Education Week - June 1, 2016 - 1

Education Week

VOL. 35, NO. 32 * JUNE 1, 2016

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BRE AKING NEWS DAILY

Civil Rights
Office Gets
Aggressive
Complaints, Investigations
Have Spiked Under Obama

A school police officer violently
throws a black high school student
from her desk before arresting her for
refusing to put away her cellphone.
A young student is put in handcuffs
for defiant behavior. A school imposes
drastically different punishments on
a black student and a white student
for the same behavior.
In years past, such stories may have
been dismissed as isolated incidents.
But, under the Obama administration, civil rights and student groups
have quickly turned to federal data to
make the case that these events are
part of a larger pattern of unfair and
excessive discipline in schools, particularly for students of color.
And they've found a partner in the
U.S. Department of Education's office for civil rights, which is charged
with identifying and rooting out unfair and discriminatory treatment in
public schools.
By all accounts, that office has been
particularly aggressive during this
presidency by putting schools on notice about their responsibilities on everything from suspensions to bullying, by increasing the data it collects
on inequitable treatment in schools,
and by committing itself to transparency by posting its resolutions and
investigations online.
"We know from our data that our
kids today are not experiencing the
equality that is their federal promise
PAGE 14 >

NashCO for Education Week

By Evie Blad

'LENS' ON EQUITY:

Students Rafael
Silva-Miranda,
Francisco Castillo,
Francisco
Martinez, and
Cristopher Huerta,
left to right, greet
one another at
Woodburn High
School in
Woodburn, Ore. The
district has the
highest Hispanic
graduation rate in
the state. PAGE 16 >

In Special Education, a Debate on Bias
By Christina A. Samuels
It's not often that special education research gets attention from more than
teachers and other academics.
But it's also not often that research purports to upend decades of accepted wisdom
in the field-and also takes direct aim at
race-related policy issues currently under
debate at the federal level.
In 2015, education professors Paul L.
Morgan and George Farkas published a
peer-reviewed analysis stating that there
is clear bias in the way students are identi-

fied for special education. But the bias went
in an unexpected direction, they said: By
their calculations, black and Hispanic students are universally underrepresented
compared to their white peers-rather
than overrepresented-in a variety of categories, including emotional disturbance
and specific learning disabilities, such as
dyslexia.
The paper was not the first time that
Morgan, of Pennsylvania State University, and Farkas, based at the University
of California, Irvine, had published those

By Sarah D. Sparks
Montessori education has a more than
century-old history in the United States, but
thanks to burgeoning charter and parent-advocacy movements, the model is in the midst
of an unprecedented boom in public schools.
At the same time, new research raises
questions about how the model will fit with
states' and districts' test-focused accountability systems in public education, as well
as how well it will fit the needs of diverse
students in its communities.
Nationwide, more than 500 public schools
enrolling 125,000 students follow the Montessori model-an education approach that
emphasizes child-directed learning in multiage classrooms. Nearly 300 of the public

Montessori schools have opened in the past
15 years, according to Mira Debs, a Montessori doctoral researcher at Yale University
who has tracked that growth.
Gettysburg Montessori Charter School,
a few miles from the famous Pennsylvania
battleground, is one of them, and its story
mirrors that of many of the new public
Montessori schools.
The school grew out of a small private
Montessori school for preschool and young
elementary pupils in the area. A group of
parents whose children had attended the
preschool petitioned the Gettysburg school
district to open a separate charter Montessori for K-6 in 2009.
Today, the school serves 155 students
PAGE 20 >

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton discusses
a lawsuit filed by 11 states over federal
agencies' guidance on transgender students.

Transgender Students and
Schools: What's Next?
The Obama admininstration's new guidance
on the rights of transgender students is sparking
protests, lawsuits, and lots of questions
for K-12 educators. PAGE 6 >

This package is the fourth
installment of a yearlong series
on efforts to recognize and
overcome discrimination
in schools.
32 COMMENTARY: Researchers
discuss their perspectives on
the criminalization of black girls
in public schools.
See Page 17 for more information
about this series.

PAGE 17 >

Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman/AP

Charter Movement Fuels Boom
For Public Montessori Schools

BEYOND BIAS
Countering Stereotypes
in School

Proposed ESSA Rules
Aim to Strike Balance
By Andrew Ujifusa
In their proposed rules on school accountability, federal officials are attempting to walk a
fine and aggressively scrutinized line.
They say they've tried to offer the meaningful flexibility to states and districts under the
Every Student Succeeds Act that many say the
law requires, while answering the call to make
sure that all students are accounted for and
given appropriate, equitable support.
What remains to be seen, however, is whether a
variety of others-such as Republican members
of Congress and civil rights advocates-will be
satisfied with the U.S. Department of Education's
foray into crafting accountability regulations for
the successor to the No Child Left Behind Act.
The draft rules, issued May 26, would not
PAGE 24 >
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Education Week - June 1, 2016

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