Education Week - March 8, 2017 - 5

REPORT ROUNDUP

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ana teachers could only earn tenure after getting a "highly effective" rating on their evaluations for five of six consecutive years. Even if a
teacher earned tenure under this new system,
it could be revoked with one "ineffective" rating, which means that no Louisiana teachers
enjoy permanent job protections, according to
the study's authors.
The teachers who left in the two years that
followed did not do so because of low ratings
on evaluations, since those wouldn't have been
available until 2014, say the study's authors.
More likely, teachers viewed the changes to
tenure, a benefit they highly regarded, as a
loss in job value and headed for the door, according to the report. The numbers of teachers exiting was highest in the schools with the
lowest test scores.
The authors could not determine from their
data whether the teachers leaving were effective or not. But they warn districts looking to
eliminate tenure to consider the negative effect that teacher exits could have on student
achievement.
-B.I.

SCHOOL SCHEDULES
"Reimagining the School Day"

district's request to use the SAT
college-entrance exam instead of
the state's required Smarter Balanced test in high school. State officials said the SAT isn't sufficiently
aligned to the state's standards, according to EdSource.
The College Board and ACT said
they knew of no other instance in
which a state has turned down such
a request.
-CATHERINE GEWERTZ

Much of a teacher's day is devoted to instruction, with precious little time set aside for collaborating with colleagues, planning lessons,
or reflecting on practice, says a report from the
Center for American Progress.
The authors note that U.S. educators spend
far more time teaching lessons and less time
planning them than educators in other topperforming countries. In a typical workweek,
American teachers spend about 27 hours delivering lessons, compared with their counterparts in Singapore, who teach 17 hours each
week, or to teachers in Finland, who log 21
hours a week.
The report highlights five schedules that aim
to revamp how teachers spend a typical school
day. All the schedules include more time for
teachers to work together to plan lessons, flexible instruction blocks that allow teachers to
tailor instruction to students' particular needs,
and opportunities for small-group instruction
and student-directed learning. -BRENDA IASEVOLI

'Nudge' Letters Help Cut
Chronic Absenteeism
In Tacoma, Wash., and 16 other
cities across the nation, districts
are boosting student attendance
by sending home what they call
"nudge" letters when students miss
too many days of school.
The letters include a tally of a
student's absences-a number that
research shows parents usually underestimate. The letters also provide
the absence average for the school
and for the child's grade level across
the district.
Studies done in Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Mateo, Calif., have
shown the letters can reduce chronicabsenteeism rates by as much as 15
percent. After just one round of letters, Tacoma's Lister Elementary
School showed attendance improved
for 62 percent of the students who received them.
-TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE

YOUTH DEVELOPMENT
"The State of Girls 2017: Emerging Truths and
Troubling Trends"

TEACHERS
"When Tenure Ends: Teacher Tenure in Response
to School Policy Changes in Louisiana"

A report from the Girl Scout Research Institute finds that girls with lower socioeconomic status participate in extracurricular
activities less often than their more-affluent
peers.
The report by the research arm of the Girl
Scouts of the USA uses data from national and
government sources to examine girls' well-being in the United States. The information was

The Louisiana legislature's move to weaken
teacher tenure in 2012 led to the loss of up to
1,700 public school teachers over the next two
years, according to a study by the Education
Research Alliance for New Orleans at Tulane
University.
Beginning in the 2012-13 school year, Louisi-

BECOMING PRINCIPAL: WHOSE ROUTE IS SHORTEST?

White
Black
Latino

The route into the principalship varies for teachers of different genders, and different racial
and ethnic groups, according to researchers. Once they are certified, white, male teachers
generally take the fewest number of years to get the job.
Females

In Percent
10%

Males

6
4
2
0
2

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Years After Principal Certification
"Pathways to the Principalship: An Event History Analysis of the
Careers of Teachers With Principal Certification"
Men and women teachers take different paths to become
school leaders, according to a new study in the American Educational Research Journal.
Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and Columbia University tracked the careers of more than 11,000
teachers in a large, diverse area over 17 academic years. They
found that, on average, teachers who made the jump to the
principalship did so after five to seven years of teaching. The
amount of time teachers had spent in the district did not seem
to be a big factor in whether they became principals; on average, teachers who got their principal certification had been with

EARLY CHILDHOOD
"Child and Parenting Outcomes After One Year of
Educare"
Children enrolled for a year in an enhanced
Head Start program known as Educare show
better results on tests of auditory and expressive-language skills, parent-reported problem
behaviors, and parent-child interactions than
those who were not able to enroll in the program, a study finds.
The report, published last month in Child
Development, tracked more than 200 children
younger than 19 months. The children were either enrolled in Educare, a national program
that blends federal, public, and private dollars
to support children from birth to age 5, or in
a control group of children who were not able
to enroll in an Educare because the program
was full.
There are 21 Educare programs in 18 cities,
serving rural, suburban, and urban communities.
The model includes embedded professional
development for teachers, the use of data
to guide decisionmaking, and high-quality
teaching practices. Each school is housed in a
new or remodeled center that includes infant,
toddler, and preschool classrooms. Schools are
open eight to 10 hours a day, and all children
attend at least six hours a day. Children enroll as young as 6 weeks of age, with the program's goal of serving them until they start
kindergarten.
-CHRISTINA A. SAMUELS
TELEVISION TIME
"Family Socioeconomic Status Moderates
Associations Between Television Viewing and
School Readiness Skills"

collected between 2012 and 2016.
Researchers found that among high school
seniors, girls with lower socioeconomic status were less likely to participate in student
government (6 percent versus 10 percent) and
sports (17 percent versus 31 percent) than
girls with higher SES backgrounds. Girls from
lower-income households were also less likely
to do volunteer work "at least a few times a
year" than those who are more affluent (73
percent versus 86 percent).
-MARVA HINTON

their district six years, and those who actually became principals had been in their district seven years. A little more than
half of teachers who got administrative certification were still
not principals after 16 years.
But after accounting for differences in teachers' background and
professional experience, the study found teachers of different gender or racial groups had different paths. White male teachers were
more likely than women and those of racial minorities to become
principals, and they did so earlier in their careers. White teachers with administrative certification were more than 1½ times as
likely to become principals as black or Latino teachers with the
same certification. Black and Latino male teachers, however, were
more likely than women teachers of any race to become principals.
-SARAH D. SPARKS

Young children who watch television more
than two hours a day show decreased skills
in math and executive functioning-the collective term for cognitive abilities related to
attention, focus, and self-control-with lowincome children faring the worst compared
with those from higher-income families who
viewed the same amount of TV, concludes a
new study.
It was published online last month by the
Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.
The link between television viewing and a
child's math and executive-functioning skills
was highest for children in families living on
$21,200 or less a year, the poverty line at the
time of the study. The effects on middle-income
children-pegged at an average of $74,200 a
year for a family of four-were smaller, but
statistically significant. No effect on school
readiness was seen on children in families
making $127,200 or more a year.
The findings are based on a group of 5-yearolds in Massachusetts who were recruited for
a kindergarten intervention in fall 2008 and
2009.
This study captures only the hours spent
passively viewing television-it does not
measure the hours spent listening to television in the background, or time that children
spent using electronic games or on interactive
screen-based technologies. The study also does
not capture the content of the television that
children were watching.
-C.A.S.
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Education Week - March 8, 2017

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