[Ohiogift] Public Education NewsBlast — May 19, 2015

[Art Snyder]

  May 19, 2015 - In This Issue:
Invisible black girls
Uneven grad rates, but this can change
Cri de Core
SIG: Part of the problem
Data, data everywhere
Reduced class size can work
Questioning 3rd-grade retention
What countries could gain
BRIEFLY NOTED CALIFORNIA
BRIEFLY NOTED
GRANTS AND FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES
 Invisible black girls
The urgent focus on interventions for boys of color has rendered black girls all but invisible, writes Melinda Anderson for The Atlantic. "The gender-exclusive focus on [black] boys as ground zero ... continues to undermine the well-being of our entire community," says Kimberlé Crenshaw of UCLA and Columbia, co-founder of the African American Policy Forum. Present discourse around boys of color is largely driven by President Obama's initiative My Brother's Keeper, which strives to remove barriers to education and employment for black and brown males. But challenges for females get less attention, even though one in four black girls in the nation's capital, for instance, will become a teen mother, significantly lowering her prospects for high-school completion. Nationally, black girls are six times more likely to be suspended from school than white girls; black boys just three times more likely than white boys. In interviews, black girls describe alienating learning environments, as well as sexual harassment and violence in their everyday environment. Family responsibilities, such as caring for siblings, also disproportionately fall to females. To foreground girls of color in policy talks, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the National Women's Law Center, and the African American Policy Forum have launched #WhyWeCantWait, urging the president to include females in his initiative and challenging a single-gender racial agenda that erases half the children of color. More
 Uneven grad rates, but this can change
According to the 6th annual Building a Grad Nation report, the national high school graduation rate between 2011 and 2013 hit a record high of 81.4 percent. For the third year in a row, the nation continues on pace to attain 90 percent on-time graduation by 2020. Yet improvement in states and large districts has varied considerably. Some, including those that are majority low-income and minority, made large strides; others lost ground. Improvements therefore don't reflect broad economic, demographic, or social trends, but a constellation of leadership-driven reforms and multi-sector efforts at state, district, and school levels. With focus and concerted effort, graduation rates can increase everywhere. The report recommends that states and districts eradicate zero-tolerance discipline policies, since expelled or suspended students are far more likely to drop out. States and districts should expand use of early-warning indicators, allowing educators to intervene at the earliest and most critical times. State funding must also be made more equitable, so low-income students enjoy the same opportunities as their affluent peers. A standard diploma must be offered to all students, thereby limiting exit options that prematurely take students with disabilities off-track to graduating on time. Finally, policymakers must increase use of consistent and comparable data to hold states accountable for graduation rates, deploying these data as a tool for determining where challenges exist. More
 Cri de Core
It's time to debunk myths about who's good in math, and the Common Core ushers us toward this goal, writes Jo Boaler of Stanford University in The Hechinger Report. All children are different in their thinking, strengths, and interests. Brain science tells us better memorizers don't have greater math "ability" or potential, yet we continue to value faster memorizers over those who think slowly, deeply, and creatively -- the very students we need for our scientific and technological future. Mathematics classes of the past decade have valued the learner who memorizes well and calculates fast. Yet data from 13 million students taking PISA tests shows the lowest-achieving students worldwide are those who use memorization strategies, viewing math as a set of methods. The highest-achieving students are those who think of math as a set of connected, big ideas. Our most recent generation of students is procedurally competent but can't think its way out of a box. Mathematics is broad and multidimensional, about inquiry, communication, connections, and visual ideas. We don't need students who calculate quickly. We need students who ask good questions, map pathways, reason out complex solutions, build models, and communicate in different forms. These ways of working are all encouraged by the Common Core. More
 SIG: Part of the problem
A review from the National Education Policy Center of a report from the Center for American Progress about school turnarounds finds its claims and recommendations aren't founded in rigorous research. The report argues that available research indicates bold actions are necessary to improve low-performing schools measurably, advocating that the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program carries the most effective methods for turning these low-performing schools around. The reviewer feels SIG policies have superficial appeal, and given unsatisfactory outcomes, are based on unwarranted claims that are contradicted by empirical evidence. She points, for instance, to the claim that dramatic changes in staffing and management spur fast and sustainable improvement. In fact, such drastic disruptions generally lead to poor school performance, but readily available and plentiful research about this is not incorporated into the report. "In the end," the reviewer states, "schools, districts, and states that follow the report's advice stand only to reproduce the unequal conditions that have led, in part, to their need for dramatic turnaround in the first place." More
