[Ohiogift] Public Education NewsBlast — April 7, 2015

[Art Snyder]

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 ?April 07, 2015 - In This Issue:
ESEA at 50
What increasing the number of bachelor's degrees will -- and will not -- do
Voc ed: now rigorous and real-world
Lessons of Louisville
The Red State that hearts the Common Core
Girls are still stronger readers. What of it?
A death knell for the textbook
Youth incarceration: the hidden civil rights crisis
BRIEFLY NOTED CALIFORNIA
BRIEFLY NOTED
GRANTS AND FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES
 ESEA at 50
Fifty years ago this month, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) outside the one-room schoolhouse he'd once attended, writes Alyson Klein for Education Week. The new law dramatically ramped up Washington's investment in K-12 education for the nation's poorest children. Five decades and more than a half-dozen ESEA revisions later, the federal K-12 role remains unresolved. After hitting a high-water mark with bipartisan passage in 2001 of the No Child Left Behind Act -- an ESEA overhaul that gave the U.S. Department of Education unprecedented sway over how states measured student achievement and intervened in failing schools -- consensus around a strong federal role has collapsed. Over the years, the ESEA has also taken on a civil-rights cast. NCLB, for example, requires states to intervene in schools with poor results for minority students, even if their student population as a whole is succeeding. NCLB was never intended to go 13 years without an update, but a polarized Congress has been unable to renew the legislation. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has under two years remaining, and it's unclear if the next administration -- Democratic or Republican -- will continue with the waivers or put its own twist on the ESEA. More
 What increasing the number of bachelor's degrees will -- and will not -- do
Will increasing educational attainment decrease economic inequality in this county? A new paper from the Hamilton Project simulates the national distribution of earnings if one out of every ten American men aged 25-64 who lack a bachelor's degree were to instantly obtain one. Low-skilled men have seen the largest drops in employment and earnings over the past few decades, and are considerably less likely to attend and graduate from college. The paper finds that increasing educational attainment increases average earnings and likelihood of employment, but does not shrink earnings inequality overall. Most earnings inequality is at the top of the distribution; changing college shares doesn't affect this. Increasing college shares does, however, reduce inequality in the bottom half of the distribution, boosting earnings of those around the 25th percentile. Higher levels of skills for those around and below the middle of the distribution is therefore the most effective and direct way to increase economic security, reduce poverty, and expand upward mobility. But increasing skills does not simply mean increasing attainment of bachelor's degrees -- it also means improving K-12 education, with more training and human capital development in specific skills demanded by the labor force.?To address rising levels of overall inequality, separate measures would be needed. More
 Voc ed: now rigorous and real-world
As high school reform gains momentum around the country, vocational education is reviving, writes Sarah Garland for The Hechinger Report. New models hope to change voc ed's reputation as a dumping ground for students who can't hack the academic track. The National Academy Foundation, a network of 600 schools that house "work-based learning" programs, now serves 80,000 students, up from 50,000 in 2010. Students complete internships and participate in classes shaped by business partners, while also taking college-track courses. The foundation says over half its graduates earn a bachelor's within four years of high school graduation. Along with blue-collar skills, schools incorporate key strategies of the college-ready movement that connect learning to the real world, with curricula organized around projects. For instance, at Greater Waco Advanced Manufacturing Academy in Texas, geometry students spend the year using formulas to create blueprints for a house -- then build it. The school lost a dozen students from its original 67 juniors and seniors in fall of 2013 because some decided its vocational focus and rigor were too challenging. Greater Waco administrators encourage students to be savvy about planning for post-secondary education, teaching them about the tuition-reimbursement programs that the school's partner companies offer to employees. More
 Lessons of Louisville
Louisville, Kentucky, an economically vibrant city in a highly conservative and segregated state, is arguably a success today because of its integrated schools and collaboration among racial and economic groups resulting from court-ordered desegregation in the 1970s, writes Alana Semuels in The Atlantic. Jefferson County is one of few districts nationally that still buses students among urban and suburban neighborhoods, with residents and leaders defending the plan up to the Supreme Court in 2006. Jefferson County Public Schools is 49 percent white, 37 percent black, and 14 percent Latino and other groups. It spreads across 400 square miles, encompassing tracts in which half the population lives below the poverty line, and tracts where less than 10 percent does. It has no struggling inner-city schools; some of its most sought-after schools are downtown. Now-flourishing Louisville was declining in the early '70s, but appears to have embraced the idea that a region can't prosper when some are mired in poverty. In contrast, Detroit, facing a similar court order in 1972, was released from combining city and county schools by Milliken v. Bradley, a decision many consider one of the worst in the Supreme Court's history. Detroit has for years struggled with a declining tax base, high vacancy rates, and high crime, while its suburbs are the whitest and wealthiest in Michigan. More
 The Red State that hearts the Common Core
