Education Week - March 8, 2017 - 4

NEWS IN BRIEF
N.Y. Districts Look South
To Diversify Teacher Corps

N.C. Board Rejects Ban
On Confederate Flags

Two struggling urban districts in
upstate New York-Rochester and
Buffalo-are looking to shrink the
racial gap between teachers and
students in hopes that doing so will
improve outcomes for their mostly
black and Latino student bodies.
To find a more diverse teacher-applicant pool, the districts will partner
and travel to the South, especially to
historically black colleges and universities, and Puerto Rico, according to
WHEC, the NBC-affiliated television
station in Rochester.
While white students make up just
10 percent of Rochester's enrollment,
80 percent of the district's educators
are white. Despite years of efforts to
diversify the nation's teaching force,
the percentage of nonwhite teachers
has hardly budged since 2000 when
84 percent of teachers identified as
white. The share now is 82 percent.

A North Carolina school board has
voted not to ban the Confederate
flag from school grounds, rejecting
two pleas from a local chapter of the
NAACP to establish the policy.
The Orange County board of education decided instead last week to
establish an equity committee to
advise the board on several issues,
including symbolic speech.
The Northern Orange County
NAACP had asked the board to
ban the Confederate flag on school
grounds. Some students, parents,
employees, and community members
said there's been an increase in Confederate flags appearing on vehicles,
bags, and pieces of clothing on campuses, which the organization says
can be intimidating. -ASSOCIATED PRESS

District Led Investigation
Into Locker-Room Assault
Wilfredo Lee/AP

-EMMANUEL FELTON

Oregon Educator Named
Superintendent of Year
Matthew Utterback, the superintendent of the North Clackamas
district in Oregon, was named last
week as the 2017 National Superintendent of the Year.
The AASA, the School Superintendents Association, which gives out the
annual award, noted the strides that
the district in Milwaukie, Ore., has
made in closing achievement gaps
under Utterback's leadership. Its
four-year graduation rate rose from
66 percent to 83 percent in the past
four years, with significant increases
for subgroups, including students
with disabilities, black students, and
Hispanic students, the AASA said.
Utterback started his education
career as a teacher in the district in
1989 and has been superintendent
since 2012.
-DENISA R. SUPERVILLE

FILLED WITH JOY
Drama teacher Tanisha
Cidel, center, laughs with
students Jaden Piner, left,
13, and Alex Hibbert, 12, as
they head to drama class
at Norland Middle School,
last week in Miami
Gardens, Fla. The three
acted in the Oscar-winning
film "Moonlight." The film
garnered three Oscars last
week, including the award
for best picture.

ally funded consortia-especially at
the high school level-one of those
assessment groups is looking to hit
the refresh button with a new type of
test that is useful for both federal accountability and college admissions.
The Smarter Balanced Assessment
Consortium put out a request for
proposals last week seeking a partnership with a group that provides a
college-admission test accepted by at
least 200 colleges and universities-in
other words, either ACT or the College
Board, which administers the SAT.
The idea is to create a hybrid test
that would give students both a
Smarter Balanced score and a collegeentrance score, though the RFP notes
other innovative solutions will be considered.
-LIANA LOEWUS

SBAC Seeks Partnership
For Hybrid Assessment

Website Claims Spur Threats
Against Ga. Superintendent

With states increasingly having
walked away from the common-corealigned tests developed by two feder-

The schools superintendent of
DeKalb County, Ga., says he and his
family have received death threats

Kansas Supreme Court Rules K-12 Funding System Inadequate
The Kansas supreme court ruled last week that
the level of state funding for public schools is inadequate and does not square with the state constitution, giving state lawmakers until the end of June
to respond.
Gannon v. Kansas has been one of the most
closely watched state school funding cases in recent
years. Several districts alleged that the state's K-12
funding is inadequate, which the state denied in a
long-running and complex legal battle.
Separately, the court ruled in 2015 that the
state's funding system was inequitable. That issue
was settled to the court's satisfaction last year by
shifting $38 million around within the education
budget, but the question of funding adequacy remained.
The March 2 decision on the funding system's adequacy could cause difficulties for lawmakers pondering

4 | EDUCATION WEEK | March 8, 2017 | www.edweek.org

how to dig the state out from a massive budget hole.
The ruling supported its conclusion that the current K-12 funding system is inadequate by citing
the nearly 50 percent of African-American students in Kansas who are not proficient in reading
or math, and the one-third of students who receive
free or reduced-price meals and are also not proficient in those subjects.
"It is incumbent upon the legislature to react to
the ruling quickly and in a way that puts the funding levels into constitutional compliance," said Alan
Rupe, a lawyer representing some of the districts
that originally sued.
Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican, said in a
statement in response to the ruling that lawmakers
have a chance to pursue "transformative educational
reform" and called for new school choice measures,
without being more specific.
-ANDREW UJIFUSA

after a conservative news and opinion website published a story saying
the district prohibits "pro-Trump immigration rhetoric."
The WorldNetDaily website piece
claimed that schools chief R. Stephen
Green fired three school employees for
supporting President Donald Trump.
The district maintains that the
employees voluntarily resigned,
knowing that they were likely to
be dismissed. The employees allegedly made derogatory statements
about undocumented students and
parents at a heavily Hispanic high
school.
-COREY MITCHELL

Snap IPO Yields Millions For
Private Calif. High School
A California high school has made
millions of dollars from the initial
public offering of shares in Snap
Inc., the company behind the Snapchat photo-messaging application.
The board of the Saint Francis high school in Mountain View
agreed to invest $15,000 in seed
money in Snap in 2012, when the
company was just getting started.
They had been invited to do so
by one of the student's parents, a
venture capital investor, the high
school president says in a letter
issued to the school community
Thursday.
The school held onto the investment until this week, when Snap
shares sold for $17 each in an IPO.
The share price rocketed 44 percent
higher when trading began last
week.
The school was quoted by media
including the website Quartz
as saying they sold two-thirds of
their shares at $17 each, to raise
$24 million.
"The school's investment in Snap
-which this morning announced
the completion of its IPO-has matured and given us a significant
boost," said the high school president, Simon Chiu, in the letter. -AP

An investigation into the sexual
assault of a black football player
with disabilities by his white teammates at a small-town Idaho high
school showed that crucial evidence
was collected by school employees,
not law-enforcement officials.
John R.K. Howard and two teammates were charged with sodomizing the victim with a clothes hanger
in 2015 in the locker room at the
high school. The sex-assault charge
against Howard, who was 18 at the
time, was dropped. He was sentenced
last month to probation for felony injury to a child. The other two cases
are sealed in juvenile court.
An Associated Press review of
roughly 2,000 pages of documents
found that school officials waited four
days to report the crime. Instead, Superintendent Ben Hardcastle gathered evidence and began interviewing
the suspects potential witnesses before notifying the sheriff's department.
Fellow students, neighbors, and
even football coaches were allowed
to pressure the 17-year-old victim
about his testimony.
-AP

Texas District Apologizes
For Comments on Hijabs
A Houston-area school district is
apologizing after an administrator
told Muslim students they need to
obtain permission from an imam to
wear hijabs in school.
The Fort Bend district said in a
statement last week that students at
Bush High School in Richmond were
given "misinformation" about needing documentation in order to wear a
headscarf in school.
The district said in its statement
that documentation is not needed
to wear a headscarf for religious
purposes.
-AP

California Refuses Request
To Swap State Test for SAT
California last week became the
first state to reject a request to use
a new kind of testing flexibility offered under the Every Student Succeeds Act.
It turned down the Long Beach

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Education Week - March 8, 2017

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