text:
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Politics K-12®

ESSA. Congress. State chiefs. School spending. Elections. Education Week reporters keep watch on education policy and politics in the nation’s capital and in the states.

New York State Teams With Gates Foundation to ‘Reimagine Education’ Amid Pandemic

By Evie Blad — May 05, 2020 5 min read

New York state will work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on a plan to “reimagine education,” developing new online learning strategies as it continues to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday.

The state’s schools are closed for the remainder of the school year to slow the spread of the virus and, like every other state, New York leaders are considering what schools should look like when they reopen. Some governors have raised concerns about maintaining social distancing in classrooms and planning for rapid, emergency transitions back to online learning if the virus resurges in their areas. Cuomo, a Democrat, seemed to suggest the work with the Gates Foundation would move beyond that, planning for larger changes.

“So, it’s not about just reopening schools,” Cuomo said at his daily coronavirus briefing. “When we are reopening schools, let’s open a better school, and let’s open a smarter education system. ... Bill Gates is a visionary in many ways, and his ideas and thoughts on technology and education he’s spoken about for years, but I think we now have a moment in history where we can actually incorporate and advance those ideas.”

Learning from Crisis

Cuomo sandwiched his thoughts on education between broader remarks about learning from the state’s experience during the crisis in areas like transportation.

He said the education system did “a great job” transitioning to remote learning with very little advanced warning, but that some teachers needed more training in virtual instruction, and some students lacked technology and devices.

“We’ve all been talking about tele-education, virtual education, remote education, and there’s a lot that can be done” he said. “The old model of everybody goes and sits in a classroom and the teacher is in front of that classroom and teaches that class, and you do that all across the city, all across the state, all these buildings, all these physical classrooms. Why, with all the technology you have?”

Cuomo did not outline the scope and aim of the state’s work with the Gates Foundation. As he spoke, he showed a slide that showed questions like, “Where can we use technology to provide more opportunity to students no matter where they are?” and “How can we use technology to meet educational needs of students with disabilities?”

Criticism of Gates Plan

Cuomo’s announcement was met with concern from some educators, who believe it focused too heavily on technology, overlooking the value of in-person education and supporting students’ growing social and emotional needs as the state recovers.

“Remote learning, in any form, will never replace the important personal connection between teachers and their students that is built in the classroom and is a critical part of the teaching and learning process—which is why we’ve seen educators work so hard during this pandemic to maintain those connections through video chats, phone calls and socially distant in-person meetings,” New York State United Teachers President Andy Pallott said in a statement. “If we want to reimagine education, let’s start with addressing the need for social workers, mental health counselors, school nurses, enriching arts courses, advanced courses and smaller class sizes in school districts across the state.”

Cuomo’s remarks also were also panned educational activists who question the Gates Foundation’s support for initiatives like test-based teacher evaluations and common core standards and are critical of the foundation’s overall influence on the education sector.

In a tweet to Cuomo, parent activist Leonie Haimson cited the state’s 2014 decision to pull the plug on its relationship with inBloom, a controversial Gates-supported effort to store and sort student data for states and districts that faced concerns from student-privacy groups.

Gates Foundation Coronavirus Response

The Gates Foundation has responded to the pandemic by offering emerging aid to existing grantees to help them “confront their most urgent needs,” Bob Hughes, the foundation’s director of K-12 education, told Education Week opinion blogger Rick Hess last month.

“We’re working with partners such as the Council of Chief State School Officers to help state departments of education and school districts navigate the immediate programmatic and financial implications of this emergency,” Hughes said. “We’re also supporting partners who are expanding online learning and coordinating meals and other supports for K-12 students, and helping lessen the financial shock felt disproportionately by low-income college students due to lost housing, food, and wages.”

The Gates Foundation provided few details about the New York initiative Tuesday.

“The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has committed to work with New York State on its efforts to ensure equitable access to education for its students in response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” the organization’s press office said in a statement. “We will provide further details as they become available.”

A spokesman for the state’s education department referred questions to the governor’s office.

“The Board of Regents and Department recently announced they will be creating a statewide task force on re-opening made up of education leaders, which has been widely supported by New York’s education community,” the agency said in a statement. “By working with our partners across the state, we can ensure our guidance is grounded in the principles of practice and our children’s educational, developmental and overall wellbeing is considered during this important discussion”

Education Week has reached out to Cuomo’s office for more information about the plan. We will update this post if they respond.

Photo: A still from C-SPAN video of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s May 5 coronavirus briefing.

Follow us on Twitter @PoliticsK12. And follow the Politics K-12 reporters @EvieBlad @Daarel and @AndrewUjifusa.

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News in Brief: A National Roundup

January 17, 2001 6 min read

Police Kill Gunman on School Grounds

Police in Oxnard, Calif., shot and killed a 17-year-old gunman last week who had held a student hostage on a high school campus. Richard Gene Lopez was slain Jan. 10 after he held a loaded revolver to the head of a 17-year-old girl, said David Keith, a spokesman for the Oxnard Police Department.

Mr. Lopez, who attended an alternative high school and had a record of gun-related violations, did not know his victim at Hueneme High School, Mr. Keith said.

“He told the girl that he had family reasons, that he should kill himself, and that he wanted the police to do it,” Mr. Keith said.

Before taking the girl hostage, the gunman fired three shots on the campus, one of which shattered a car window. The incident at the 2,600-student school occurred at lunchtime as several hundred students looked on.

The Oxnard campus, located about 60 miles northeast of Los Angeles, was closed immediately after the shooting and the following day. A spokeswoman for the 13,800-student district said officials were considering closing school Jan. 12 as well.

Mark Stricherz

Students Tested for TB

Some 90 students and staff members at a suburban Maryland high school were required to have tuberculosis tests last week after a 10th grader at the school was found to have contracted the disease.

The Montgomery Blair High School student is no longer contagious, but health authorities want all those who shared classes with him to have the test to make sure they were not infected earlier, according to Brian J. Porter, the spokesman for the 135,000-student Montgomery County, Md., district just outside Washington.

The tests were given at the school free of charge.

Public-health officials are trying to stem the spread of tuberculosis, a communicable disease primarily affecting the lungs, which has been on the rise in the United States for more than a decade. Many of the cases are found in people who have immigrated from poorer countries or in people with AIDS.

Montgomery Blair has a large enrollment of immigrant students. School officials did not identify the student who contracted the disease.

—Bess Keller

Boy Sues Over Team Allegiance

A Minnesota district is in a legal dispute with a parent who contends school officials repeatedly punished his 4th grader for rooting for the wrong football team.

The 2,500-student New Prague district is being sued in federal court by Roy Sonkowsky and his son, known as “Rocky,” who claim that the boy was harassed by school officials for trying to express his support of the Green Bay Packers. Lawyers for the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union, who represent the plaintiffs, say the actions of New Prague teachers and administrators violated the boy’s free-speech rights.

The suit stems from a number of alleged incidents during the 1999-2000 school year, when New Prague Intermediate School took part in a statewide geography contest, sponsored in part by the Minnesota Vikings football team.

