to give students the equivalent of three additional months of math instruction relative to the teacher’s initial performance. • Credentials generally were not linked to performance, but teachers with certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards tended to outperform others by the equivalent of one to two months. It’s not clear, though, whether those gains are a function of the certification process itself, or of the teachers who elect to become board-certified. —STEPHEN SAWCHUK

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Education Week - December 5, 2012

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