Republicans hate the Common Core, observes Louis Jacobson for Governing Magazine. Several red states -- Indiana, Oklahoma, and South Carolina, all initial adopters -- have withdrawn from the standards, with other red states making strident moves to follow suit. Wyoming is a surprising contrast, with a deliberate, bipartisan effort to refine and enshrine the standards. Political leaders there say despite grassroots resistance, they're sticking with them. Jillian Balow, Republican state schools superintendent, says she's talked to thousands of people and never heard they didn't want high standards for their kids. Under a policy backed by Balow and legislators, the state will revisit the Common Core every five years. Wyoming lawmakers have also cleared the way for new science standards facing similar grassroots criticism. How has the Common Core survived in a state with no statewide Democratic officials, and Democratic legislative caucuses in the single digits? For one, Wyoming implemented the standards early, but perhaps more importantly saw buy-in at the district level. The Common Core is widely seen in districts as better than previous standards. Observers say Balow has shrewdly framed the issue as one of national vs. local control -- with the national thrust being anti-Common Core. "I'm a conservative. I'm a Republican, small-government gal. But I don't think of solving problems in a partisan way," Balow says. More
 Girls are still stronger readers. What of it?
A new study from the Brookings Institution finds that based on eight estimates of U.S. national reading performance, girls consistently outscore boys, as they have for decades.?It also finds gaps are shrinking. At age nine, the gap on the NAEP Long Term Trend (NAEP-LTT) between girls and boys declined from 13 scale score points in 1971 to five in 2012, with smaller gap shrinkages at ages 13 and 17.?This performance gap is also worldwide: On the 2012 PISA, 15-year-old females outperformed males in all 65 participating countries. But for all of this, the gap seems to disappear by adulthood.?Tests of adult ability show no U.S. gender gap in reading by age 25, and in later years, scores tilt toward men.?So what should be done? Perhaps nothing, writes the study's author, Tom Loveless.?As noted, the gap vanishes, and since we don't know its cause, a remedy is elusive. Many argue that schools should try getting boys to enjoy reading more, since reading enjoyment is statistically correlated with performance. But Loveless dismisses the idea based on weak causality. He stresses that large, cross-sectional assessments are good for measuring academic performance at one point in time, and are useful for generating hypotheses based on observed relationships, but are not designed to confirm or reject a causal link. More
 A death knell for the textbook
The Common Core was expected to be a boon to textbook publishers, allowing them to market the same books in 40-plus states, but instead may usher in the textbook's extinction, writes Rachel Monahan for Quartz. In 2014, textbooks sales for K-12 were 3 percent lower than in 2009, according to the Association of American Publishers. Education leaders and experts fault textbook quality. Writing high-quality textbooks takes time, and other sources have been more nimble, making freely available online curricula a major force in the industry. Two studies of math books last year found that major-publisher math textbooks labeled "Common Core" didn't address key parts of the standards and were mostly reiterations of past versions of textbook series. "We're going from the dominant paradigm of the publishing industry to a much more flexible, often electronically distributed, more Silicon Valley-like lifting up of content from lots of sources, often from teachers themselves for other teachers and leaders, with new distribution platforms that go directly to users with a much broader base of content developers," said Scott Hartl of Expeditionary Learning. Still, districts are discovering that materials available for free cost money, in terms of downloading and printing. A future without textbooks was supposed to look sleeker, and may yet, but at the moment it's still paper-based. More
 Youth incarceration: the hidden civil rights crisis
In Meridian, Mississippi in 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit to stop the city's juvenile discipline practices it found were enforced so "arbitrarily and severely as to shock the conscience," writes Jody Owens of the Southern Poverty Law Center for Politico.com. Understanding the dynamic at work in Meridian is key to understanding how the United States imprisons more people -- and a larger share of its population -- than any other country on the planet. Owens traces the school-to-prison pipeline to 1990s reports of "superpredators" -- described as "radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters," a phenomenon now debunked as junk science and myth. Yet in response, police departments began supplying on-duty "school resource officers" to patrol hallways, and educators began to confuse adolescent misbehavior with criminality. The results have been disastrous. Introducing youth to judicial and penal systems does little or nothing to help troubled children become better citizens. Research finds the brain doesn't fully develop until a person's mid-20s, with the part of the brain that governs decision-making the last to develop. A child may engage in dangerous behavior without fully realizing risks and consequences for himself and others, but he also has an extra propensity for rehabilitation. We shouldn't give up on kids who get into trouble, Owen says. Yet that's what we're doing. More
 BRIEFLY NOTED CALIFORNIA
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Economic drought
Because of stagnant funding, California's after-school programs can't retain and attract high-quality staff, and have reduced enrichment activities offered to low-income students, according to a survey by the Partnership for Children & Youth. More
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A Latino literacy?deficit
Latino babies whose language comprehension is roughly similar to white?peers?at 9 months?fall significantly behind by the time they are 2,?according to a new study from UC Berkeley.?More
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Less-contentious unions, perhaps
Lawyers, metal workers, and police employed by the LAUSD were among groups of employees who earned more on average than a typical teacher last year.?More
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And that's nothing, compared to insurance brokers
An insurance broker faces charges of grand theft for allegedly stealing more than $500,000 from accounts managed by his employer, including a LAUSD program.?More
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The long shadow of Uncle Ho
The Westminster School District has pulled a Vietnamese-language textbook and workbook from a classroom because of concerns by some in the Little Saigon community that certain sections have pro-Communist wording.?More