School officials made Rocky cover up his Packers jersey when they took a group picture to show their appreciation for the Vikings, excluded him from a holiday parade featuring a Vikings-themed float after he said he planned to wear Packers colors, and was kept from attending a party at the Vikings’ practice facility, the complaint says.

But in court papers filed this month, the district maintains that Rocky was disciplined for “disrespectful behavior toward students and staff.”

—Jeff Archer

Typo Undercuts Ad Campaign

The District of Columbia public school system’s ad campaign to combat truancy has backfired.

The 77,000-student system spent $41,000 to put advertisements on the sides of 75 city buses urging students to attend school.

But the message, “D.C. Public Schools Wants You!!! Go To Class—It’ A Blast!!!” became an embarrassment this month because the S needed for the contraction was omitted from the sign. The ad depicts children rushing in the door of an old-fashioned schoolhouse.

School officials blamed the printer for the typographical error, which slipped by district proofreaders.

Corrected signs were placed at no charge on the buses on Jan. 5, the day after the error was caught, according to Devonya Smith, a spokeswoman for the school district.

—Ann Bradley

L.A. Board Accused of Violation

A deputy district attorney contends that Los Angeles school board members broke the law when they met in closed session last month to take action on completing construction of a troubled high school.

During the Dec. 12 meeting, the board gave Superintendent Roy Romer permission to accept private bids to finish work on the Belmont Learning Center. The project, which is located on a former oil field, has been plagued by environmental hazards on the site. The school’s cost has climbed to more than $200 million.

Susan Chasworth, a Los Angeles deputy district attorney, maintains that the board violated the state’s Brown Act, which requires all public entities to discuss issues in open and public forums. The only exceptions to the law are personnel issues, pending litigation, and negotiations on real estate costs.

Hal Kwalwasser, the district’s general counsel, said the superintendent did not need the board’s approval to move forward with the bid process, but sought its input because of the significance of the issue. He added that the board’s discussion about Belmont was intimately involved with pending litigation regarding the school and thus was within the law.

But Ms. Chasworth warned that if the board refused to discuss the Belmont decision in public, the district attorney’s office would file a civil lawsuit seeking to halt the board’s actions and to prevent its members from holding similar meetings in the future.

—Karla Scoon Reid

N.J. Superintendent Accused

The superintendent of the East Orange, N.J., district was put on unpaid leave last week after the school board voted to pursue administrative charges against him alleging that he used district employees for personal projects.

The board accused John Howard Jr. of using employees of the 11,000-student district to clean his house and move his daughter into her college dorm room during the school day.

Neither Mr. Howard nor his lawyer returned phone calls. But in local news accounts, Mr. Howard has denied the charges, saying they were trumped up by the board as a pretext to void his five-year contract.

The board recommended that the superintendent be fired from his $170,505-a-year job, according to Stephen Edelstein, the board’s lawyer.

Mr. Howard had been on paid leave since September, when the charges were first alleged. He was placed on unpaid leave Jan. 10 after the board voted to send the matter to the state education department, which could fire him. In New Jersey, a school board cannot fire a tenured employee, Mr. Edelstein said.

—Lisa Fine

Drivers Charged in Fake Test

Two bus drivers in Albany, N.Y., have been charged with persuading a 5-year- old boy to urinate into a cup so one of them could pass a drug test.

Tanya Humbert and Kimberly Holsapple were charged Jan. 3 with a misdemeanor for “conspiring and enticing a child,” said Detective James Miller, a spokesman for the Albany police. The two were fired from their jobs with Stock Transportation, which serves the 10,400-student district.

Ms. Holsapple admitted to using marijuana, Mr. Miller said, and hoped to foil her upcoming drug test by passing off the boy’s urine as her own. The bus drivers were caught talking about the incident on the bus’ taping system, Mr. Miller said.

Lonnie E. Palmer, Albany’s superintendent, said district officials were considering toughening their anti-drug policy by retesting employees and examining what workers are allowed to bring to the drug-test site.

The bus drivers could not be reached for comment. Ms. Holsapple was quoted as telling a local reporter that the incident was “about as low as I’ve ever stooped.”

Mark Stricherz

A version of this article appeared in the January 17, 2001 edition of Education Week as News in Brief: A National Roundup

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Opinion Blog

Rick Hess Straight Up

Education policy maven Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute think tank offers straight talk on matters of policy, politics, research, and reform.

Education Opinion

Straight Up Conversation: Louisiana Schools Chief Paul Pastorek Reflects on RTT

By Rick Hess — August 27, 2010 5 min read

Less than a month ago, our earnest Secretary of Education described Louisiana as “leading the way” with data systems that monitor teacher preparation programs and student performance. Louisiana has been ranked a top-ten state for teacher policy, data systems, and charter schooling by the National Council on Teacher Quality, the Data Quality Campaign, and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. (And, for what it’s worth, in my new Fordham Institute study published this week, New Orleans graded out as the nation’s most vibrant city when it comes to school reform.) All of this makes Louisiana’s failure to win one of the dozen Race to the Top billets more than a little controversial. Louisiana’s reformers are frustrated and wondering what to make of the results. Penny Dastugue, a member of the Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, said she was “absolutely shocked... We were confident that we would prevail in round two, and we had strengthened our application after the first round... There’s no rational explanation... We’re all shaking our heads.”

On Wednesday, I chatted with Louisiana’s heralded state chief Paul Pastorek about the results. The ever-gracious Pastorek still ardently backs the program and took pains to avoid zinging winning states, the RTT process, or the Department. (Of course, given the resources and bully pulpit at ED’s disposal, only in Texas do we find state leaders eager to openly cross swords with Secretary Duncan.)

Reflecting on the big picture, Pastorek said, “Creating a competitive fund of money for people who want to do the right thing has already proven to be effective. People have changed their laws and changed their mindsets. While we were working on passing a value-added law prior to RTT, the competitive grant incentivized us to accelerate our push.”

He wonders, though, whether the Department of Education and too many states have been insufficiently attuned to the implementation challenges. He said, “I personally think implementing some of the components of these plans is going to be extremely challenging... There are states, like Louisiana, that have effectively implemented these reform strategies. But having done so, I can attest to the fact that it takes a lot of work to get there. And I think some may be underestimating the resources and energy that these kinds of initiatives require.”

Pastorek expressed reservations about the push for states to include as many districts as possible in their reform proposals: “I said this many times, in the [finalist] interview and publicly, that I didn’t think we could handle more districts than we were trying to include and yet achieve the objectives we were trying to achieve... Implementation at the scale the federal government has proposed, at ninety percent, which is implicitly what they’ve required, is going to be immensely difficult.”

While Louisiana’s proposal seems to have been dinged by reviewers for not including enough districts, Pastorek said, “We intentionally limited the scope of our effort in Louisiana because I did not want to be overly ambitious and end up with failure. At the end of the day, you can say what you want to say about our proposal--and a lot of people have been critical of our proposal for not being inclusive enough--but if you’re going to be this ambitious, you have to make choices. You’ve got to have focus. And you’ve got to make sure the state and the districts have the ability to do what’s needed.”