 Data, data everywhere
Some districts, taking a cue from the business world, are fully embracing data and metrics, recording and analyzing every scrap of information related to school operations, writes Motoko Rich for The New York Times. The goal is improvement in everything from bus routes to classroom cleanliness to reading comprehension. In Jenks, Okla., for example, the district tracks how often teachers use photocopiers. With a bump in use, curriculum supervisors help teachers find supplemental class materials and plan lessons further in advance. After documenting a drop in the size of marching bands, the Arlington Independent School District near Dallas suspended instrument rental fees; band participation jumped. "We've been making most decisions up until now by anecdote or hunch, or by who had the greatest sales pitch or what worked when I was in school," says Aimee Rogstad Guidera of the Data Quality Campaign. Still, critics worry a focus on metrics could sideline intangible factors that enhance learning and inspire students. Just as doctors observe more than blood pressure or cholesterol readings when treating patients, "the same is true in education," says Pedro Noguera of New York University. "If you only look at numbers and don't probe and look at the learning environment -- the culture of the school or the relationships between teachers and students -- you're going to miss a lot." More
 Reduced class size can work
A new report from the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center explores the connection between class size and student learning, distilling key principles, and comparing current class sizes in Massachusetts with optimum sizes identified by research, then estimating cost of bringing class sizes down in targeted districts. It notes that class-size reduction efforts have not always been well implemented; prominent successes and costly failures are both instructive. A review of class-size reduction efforts across the country prompts four policy recommendations. First, target early grades. Elementary class-size reductions are most effective kindergarten through 3rd grade. Second, target students with greatest need. All students benefit from smaller classes, but students of color and low-income students particularly benefit from well-designed class-size reductions. Third, employ strong teachers. Reducing class sizes involves hiring additional teachers, and it's critical they're highly qualified. When California implemented statewide class-size reductions, results fell short in part because of under-qualified teachers. Finally, combine class-size reduction with other school practices like appropriate teacher training and support, increased learning time, and services that address non-academic barriers that students face outside the classroom. More
 Questioning 3rd-grade retention
A rising number of states bar promotion for students who don't read proficiently by 3rd grade, yet new research questions retention's effectiveness, as well as the timing of reading development itself, writes Sarah Sparks for Education Week. The theorized cognitive shift from "learning to read" in 3rd grade to "reading to learn" in 4th grade may not be as clear-cut as traditionally thought. "Not being able to decode is different from phonological fluency, which is different from not understanding what words mean," says Shane Jimerson of the University of California, Santa Barbara. "Just repeating a grade is not going to magically solve those problems, and it adds the consequences psychologically of being left behind." The Common Core State Standards call for students to begin "reading to learn" -- drawing information from text -- as early as kindergarten, despite no clear break between learning to read and reading to learn. And the recommended timing of interventions is questioned, too. "There isn't this magic age that, if you don't catch a kid by that age, you lose them forever," says Timothy Shanahan of the University of Illinois at Chicago. "Just because you catch a 7-year-old up and get him to his class average, that's terrific, but that doesn't guarantee his future, either. What you tend to see is [retained students] fall back over time." More
 What countries could gain
A new report from the OECD projects economic and social benefits that will accrue to countries -- regardless of national wealth -- if they ensure every child can not only access education but acquire baseline skills to participate fully in society. The skills that drive economic growth are not measured by school attainment; access to schools alone is an incomplete and ineffective goal. Using data from 76 countries, the report focuses on that portion of a country's population lacking basic skills for full participation in today's global economy, which it defines as acquisition of at least Level 1 skills (420 points) on the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), corresponding to modern functional literacy. Based on these metrics, the report predicts that under three scenarios -- all current students attain basic skills; full enrollment at current educational quality; and universally attained basic skills -- lower middle-income countries (e.g., Ghana, Honduras) would gain 627 percent of their current GDP; 206 percent of their current GDP; or 1,302 percent of their current GDP, respectively. High-income OECD countries (e.g., U.S., Greece) would gain 142 percent; 19 percent; or 162 percent of current GDP, respectively. The report also makes projections for upper middle-income countries (e.g., Thailand, Hungary) and high-income non-OECD countries (e.g., Hong Kong-China, United Arab Emirates). More
 BRIEFLY NOTED CALIFORNIA
 
