Education Week - June 7, 2017 - 1
Education Week VOL. 36, NO. 34 * JUNE 7, 2017 edweek.org: AMERICAN EDUCATION'S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD * © 2017 Editorial Projects in Education * $ 5 BRE AKING NEWS DAILY HIDDEN INEQUITIES An Education Week Analysis After a lengthy ride from her school in West Memphis, Ark., Zion Robinson, 7, heads to her home in Hughes, Ark. The schools in Hughes were closed at the end of the 2014-15 school year after state officials ordered the two school systems to consolidate. Some Districts Hit Hard When Schools Close Arkansas Community Shrinks After Its Schools Shut Down By Denisa R. Superville Hughes, Ark. PAGE 11 > PAGE 10 > Karen Pulfer Focht for Education Week Researchers and advocacy groups are bracing for an avalanche of new data on mobility once the Every Student Succeeds Act goes into effect for the upcoming school year. The federal law requires schools to track and publicly report the academic performance of military, foster, and homeless students, groups that all disproportionately change schools. Those data could not only start chipping away at long-standing questions, researchers and advocates theorize, but could also Seven-year-old Zion Robinson bounded across the narrow road after the school bus stopped in front of a house with pink petunias hanging from the porch rafters. She excitedly held up to her mother her reward for doing well in class at Faulk Elementary in West Memphis: a white paper plate she had decorated with red, green, and blue paint. Like many school-age children in this rural town in the Arkansas Delta, Zion gets on a school bus around 6:30 a.m. for the ride to school in West Memphis, Ark., across the Mississippi River from Memphis, Tenn. Ordinarily, West Memphis is a half-hour drive from Hughes, but with frequent school bus stops, the ride can last nearly 60 minutes. Zion gets off the bus around 3:30 p.m. In the winter, Hughes students can both leave home and return in the dark. Hughes elementar y and secondar y schools closed at the end of the 2014-15 school year, when the Arkansas education department mandated that the district consolidate with West Memphis because its average daily attendance had fallen below 350 students-a threshold set by a 2004 law known as Act 60. It requires districts that enroll fewer than 350 students Student Mobility Takes Invisible, Uneven Toll By Daarel Burnette II Parents and educators have long documented and witnessed firsthand the psychological and academic toll of a child having to move to a new school midyear. But how students, families, and schools rebound from the moves is still a sort of black box for researchers. Because data on these hard-to-track students have been so hard to come by, researchers and advocates in the past have been stumped answering some very Flurry of Bills Seeks To Protect Student Journalists, Advisers By Madeline Will When 17-year-old Robbie Maher stood in front of the Vermont House judiciary committee this spring to make his case for studentpress freedoms, he credited his high school journalism adviser for his ability to report on issues that matter. "It all starts at the top with the Mercury [student newspaper] adviser, Peter Riegelman," said Robbie, a student at Bellows Free Academy in St. Albans, Vt. "Mr. Riegelman ... learned the ins and outs, do's and don'ts, of journalism. As our adviser, he has passed this knowledge down to each and every BFA journalism student." The bill Robbie was testifying for grants free-speech and free-press protections for student journalists at public K-12 schools and basic questions about student mobility: What exactly is it about moving to a different school that's most damaging, and how can schools best support mobile students? "Mobility is a very big deal, but it's a poorly studied field, and there are still lots of important questions out there," said Amy Ellen Schwartz, a professor of economics and education at Syracuse University who has studied the topic. "If you want to design a policy to solve the problem, you have to know the nature of the problem." state colleges and universities. It also protects media advisers from being dismissed, suspended, reassigned, or otherwise disciplined for protecting their students' journalism. The bill is among more than a dozen such efforts across the country seeking to expand freepress protections to both student journalists and their teachers-and meeting with varying degrees of success. The Vermont measure was signed into law last month by Republican Gov. Phil Scott. But the day before, 2,600 miles away, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, also a Republican, vetoed an equivalent bill. In his response to the state legislature, Ducey wrote that while he supports free speech and a free press, he worries that "this bill could create unintended consequences, especially on high school campuses where adult supervision and mentoring is most important." The New Voices movement, led by the Washington-based nonprofit Student Press Law Center, started with a law passed in North Dakota in 2015. Last year, such laws were victorious in Illinois and Maryland PAGE 16 > Private School Vouchers Offer Few Safeguards Against Discrimination Concerns Over How a Federal Program Would Protect Students By Arianna Prothero & Andrew Ujifusa How far can private schools that take taxpayer-funded vouchers go in selecting students without running afoul of civil rights and antidiscrimination laws? The answer is complicated-and less than reassuring to those concerned about the rights of students of color, LGBT students, and children with disabilities. And it's a question supercharged now by the Trump administration's strong advocacy for expanding school choice and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos' opaque stance on the issue, especially in recent testimony before members of Congress. This tension took center stage in a recent congressional hearing on Trump's proposed education budget-which includes $250 million in competitive grants to fund vouchers, and to study their effects-as Democrats pushed DeVos to say whether she would prohibit federally funded vouchers from going to private schools that don't admit certain groups of students. DeVos did not name an instance of discrimination that would rule out a private school from participating. But she did stress that her agency would investigate any alleged civil rights violations in schools. Federal anti-discrimination, laws include protections for race, color, and national origin under Title VI, for those with disabilities under provisions of the AmeriPAGE 19 >
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.