He continued, “One reason I think states are going to have a tough time implementing their plans is that state Departments of Education are not designed to implement these programs. We’ve spent a year redesigning our Department around our reform initiatives. If you look at our organization today, it’s a radical change in how we’ve been doing business. It’s revolutionary. And I don’t think that Louisiana’s [RTT] score reflected the capacity we’ve created in doing so.”

He noted the irony of states that have learned from Louisiana racking up RTT dollars, while Louisiana is on the outside looking in. Pastorek noted, “We were the guinea pig. We’ve created a Superintendent’s Delivery Unit to improve academic outcomes, and it’s been operational for a year. One of the Race to the Top winners has been here sitting with my lead guy in our Delivery Unit for two days, and they spent a week in Louisiana studying our Recovery School District. And [three other states] have approached us about borrowing our value-added software, which we are allowing them to do.”

He said, “We are sharing our work and our resources with education leaders and states... We will continue collaborating with them because we will all be better for it. But it’s only human nature to question how some of these states who are relying on our models to implement their RTTT plan were selected for funding, while Louisiana wasn’t. But dwelling on this won’t change the outcome. And the fact of the matter is that we’re all in this together.”

Pastorek remains upbeat about the potential of RTT and thinks it a powerful and promising approach to reform. “I think it was a brilliant idea to not say, ‘Here’s the money, here’s what you need to do with it,’ but to ask states to come forward with their reforms. In fact, we ran all of our school improvement money through a competitive grant program. We mirrored it on RTT, completely. We asked people to come to the table and put their best foot forward.”

He said, “While we ultimately didn’t secure any funding, we can’t lose sight of these ideas... Louisiana has been advancing many of these reforms long before Race to the Top... So while the outcome of this competition may prevent us from pursuing a more aggressive timeline, we remain committed to the same course.”

Pastorek’s final thought? “I do think Arne [Duncan] would observe that the process is good but can improve. But I don’t think it’s fundamentally flawed. I think we need to give them credit for setting up a very good program. And I don’t think we ought to try to convince them it can be a better process, because I don’t think that’s what’s important to them. I think what they care about is whether you can drive change in schooling all the way down into schools through policy. I think that we’ve seen that you can, but that it [comes down to] a question of focus and implementation.”

The opinions expressed in Rick Hess Straight Up are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
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text:
Opinion Blog

Peter DeWitt's

Finding Common Ground

A former K-5 public school principal turned author, presenter, and independent consultant, DeWitt provides insights and advice for education leaders. He can be found at www.petermdewitt.com.

Education Opinion

This Is Not an Implementation Dip. It’s Just Bad Practice!

By Peter DeWitt — October 04, 2012 6 min read

To keep moving forward with so much collateral damage is educational malpractice on the part of those in charge.

A few days ago the Niagara Regional PTA (Resolution) in upstate New York passed a resolution to be introduced at the New York State PTA Convention. The resolution calls for a moratorium on 3rd -8th testing and the elimination of using test scores on teacher and principal evaluation. Thankfully, this shows yet another large group in the public school community who understands how harmful the focus on high stakes testing has been in America, and other PTA’s should consider showing their support.

In New York, Governor Cuomo used Race to the Top as a chance to swing his bat at public school education and things have not been the same since. Fortunately for those of us in public education this may be offering us a unique opportunity to finally have all the stakeholders in public education be on the same side.

Wantagh, New York Elementary Principal Don Sternberg recently sent a letter out to the parents of his elementary school providing his opinion about the current educational system. The following is only one paragraph from the excellently written letter (Dear Parents).

Unfortunately, if educators want to survive in the new, Albany-created bureaucratic mess that is standardized assessments to measure teacher performance, paramount to anything else, we must focus on getting kids ready for the state assessments.

This is what happens when non-educators like our governor and state legislators, textbook publishing companies (who create the assessments for our state and reap millions of our tax dollars by doing so), our NYS Board of Regents, and a state teachers’ union president get involved in creating what they perceive as desirable educational outcomes and decide how to achieve and measure them.

Where were the opinions of teachers, principals, and superintendents? None were asked to participate in the establishment of our new state assessment parameters. Today, statisticians are making educational decisions in New York State that will impact your children for years to come”.

Coming Together
Recently, a group of parents contacted me about opting out from the state exam in the spring. It was the first time I have ever been approached by parents. There will always be students who do well on testing because they are great test takers and some of their parents believe the test is something to get through while others think it’s a roadblock to learning because of the time it takes away from teaching.

Voorhesville, N.Y. Superintendent Teresa Snyder in a recent letter to parents said, “Child growth and development is not a race, it is a journey. There are hills and valleys, straight roads, and unexpected curves. Certainly, we can benchmark certain elements of growth - physical, social, and cognitive - in the same way we map a journey. We just have to remember that the map is not the journey and the benchmark is not the goal. The children in our care every day are not finished - there is nothing summative about them.”

There are many students who fear testing for a variety of reasons and their parents try to console them at the same time they get angry that their children have to sit and take a test for hours at a time. Harvard has not come calling for 3rd grade test results but many students have certainly left our school systems believing they are a 2 when we know they are more than that.

Parents, teachers and administrators are now on the same page on the issue of high stakes testing and evaluation and that can be a very powerful thing for schools. For too long teachers and administrators fought about issues that no longer seem very important. Now they are fighting the same argument and parents are beginning to join in that fight.

Parents - We have always had parents who know very little about the test and others who believe it is important. However, there is a large percentage of parents who have seen the testing craze get more out of control year after year and they want a different experience for their children. For those who haven’t paid attention to state testing, show them a passage by Tolstoy on the third grade test and they’ll understand our angst.

Teachers - When standardized tests began to happen in states many teachers looked at it as an opportunity to see what their students learned. Unfortunately it took so long for state education departments to return the test results that teachers often got the results after the students were no longer in their classes.

The results typically showed that students had issues with comprehension or inquiry based thinking. This was not new information for teachers. As the years went on, the tests became more and more important. The scores were announced through the media and parents chose houses based on how well schools did on the test. After awhile, parents understood that the test just provided one view into the school. Hopefully they learned that it’s the school culture that affects learning and the test is now beginning to affect that school culture. The test has become the tea party of public education.

Principals - “Raise those scores!” Principals had a stake in how their schools did on the test. If there were multiple schools in one district, it was often a competition between schools to see who would do better and no one wanted to be on the bottom-end. After years of going through a few weeks of testing that will put any budget process to shame, principals understand that the test is simply a wild card. It’s something to get through, not learn from and that shows how pathetic the relationship between state education departments and public schools has gotten.

Principals are tired of telling their teachers to prepare for a moving target. No one knows what will be on the test and schools cannot keep any copies of the test (even though they are blank) after the test. Many states education departments do not send back the student booklets, just the results. The trust is gone and now even the administrators who used to enforce test prep and testing are tired of the game.

In the End
High stakes testing has gotten out of control. Policymakers, state and federal education departments aren’t on the sidelines. They are making decisions from remote locations. These decisions are coming from people who care more about money and shame than they care about children. Unfortunately, children are the collateral damage in this new test-taking era.