 BRIEFLY NOTED?
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A scandal draws to its close
In a dramatic conclusion to a landmark case,?an Atlanta jury convicted 11 educators for their roles in a standardized-test cheating scandal that tarnished a district's reputation and raised broader questions about high-stakes testing in American schools. More
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Long may they waive
Kentucky, Minnesota, North Carolina, New Mexico, and Virginia may keep their NCLB waivers for another four years, through 2018-19, beyond the end of the Obama administration.?More
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Not quite the plan
A third of the approximately 112,000 students receiving federal Teach Grants have had them changed to loans, according to the Government Accountability Office.?More
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Fightin' words
Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers tweeted and wrote on her Facebook page that she supports parents who opt out of the PARCC tests.?More
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He's pleased, anyway
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says the reform measures tucked into New York state's $150 billion budget will move education from a seniority-based system that protects teachers to one that focuses on their performance.?More
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Stet
The U.S. Supreme Court has left intact New York City's ban on religious worship services inside school buildings after hours.?More
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Crowd pleaser
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf intends to steer the state away from school accountability measures that he says place too great an emphasis on standardized test scores.??More
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Alternative measures
A bill that will pay for students with special needs to receive education outside the public school system likely will go to the desk of Missouri Gov. Phil Bryant, who has indicated he will sign it.?More

 
 GRANTS AND FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES

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Lalor Foundation: Anna Lalor Burdick Program
The Anna Lalor Burdick Program seeks to empower young women through education about healthy reproduction in order to broaden and enhance their options in life. The program focuses particularly on young women who have inadequate access to information regarding sexual and reproductive health, including comprehensive and unbiased information on contraception and pregnancy termination. Areas of interest include programs that include a comprehensive approach to sexual and reproductive health education; novel ideas, including innovative methods of providing information; and programs that incorporate advocacy or policy change. Maximum award: $50,000. Eligibility: 501(c)(3) programs for young women, particularly those who are disadvantaged by poverty, discrimination, geographic isolation, lack of specific sex education, hostile public policy, or other factors leading to inadequate reproductive health. Deadline: May 1, 2015. More
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Action for Healthy Kids: School Breakfast Grants
Action for Healthy Kids is offering grants to to pilot or expand their School 
 Breakfast Programs, including alternative breakfast, or pilot universal school breakfast. Maximum award: $2,500. Eligibility: K-12 schools with a free/reduced priced meal eligibility equal to or greater than 40 percent for the School Building Alternative Breakfast Grant; 50 percent for the School District Alternative Breakfast Grant; and 60 percent for the Universal School Breakfast Pilot Grants. All schools are eligible to apply for the Every Kid Healthy Grants, though schools with greater than 50 percent of students eligible for free/reduced priced meals may receive priority. Deadline: May 1, 2015. More
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RWJF: Sports Award
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Sports Award recognizes the ways in which sports influence healthy change in communities by helping children maintain a healthy weight, creating safe play environments, encouraging positive behaviors, eliminating bullying, abuse and violence, and expanding opportunities for children living in poverty. Maximum award: $5,000. Eligibility: professional sports team community relations departments or foundations based in North America; individual athlete or professional coach's foundations based in North America; organizations in North America that are influential leaders and models for others. Deadline: May 13, 2015. More
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Quote of the Week:?
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"[Abandoning testing would] be equivalent to saying 'O.K., because there are some players that cheated in Major League Baseball, we should stop keeping score, because that only encourages people to take steroids,'?" -- Thomas Kane, director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University. More

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