'The next salvo'
California's teachers unions have filed the opening brief in their appeal of the ruling in Vergara v. California, the next move in an ongoing battle over teacher quality in the state. More
 
Unconstitutional
A judge has ruled that California's sex-education law prohibits districts from indoctrinating students on the need to remain celibate before marriage or teaching them that abstinence is the only safe way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. More
 
We like it
A coalition of 500 California groups, along with a recent poll, indicate statewide support of the Common Core State Standards. More
 
Keep going
The Los Angeles Board of Education has voted unanimously to extend the contract of schools Supt. Ramon Cortines for a year, through June 2016. More

 BRIEFLY NOTED 
True grit
A new survey of more than 30,000 U.S. teachers finds that most of them report high levels of stress and low levels of autonomy, but also shows they are not ready to abandon the classroom. More
 
Unintended?
Results of the new third-grade reading test that aims to make it tougher for Mississippi students to advance if they don't read at grade level could mean 15 percent of the state's test-takers will repeat third grade. More
 
Duckworth redux
Angela Duckworth, the scientist most closely associated with the concept of "grit," has published a new paper arguing that calculations of grit aren't ready for prime time, if prime time means high-stakes tests. More
 
Getting hard Core
Citing the state's economic competitiveness, New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan has vetoed a bill that would prohibit the Department of Education or the New Hampshire Board of Education from implementing Common Core standards in any school in the state. More
 
Conundrum
The decision by Florida lawmakers to end mandatory final exams for every class will mean that more teachers will be evaluated based on subjects they don't teach. More
 
New regime
Following a painstaking, and at times acrimonious, debate about final revisions to Indiana's A-to-F school-grading rules, the Indiana State Board of Education has voted on a change that will equally balance each school's passing rate with student gains over the prior year to determine the grade. More
 
New blueprint
The Utah State Board of Education has adopted a new teacher-evaluation framework that relies mostly on administrative observation, but also on evidence of student growth and input from parents. More
 
By any other name
Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam has signed Common Core legislation billed as moving the state away from its current academic standards for math and English, which the state Board of Education adopted in 2010 along with 47 other states. More

 
 GRANTS AND FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES

 
LLCF: Grants for Libraries
The Lois Lenski Covey Foundation, Inc. annually awards grants to libraries and other institutions that operate a library for purchasing books published for young people preschool through grade 8. Maximum award: $3,000. Eligibility: school libraries, non-traditional libraries operated by charitable [501(c)(3)] and other non-taxable agencies, and bookmobile programs. Deadline: May 29, 2015. More
 
The Awesome Foundation: Grants for Projects
The Awesome Foundation funds projects that challenge and expand our understanding of our individual and communal potentials, bringing communities together, casting aside social inhibitions and boundaries for a moment. Maximum award: $1,000. Eligibility: all people and organizations; there are no prerequisites. Deadline: rolling. More
  
Quote of the Week: 
 
"There will be times ... when you feel like folks look right past you, or they see just a fraction of who you really are. The road ahead is not going to be easy. It never is, especially for folks like you and me." -- Michelle Obama, in a commencement speech at Tuskegee University in Alabama. More

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