Education should be about learning, educational resources and building relationships with students and families. It should not be about testing. So many stakeholders do not understand the amount of money that is given privately to companies creating high stakes tests. They hear about money coming from the lottery or from Race to the Top and truly believe that each school district shares in that pot when that is just not true. It takes millions of dollars to pay for tests made by companies and that money could be better invested where it is needed most, which is in our students.

It’s time for policymakers, politicians and state education departments to wake up and see that the complaints about high stakes testing is not part of an implementation dip, it’s just bad practice. Many states have been giving high stakes testing for almost fifteen years and it has done little to help public education. To keep moving forward with so much collateral damage is educational malpractice on the part of those in charge.

Connect with Peter on Twitter

Diane Ravitch, Anthony Cody and thousands of other educators will be sending a letter to President Obama on October 17th. If you are interested in writing a letter to President Obama regarding the state of education, please click here.

The opinions expressed in Peter DeWitt’s Finding Common Ground are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
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School Climate & Safety

Discipline Split at Heart Of IDEA Overhaul Debate

By Lisa Goldstein — June 18, 2003 10 min read

Any student who punched a teacher in the stomach, knocked a classmate off his chair, and then hit a school secretary with a tennis racquet would likely face severe punishment in the Park Hill school district in suburban Kansas City, Mo.

But after a middle school student in special education engineered that mayhem there several years ago, Park Hill educators were dismayed by legal limits on how they could punish him. The boy had autism, a developmental disorder that can lead to violent outbursts, and it was officially determined that his disability had caused the attacks.

Federal law bars schools from suspending students long term for actions related to their disabilities. It also protects such students from going for long stretches without educational services.

“That’s a double standard there,” Superintendent Gayden Carruth of the 9,350- student Park Hill schools said of the dual systems of discipline for students with and without disabilities. “It is the least fair for a special education student, who gets the notion that because of his disability, he cannot get consequences.”

Stories like the one about the student in Park Hill, anomalous perhaps in its severity but common in its outlines, have many school administrators clamoring for change. Some educators are calling for a more uniform system of discipline for all students. Federal lawmakers have listened, but the debate is far from over.

As Congress prepares to reauthorize the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act—the current name of the landmark 1975 law guaranteeing the nation’s now-6.5 million students with disabilities the right to a free, appropriate public education— to do about the law’s discipline language has become a major point of contention.

Opponents of the push for changes have pushed back, arguing that creation of what some would consider a more “equal” system of punishment would erode the civil rights of students the IDEA was meant to protect.

At its heart, the law does not allow students to be denied a public education because of disabilities. If such students are punished without taking into account those disabilities, many advocates for special education say, that is exactly what will happen.

Careful Negotiation

The last reauthorization of the IDEA, completed in 1997, stretched over three years, mostly because of a bitter debate on just this issue. Before that version of the IDEA became law, the special education statute was mostly silent on discipline.

Some people involved in the 1997 process say that intense negotiation produced a measure that in the end properly balanced the need for schools to punish students with disabilities and the rights of such students. Advocacy groups argued that if students with disabilities missed too much school, their conditions in many cases rendered them particularly ill-equipped to catch up.

Under current law, a school can remove such a student for up to 10 days for any violation of school rules. During those first 10 days of suspension, the school must examine the role of the student’s disability in the misbehavior. Then, if officials determine that the disability was not a factor in the incident, the school may suspend the student for the same length of time as for a student without a disability. But the school must still provide educational services after the tenth day.

On the other hand, if the student’s disability was the cause of the misbehavior, he or she typically returns to school, with educators putting into place new strategies for curbing the student’s bad behavior.

A school can suspend students with disabilities for up to 45 days for such serious infractions as bringing a gun to school, or illegal drug incidents. But alternative educational services still have to be provided after the tenth day.

Many parents, disability- rights advocates, and educators are incensed that members of Congress are trying, in the opponents’ view, to gut those carefully calibrated 1997 provisions. But in the wake of several high-profile school shootings in recent years—not necessarily involving special education students—some administrators and teachers want the freedom to discipline as they see fit to keep their schools safe.

And so the next round in the discipline battle is under way.

The version of IDEA passed by the U.S. House of Representatives April 30 would allow schools to suspend students with disabilities for up to 45 days not only for the most serious infractions, as current law allows, but also for any violation of student codes of conduct. But suspended students would still be guaranteed educational services after 10 days out of school.

Burden of Proof

The new measure would also, in effect, reverse the burden of proof, putting the onus on parents to initiate the investigative process to determine if a disciplinary incident resulted from a disability.

One mother, Megan S. Clugston, of Lansdale, Pa., whose 5-year- old son has autism, said the proposed changes would be unfair to students with disabilities.

“The changes in discipline for children with disabilities are just plain crazy,” she said. “If they had [the same] control over their actions as their typical peers, then they really wouldn’t have the disability, now would they? If the cognition was in place ... then chances are there wouldn’t be different or odd behaviors.”

Opponents of the House bill say they envision that a student with epilepsy, for instance, might be suspended for inadvertently hitting a child during a seizure.

The new measures, they say, would let schools get rid of problem students more easily. In their worst- case scenarios, a changed federal law would enable schools to use infractions as minor as eating in class, or chewing gum, to free themselves of students the schools believe they can’t handle.

In addition, critics say, parents may not be empowered or informed enough to request a review of their child’s punishment.

“The discipline provisions in the House bill strip away all protections for students with disabilities,” said Lynda Van Kuren, a spokeswoman for the Arlington, Va.-based Council for Exceptional Children, an advocacy group for students with disabilities, their parents, and special educators. “At best, they allow schools to give students with disabilities an inadequate education; at worst, they enable schools to get rid of students with disabilities.”

Because contentions that the 1997 amendments set up an unfair system of discipline weighed so heavily on lawmakers at the time, Congress authorized a study to explore the consequences of the new regulatory regime. The resulting 2001 federal report found that students with disabilities who were involved in violence or other serious incidents at school were being punished in the same way, by and large, as other students who committed comparable acts.

About two-thirds of all students who engaged in serious misconduct—which includes acts of violence or incidents involving drugs, firearms, or other weapons—were given out-of-school suspensions, regardless of whether they were in special education programs or not, said the report by the U.S. General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress. (“IDEA Doesn’t Hinder Discipline, Survey Finds,” Feb. 7, 2001.)

But some administrators, like Ms. Carruth, the chairwoman of the American Association of School Administrators’ federal policy and legislative committee, say having two systems of discipline sends the wrong message.

“As part of the instructional process, students need to learn that there are consequences for their conduct,” she said.

“There is a double standard,” she continued. “Given that you aren’t going to see services to students with disabilities stopped during suspensions, I don’t know why the consequence can’t be the same ... even if it is related to their disability.”

That view assumes, other observers say, that all students in special education would have the capacity to understand what they did wrong and learn lessons from the consequences.

Those who disagree say a student’s disability must be a factor in determining punishment. And among those disagreeing, it seems, is President Bush.

When the House passed its version of the IDEA in April, President Bush’s response was mostly supportive, with one notable exception. In a “statement of administration policy” issued April 30, a written reaction to the bill, the president said schools should consider students’ disabilities when disciplining students who violate school codes of conduct.

The Senate version of the IDEA unveiled last week and supported by the Republican and Democratic education committee leaders, maintains the requirement for schools to examine the role of students’ disabilities in their behavior. (“Senate’s IDEA Bill Absent House’s Discipline, IEP Changes,” this issue.)

‘Unfairly Applied’

While the debate continues on Capitol Hill, the discussion on discipline echoes in schools as well.

Some teachers believe the existing system of discipline for students with disabilities is fair, while others do not, said Patti Ralabate, the professional associate for special needs for the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union.

“In some cases, the discipline protections are unfairly applied,” Ms. Ralabate said. “You have high school kids saying to teachers, ‘You can’t do anything to me, I am in special education.’ You have some cases where two kids strike another kid; one is in special education and was back in the classroom the next day. And the other student, he or she was out if they were not [in special education].

“These situations lend themselves to people feeling like it is not fair.” Still, she said, the NEA believes the House version goes too far.

Under current law, schools are required to investigate disciplinary incidents in a process known as “manifestation determination” to establish whether students’ misbehavior was due to their disabilities. The process includes a review of how school officials are meeting students’ needs.

Bruce Hunter, a lobbyist for the Arlington, Va.-based American Association of School Administrators, said those costly and time-consuming reviews are not always necessary, yet schools under the law must conduct them.

Ms. Carruth, the Park Hill superintendent, said that in the case of the middle school student who attacked school personnel and a fellow student, it took educators about nine hours after each of the three incidents to come to the same conclusion: His disability was responsible.

In the eyes of school administrators, Mr. Hunter said, the law assumes that the bad acts of a child in special education are related to a disability until proven otherwise.

“Now schools must prove that there is no connection between disability and behavior,” he said. “It puts us at a tremendous disadvantage. ... If it comes back, it would not be a good thing.”

If a deaf student brings drugs to school, in one “for instance” administrators point to, why should the school go through a review process to determine if he or she acted out of his or her disability?

But others say the process of “manifestation determination” is about more than the role of disability in a student’s behavior. It is about the role of the school.

In each case, the review panel must answer difficult questions. Is the student’s individualized education plan—required for every student with a disability— being handled appropriately? Does the student have the ability to control his or her behavior? And finally, was the discipline incident a manifestation of his or her disability?

Dan Losen, the legal and policy research associate for the Harvard-based Civil Rights Project, said that if the manifestation- determination process ceases to exist, so will school accountability.

“Schools won’t ask themselves if they provided support and services,” Mr. Losen said. “That question is off the table. It is the question of whether the school failed.”

The proposed changes to the law are shortsighted, Mr. Losen argued. The most effective changes could be handled from the front lines of education, he said. Teachers should receive better training, for example, in strategies to handle disruptive students, he added.

Ms. Ralabate said the NEA hopes Congress will craft changes to the IDEA that will simplify the discipline process along with the task of determining whether a student’s disability played a part in misbehavior. But she offered no specific ideas on how federal lawmakers—or school officials—can strike the perfect balance.

“It’s very complicated for educators,” Ms. Ralabate said. “It’s hard to divide out what is a result of disability and what is just misbehavior.”

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Contract Language May Save Due-Process Rights for Some Kansas Teachers

By Andrew Ujifusa — May 12, 2014 1 min read

During last-minute negotiations to remake school finance in Kansas in response to a state Supreme Court decision, lawmakers decided to end due-process rights for K-12 teachers. The move, naturally, generated anger from teachers and their union representation in the state. But it turns out that for some Kansas teachers, the new state law may not strip them of due process after all.

How so? The answer’s in contract language between Wichita USD and United Teachers of Wichita, according to the Wichita Eagle. Kansas legislators changed what it means, technically at least, to be a teacher in state law. Here’s how the change is described in a summary of the school-finance bill that includes the elimination of due process in Kansas: “In the act governing due process procedures, the bill strikes from the definition of “teacher” any professional employee who is required to hold a certificate to teach in any school district.”

In other words, Kansas lawmakers told K-12 teachers: Sorry, you’re legally not “teachers” any more. (The relevant bill that Gov. Sam Brownback signed into law, House BIll 2506, also included exemptions from teacher-licensure requirements for certain teachers, another part of the new law that’s irked unions in Kansas.)

But the contract between the Wichita union, which represents about 4,200 members, and the city school district states that teachers will keep their due-process and tenure rights regardless of how the state defines a teacher in statute, the Eagle reported. That would seem, in theory at least, to shield Wichita teachers from whatever the state does, even though the intent of the law seems to have been to protect nurses and social workers in city schools, not classroom teachers.

In theory, the state’s latest change to teacher protections simply puts more power in the local negotiating process between districts and local unions. In many cases, that shift puts much more power in collective bargaining into districts’ hands—teachers in Kansas are legally barred from going on strike. But here’s an instance where that shift to empower districts actually seems to help teachers.

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Rick Hess Straight Up

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States Opinion

During Coronavirus Crisis, How Can State Leaders Help Schools?

By Rick Hess — April 06, 2020 6 min read

As families, educators, and community leaders wrestle with COVID-19, we’ll be trying to bring conversations to readers that will be helpful in confronting the challenge.

Carrie Conaway is currently a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and previously served as the chief strategy and research officer for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. She is also the immediate past president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy. I recently talked with Carrie about the challenges coronavirus presents for state education departments, and how folks are dealing with them.

Rick: You spent years inside the Massachusetts department of education. Now that you’re on the outside and can speak freely, what are the folks in state government—in Massachusetts and elsewhere—likely wrestling with right now?

Carrie: I think the biggest challenge is likely that so much of how a state agency serves educators and kids depends on schools being in session. The immediate and obvious worry is how kids will get access to needed support services such as school lunch or special education without schools in operation. But there are also other concerns. How will teacher-candidates get the hours of classroom experience they need to earn their teaching licenses? How will states identify which schools need the most assistance if they can’t run their state testing program? How should the state advise high school principals on the minimum requirements for high school graduation when schools can’t run the required classes? Without schools in operation, the fundamental assumptions about how education happens are upended. State agencies will have to throw out their old playbooks to make this all work.

Rick: Many states, like Massachusetts, have hundreds of school districts. How does the state work across all those different environments effectively and efficiently in a crisis like this?

Carrie: It may be a hassle, but at least this is a condition states are used to dealing with! I imagine states are doing what we always tried to do in Massachusetts: listening to district questions and concerns and thinking through unintended consequences across all types of districts before making any decision. This is where stakeholder and advocacy groups can really help. They can surface issues and get them quickly to state leadership, to make sure the state is making the best-informed decisions it can in the short time available.

Rick: What kinds of state or federal policies might be making things trickier for schools and districts?

Carrie: Figuring out how to maintain access to free and reduced-price lunch and special education has been a big issue, of course. But equally as challenging are state laws around minimum instructional time, student testing, high school graduation requirements, reporting deadlines, and so forth. Most states will need to seek flexibility, waivers, or even changes to law from several federal agencies and their state legislatures to get through this. This is a challenge in itself because of the multiple agencies and processes involved.

A less obvious issue is the downstream impact of public procurement laws. State and federal laws often prohibit using public dollars to pay for services not yet rendered. Districts may have no way to maintain contracts for busing, health services, and so on if those vendors aren’t still working. Businesses like these are already starting to lay off workers because they can’t afford to keep them on the payroll.

Rick: What should state leaders be doing to help right now? What can they provide that’s most helpful, or what rules or requirements would it be useful to relax?

Carrie: I think the most important thing is for states to provide as much advance notice to districts and schools as they can of the plan for when and how school will reopen, so that districts in turn can inform families. I’d rather see schools stay closed a bit longer than absolutely necessary, with plenty of notice so people can plan, than keep pushing out the date every week or two and forcing families to readjust multiple times.

States also need to provide clearer advice on how to handle special cases such as access to services for students with disabilities, students who have not yet met graduation requirements, and so forth. Some of the early messaging I’ve seen on this has been garbled or inconsistent, but I anticipate that states will sort out those issues and provide better guidance in the coming days.

As a researcher and lover of data, it pains me to say this, but I would cancel state testing for spring 2020. Any test administered this spring is not likely to be a good measure of students’ knowledge, skills, and abilities, nor to be comparable to prior years’ data anyhow. States like Massachusetts that have a test-based high school graduation requirement might consider offering just that test but canceling all the others.

Rick: What is the state of online and virtual learning, and what are the challenges of doing it well?

Carrie: This strikes me as a much greater challenge in K-12, where most schools run on the assumption that students are coming to a physical classroom and sitting at traditional desks every day, than in higher ed, where many universities have an online-learning platform already up and running. The big issue is that relying on virtual learning to substitute for school is likely to exacerbate existing inequalities. The Boston Globe reported this week that as many as 15 percent of Boston public school students don’t have a laptop or computer at home to do schoolwork. And even if every kid had a computer, delivering online learning for students in K-12 assumes that a parent is available to make sure the computer is working, the internet is connected, the student understands the assignment, the student completes the assignment, and so on. Plenty of students of all stripes don’t have a parent available to do that right now, and school districts can’t just not educate those kids.

Rick: How will states be thinking about getting schools up and running again? What are the challenges of doing so?

Carrie: The top priority has to be safety, and not just the safety of students but of the whole community. Studies of prior epidemics show that schools can be a major source of transmission of disease. Schools shouldn’t reopen until public-health officials feel confident that it is safe to do so.

Beyond that, I think a lot will depend on where we are in the school year when the “all clear” comes. Everyone wants schools to get back to their normal routines as soon as possible and for students not to miss out on important learning—but does that mean coming back to business as usual? Should schools run longer school days or summer school to catch students up, or should they call a mulligan on this year and start afresh in the fall? States will need to provide guidance and set policy on these issues, and I’m sure most haven’t had bandwidth to focus much on this yet.

Rick: OK, last question. What are a couple of the most useful measures you’re seeing folks talk about or implement?

Carrie: I love the idea of deploying school buses to deliver grab-and-go meals to students. It’s a clever redeployment of resources that gets needed food to low-income students and keeps bus contractors in business. I have also appreciated how quickly people have stepped up to provide free internet-based access to educational resources such as museum tours, arts activities, and story time for kids—as well as access to the internet itself through Wi-Fi buses and laptop distribution. My former agency even set up a partnership with our local public-television station, WGBH, to provide educational programming from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. each weekday so students without internet access still have access to high-quality educational programming.

But perhaps the most useful thing I’ve seen are the many creative ways educators are working to maintain their learning communities at a distance. Whether that’s snack time by Zoom for young kids, phone calls or pen pals for students without internet access, or online discussion boards about course content for high schoolers, those human connections and sense of togetherness are what will get us through this crisis.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Which NCLB Waiver State Will Be the First to Get Off High-Risk Status?

By Alyson Klein — May 05, 2014 4 min read

Washington state has already lost its flexibility from the No Child Left Behind Act. But three other states—Arizona, Kansas, Oregon—may be able to shed the dreaded “high risk” label soon. All three states had until May 1 to submit a proposal to the U.S. Department of Education addressing the feds’ concerns with their waivers.

And in all three cases, as in Washington, teacher evaluation was a big piece of the problem. But the trio arguably had an easier lift than the Evergreen State, since none of them need new legislation to hang onto their waivers. Still, there’s a lot at stake here. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told state chiefs back in November that he expected to “revoke a waiver or two or three.”

Oregon was dinged last August because it hadn’t quite figured out how to incorporate student outcomes into its teacher-evaluation system, and asked for an additional year to test out potential methods. Now, state education department officials, working with the Oregon Education Association and other key advocacy groups, have come up with a teacher-evaluation system that they think will pass federal muster.

“We have every indication that this meets all their requirements,” Crystal Greene, a spokeswoman for the Oregon education department, said. “We’re very confident that it will be approved.” Under the new system, which will be based on a matrix, student growth on assessments will account for 20 percent of a teachers’ evaluation. The rest will come from a mix of factors, including observations and leadership skills, Greene said.

Kansas is also ready with its new teacher-evaluation plan. Back in August, the feds expressed concern that the state hadn’t piloted its teacher-evaluation system, and therefore hadn’t demonstrated that growth is a significant factor in evaluations, or that there’s enough differentiation among teachers.

Now the Sunflower State, has decided to offer its districts a model plan, called the Kansas Educator Evaluation Protocol, that they can opt to adopt or not. Districts that choose not to go for the state option can devise their own plans, or go with another model. But all plans must include multiple measures of student growth, including scores on state assessments, as well as meet other guidelines outlined in the Kansas’ waiver. Importantly, Kansas isn’t planning to specify that student progress on state tests make up a particular percentage of a teachers’ evaluation. That choice will be largely up to districts. Instead, Kansas defines “significant” as “demonstrating student growth in multiple ways using valid and reliable measures of student growth,” said Bill Bagshaw, the state’s assistant director of teacher license and accreditation.

Bagshaw said he’s feeling pretty good about Kansas’ chances. “I don’t have any reason to believe our waiver won’t be approved,” he said in an interview. “We’re prepared, we’ve done our work. The reality is we just sit back and wait.”

Arizona’s situation is a bit more complex. The state was put on high-risk status because of an issue with its teacher-evaluation system, but it also got into a tussle with the feds over how much graduation rates factor into a school’s overall rating. (In Arizona’s case, ratings are reflected through letter grades, on an A through F scale.) The state wanted graduation rates to count for 15 percent of a school’s overall rating, while the feds were hoping for 20 percent. Arizona has countered that it gives a heavy weight to other factors that are essential to students’ readiness for college and career, such as AP course-taking and success.

Giving a heavier weight to graduation rates would, in fact, make it easier for schools to earn a grade of “A” or “B” on the state’s grading scale, said Karla Phillips, the director of cross-divisional leadership initiatives at the Arizona Department of Education. And, even with a 15 percent weight, more schools earn an “A” or “B”, so the state board is set to consider a “rescaling” proposal later this month. The state is including data with its request to backup its claims, Phillips said.

Arizona is also working through another technical, but important, issue on teacher evaluation. The state—which has had a teacher-evaluation law on the books since 2010, long before the waivers—calls for student growth on tests to be factored in as 20 percent of a teacher’s overall rating, but it isn’t specific about whether a district or charter school must use state or local assessments. (That’s similar to the problem Washington ran into.)

In its new request, Arizona will make it clear that the state assessment must be a “significant” factor, but, like Kansas, it will leave it up to local districts and charters to decide just what significant means in terms of a percentage, until 2016. At that point, the state plans to revisit the issue, when it has additional data from new PARCC assessments.

Will the request be approved? Phillips offered a measured response. “I wouldn’t say we’re confident, but we are certainly hopeful,” she said. “We feel that we are approaching this process with good intentions and in good faith.”

And she had an interesting reflection on the process of going back-and-forth with the feds.

“When we started this journey, it was very high level,” with an emphasis on big concepts such as high standards and effective teachers, Phillips said. “We are very much now into the weeds of frameworks” and other technical provisions.


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College & Workforce Readiness

N.Y. State Seniors Flunk Exit Exam, But Get Diplomas

By David J. Hoff — July 09, 2003 5 min read

New York state officials allowed thousands of students to graduate from high school last month even though the seniors had failed a requisite mathematics exam, because the test may not have been fair.

The experience illustrates yet another kind of obstacle states may encounter as they ramp up their high-stakes exams.

The decision to let the seniors don their graduation gowns followed a week of acrimony over what school officials said were unusually high failure rates on the “Math A” state regents’ exam. Citing early indications that the June 17 test was flawed and unfair, Commissioner of Education Richard P. Mills gave districts permission to award diplomas to seniors who had passed the course that is based on the state’s math standards.

New York officials have begun studying the problems, asking a series of questions about whether the test itself was too difficult, whether it accurately reflected the course content in the high school math standards, and whether schools are able to help all students reach the new, high standards to earn a high school diploma.

The experience shows that any of the 24 states that now or soon will require an exit exam need to proceed cautiously and be prepared to fix problems quickly, New York officials and national experts say.

“If this can happen to us,” said James A. Kadamus, the state’s deputy commissioner of elementary, middle, and secondary education, referring to the state’s long history of offering the regents’ exams, “it can happen to anybody.”

While New York’s public relations problem of denying students their diplomas on the eve of graduation has been averted, state leaders still face questions about their ambitious plan to require all students pass regents’ exams—tests once given only to the college-bound. State legislators have already said they will hold hearings on the exams, amid a growing public backlash.

“The media attention hasn’t died down,” said Tom Rogers, the executive director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents. “That speaks volumes about the level of concerns that are out there.”

In the fallout from the flap, Roseanne DeFabio, the state’s assistant commissioner for curriculum, instruction, and assessment, resigned after Mr. Mills said he would take the testing program out of her office, a department spokesman said.

Going Slow

States that have been writing high school exit exams have all hit minor snags along the way, according to Keith Gayler, the associate director of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington think tank that tracks such issues.

Most states have been able to deal with their problems, Mr. Gayler said, by delaying test implementation. Just last month, the Ohio school board decided it would conduct an extra round of pilot-testing of its graduation exam because failure rates in the first go-round were too high, according to J.C. Benton, a spokesman for the education department.

Other states have made minor adjustments. Nevada temporarily lowered the passing score on its exam, and Florida has allowed students to substitute their scores on the SAT and ACT college-admissions tests. (“States Debate Exam Policies for Diplomas,” May 14, 2003.)

But none has faced the question of whether to deny students diplomas based on what is perceived to be an unjust test.

Since 1996, New York has been phasing in the rule that students pass regents’ exams to graduate. Seniors needed to pass tests in English, math, world history, American history, and one science subject this year. They are given several chances to pass each. Students at any grade level can take the tests when they finish their coursework. Some even enter senior year having passed them all.

After the students took the June 17 math test, local school officials who scored the exams noticed a higher-than-average number of students were failing. About 5,800 seniors—or about 4 percent of the total class of 2003—took the test on that date. Early estimates suggested that at least 70 percent of juniors and seniors did not pass, Mr. Kadamus said. Freshmen and sophomores fared better, he noted.

Faced with mounting criticism, Mr. Mills, the state schools chief, announced on June 24 that seniors who had passed the Math A course would be allowed to graduate on time. Graduation dates vary statewide, but they began shortly after Mr. Mills announced his decision. He also said juniors who flunked the exam would be eligible for graduation if they passed a Math A course.

Freshmen and sophomores will have to pass forthcoming versions of the exam to earn diplomas, if they haven’t done so already.

To address what went wrong, Mr. Mills said in his June 24 announcement that he had convened a panel of experts to review the test and decide whether it properly assessed the content of the curriculum and whether it was too difficult.

An estimated 80 percent of the freshmen who took the June 17 test passed it, according to Mr. Kadamus. He speculated that group was made up of high-achieving students; otherwise, they would not have taken the test at that early stage. The seniors who took it then were more likely to be those who struggle with math.

“One theory is that we have a set of expectations embodied in this exam that is running ahead of where the field is for all students,” he said. “I’m not sure we’ve found the right instructional methods to get them there yet.”

Similar problems are bound to surface in any state that is trying to require high standards in all schools, contends Jack Jennings, the director of the Center on Education Policy. “They’re raising the bar, but they’re raising it in an unequal system,” he said of states. “They’re facing the reality of how unequal American education is.”

New York educators say they believe the problem lies with the test itself. After reviewing the exam, which is available to the public, Mr. Rogers of the superintendents’ council said he found it to be harder than previous versions.

Degree of Difficulty

The June 17 test required students to apply mathematical principles in ways the previous exams had not. The test’s final problem required students to use the Pythagorean Theorem two times in a three-dimensional object to arrive at the correct answer. Most students hadn’t been shown how to use the theorem in anything other than simple problems, Mr. Rogers said.

“That makes it more of a riddle than an assessment of math skill,” he said. “I don’t know if those kinds of insights are what we can expect at the commencement level yet.”

Mr. Kadamus of the state education department said the June version had more such problem-solving questions than previous exams because the state is gradually raising its expectations.

Such additions may give rise to a higher hurdle for one set of test-takers than another. Even the best test-writers can’t produce two tests that are of equal difficulty and cover the same material, said Daniel Koretz, a professor of education at Harvard University.

The question for policymakers, he pointed out, is how much deviation from year to year are they willing to tolerate.

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Early Childhood

Research: Dual-Language Pre-K Effective in Teaching English

By Maureen Kelleher — November 30, 2010 1 min read

More from last week’s conference on Illinois and bilingual/dual-language programs. Diane August, a researcher at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Applied Linguistics, presented evidence from three studies of high-quality, dual-language preschools that showed dual-language instruction to be just as effective as English-only in helping children learn English. Dual-language programs had the bonus of helping children develop proficiency in their home language, too. For details, you can see the PowerPoint here (scroll down below the bullet points to the highlighted phrase “reviewed the research”).

The particular study I found most interesting tracked participants in a home-reading program complementing preschool. The children read English in school and in their home language—Spanish or Hmong—at home with caregivers for six weeks; the other six weeks, caregivers read books in English at home. The researchers found that children’s vocabulary increased whether they were read to in English or in their home language, but parent participation increased substantially when the home language was part of the picture.

My colleague Mary Ann Zehr’s story about the challenges Illinois will face in implementing its new mandate for bilingual instruction in preschools suggests the biggest hurdle will be to find enough qualified teachers to staff classrooms. Observers also raised questions about how well teachers will manage the transition to English or whether they will spend time exclusively in the home language (often, but not always, Spanish). Zehr also gets inside a classroom at Peck Elementary on Chicago’s Southwest Side, where the majority of instruction was in English, with just two 10-minute blocks of time in Spanish.

Related Tags:

A version of this news article first appeared in the Early Years blog.


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Special Report

Who’s to Blame for the Black-White Achievement Gap?

By Christina A. Samuels — January 07, 2020 6 min read
17BI 2 cCallory

Years ago, as part of my parents’ unending attempts to clear the house of the junk I left when I moved out, my mother handed me a folder stuffed with remnants of my public school education.

Tucked away with my elementary school report cards and other papers were some yellowed form letters from The College Board declaring my SAT scores. I took the college admissions test twice as a high school student in the late 1980s, prepped only with the practice tests that my school offered.

My final scores landed me in the 99th percentile of college-bound high school seniors nationally at the time; my math score was in the 75th percentile. “Good enough,” I thought, and proceeded to forget about them for years.

My SAT scores might have remained a bit of trivia had I not become an education reporter. But my career has given me a reason to think a lot about testing, and what seems to be an intractable test-score gap between black students (as well as Hispanic and American Indian and Alaska Native students) and white and Asian students.

It sounds naive, but at the start of my career as an education reporter, I really wondered: Why is there such a big black-white test gap? I mean, I’m no genius, but I did OK. Why does this gulf never seem to close?

It’s becoming easier to look at the SATs, specifically, and say those scores don’t matter any more. Some of the nation’s most exclusive colleges and universities—Bowdoin, Wake Forest, the University of Chicago, and other well-respected liberal arts institutions—have become test-optional. It’s an ironic dismissal of a test that was originally created to bring equity to the college admissions process.

But the same ethnic and racial gaps exist across all kinds of tests, not just assessments for college admissions. One could argue that the SAT is too easily influenced by outside factors, such as test-prep classes. But students don’t prep for the National Assessment for Educational Progress, and the so-called “Nation’s Report Card” shows similar gaps.

Teachers have one of the closest views of student performance, and Education Week recently asked them what they believe are the factors that explain why white students, overall, perform better academically than black students. (The survey respondents were predominantly white, like the teaching population as a whole, with 20 to 30 years in the classroom.) The teachers were given a number of factors to choose from: genetics, discrimination, school quality, student motivation, parenting, income levels, home environments, and neighborhood environments.

The explanation of student performance, those teachers said, rests primarily with the students and their parents. Three-quarters or more of respondents said that motivation, parenting, income, home environments, and neighborhood environments explained student academic gaps “somewhat,” “quite a lot,” or “extremely.”

Seventy-two percent said “school quality” was a major factor. A little less than half said that discrimination played a major role.

A notable minority, about 29 percent, said that genetics are somewhat to extremely significant in explaining academic gaps between black students and white students. (An even higher percentage of respondents, 38 percent, said genetics are a significant reason why Asian students in the aggregate have better academic outcomes than their white peers.)

That disparity may not be the fault of individual teachers—but it’s someone’s fault."

But “black” is as much a social construct as it is a matter of genetic heritage: I have two black parents and call myself black. So does Barack Obama, who has one white parent. So does Kamala Harris, a U.S. senator from California, who has one parent from India. The category of “black” is fluid, as are other racial and ethnic categories—and geneticists agree that we are more different from each other as individuals, than we are as populations grouped by “race.”

I was defensive and annoyed when I analyzed the results of this survey. “It’s not our fault!” seemed to be the takeaway from teachers, but kids spend up to 13 years of their lives in school. Of course what happens there is relevant.

But I have to acknowledge some truth in what these teachers are saying. Yes, it mattered that my parents were middle-class, college-educated folks who filled my childhood home with books. Yes, it mattered that they were able to show me, through their lives, the rewards that can come from a good education. But it also mattered that they were able to work the system well enough to steer me into well-resourced schools in a well-resourced school district.

And that leads me to an element that overlies all of this: wealth.

Poor students of all races perform worse on tests than more-affluent students. It’s true of the SATs and every other standardized test. And black students (along with Hispanic and American Indian and Alaska Native students) are more likely than their white and Asian counterparts to be poor.

And there are specific policy decisions that amplify the corrosive effects of poverty. Right now, majority-minority school districts get $23 billion less in funding nationally than majority-white school districts, according to EdBuild, a nonprofit organization working to overhaul school finance systems.

That disparity may not be the fault of individual teachers—but it’s someone’s fault. We are concentrating students who may already have the least, into school districts that have less money to support them. And instead of trying to make the system fairer, it’s actually getting worse, as a growing number of affluent communities work to form their own school districts, effectively keeping their resources for themselves.

I want to end on a hopeful note. So I talked to Ronald F. Ferguson, an economist and the director of Harvard’s Achievement Gap Initiative. He’s studied this issue as closely as anyone in the field, and, in 2016, released a report called “Aiming Higher Together: Strategizing Better Educational Outcomes for Boys and Young Men of Color.”

This report resonated with me because it attempts to explain all the barriers that stand in the way of students by the time they reach adolescence. Unsurprisingly, Ferguson said that the academic gap begins before children start school, which points to the need for more supports at home. Those academic gaps and the behavioral problems that come along with them are often met with teacher hostility and low expectations, all curdling into what Ferguson in this paper called “the predicament.”

Ferguson studied successful school-based interventions and outlined several common elements of success. None of them are surprising—a commitment to high expectations for all students, rigorous instruction, and well-managed classrooms, among them—but each takes hard work to implement at scale.

Right now, Ferguson is particularly focused on supporting early-brain development as a key to success for all children. “I like to emphasize the opportunity we have, as opposed to cataloging the differences” among children of different races and ethnicities, Ferguson said. “There are things that parents and communities could do differently to help children to achieve more early-brain development than they do.”

And that early-brain development can get all children off to a good start—as long as there are strong schools and teachers to support them.

“Nobody by themselves can change the laws of motion in this system,” he said.

So why are achievement gaps so persistent? I’m left with the realization that none of us are off the hook. Not parents, teachers, schools, or policymakers.

I have a son who is just a few years into his public school education. Like my parents did for me, I’d like to create a path so smooth that he is successful without even having to think too hard about how it happened.

But I can’t do it by myself, no matter what my SAT scores were. Why achievement gaps exist is an important question. But more to the point, I think, is that we agree that we are all responsible for trying to close them.

< Idea #1

Sure, We Teach History. But Do We Know Why It’s Important?

Sure, We Teach History. But Do We Know Why It's Important?

Idea #3 >

Teachers, the Robots Are Coming (And That’s Not a Bad Thing)

Teachers, the Robots Are Coming (And That's Not a Bad Thing)

A version of this article appeared in the January 08, 2020 edition of Education Week as Whose Fault Is the Black-White Achievement Gap?

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