Education Week - July 10, 2013 - (Page 1)

EDUCATIONWEEK VOL. 32, NO. 36 • JULY 10, 2013 AMERICAN EDUCATION’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD • © 2013 Editorial Projects in Education • $4 By Stephen Sawchuk Washington Buffy Keys of Countywide Family Development, a family-support group in Laurel, Miss., plays an icebreaker game at the School-to Prison Pipeline Action Camp 2.0 in Denver. The event drew youths and community activists from 16 states to learn how to fight discipline policies. ‘Camp’ Sows Activism Against Zero Tolerance By Nirvi Shah Denver In this game of bingo, it was unclear whether winning was a good thing: Five lined-up X’s meant students could say they’d had a lot of run-ins with police at school, knew someone who had been suspended or expelled, and were familiar with zero-tolerance discipline policies. “I was close to bingo twice,” said Melanie Andrade, 21, of Davenport, Fla., but she couldn’t make a straight line. She was unable to fill two blank squares that represented having $250 to pay a citation for being tardy to school and having a school with a college counselor. This inventory of experiences was one of many exercises used to coax about 150 teenagers and young adults from around the country meeting here into action against school discipline policies that some civil rights, education, and health groups say do far more harm than good and disproportionately affect students who are black, Latino, or have disabilities. They were gathered at a Denver school during the last weekend in June as part of Action Camp 2.0, a training session designed to show them how they could play a role in dismantling practices that create what critics call a school-to-prison pipeline. In the view of organizers, those practices include out-of-school suspension and expulsion, citations and ticketPAGE 24> A panel tapped by the national accreditation body for teacher preparation has finalized a set of standards that, for the first time, establishes minimum admissions criteria and requires programs to use much-debated “value added” measures, where available. The action promises to have major ramifications for how programs select, prepare, and gauge the success of new teachers. Already, programs planning to seek the seal of approval from the Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation say the standards are significantly more demanding than those used by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, one of two accreditors that preceded CAEP. “These standards, when you get down to it, are really different, and they are much more challenging,” said Michael J. Maher, the assistant dean of the education school at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “Even as a college that’s been NCATE-accredited and made our PAGE 20> FAIR OR FOUL?:A long-awaited review has teacher colleges in an uproar. PAGE 8 edweek.org: BREAKING NEWS DAILY Teacher Ed. Is Facing Higher Bar Accrediting Body Poised To Adopt New Standards Diversity Goal Set Tone For Science Standards By Lesli A. Maxwell When the writers of the Next Generation Science Standards began sketching out a new vision for K-12 science education, they gave themselves a mandate: Develop standards with all students in mind, not just the high achievers already expected to excel in the subject. Now, three years later, their notion—that every student should get a deep, rigorous science education that prepares the ground for demanding coursework, a college degree in the sciences, and a career that could follow—has helped produce a set of standards meant for the most-advanced science students, as well as students who previously may have been steered away from taking a science class, writers of the standards said. Teachers and advocates for these “diverse” learnPAGE 26> INDUSTRY & INNOVATION Free Content Challenges Publishers By Sean Cavanagh Commercial publishers are accustomed to battling with one another for control of state and local markets for textbooks and other academic materials. Now they face a more complicated task: how to cope with what’s being offered to schools for free. The menu of products available to educators today includes not only textbooks and digital products offered at a cost, but also a growing number of “open educational resources” developed or supported by nonprofit groups, universities, philanthropies, individual teachers, and entire states. While those materials come in many different forms, they are generally defined as free resources that can be revised and redistributed by teachers and other Waiver States Split On Ed. Dept. Offer Of New Flexibility By Alyson Klein users to meet their specific needs. The rise of open educational materials is creating major shifts in a landscape that is already being transformed by the movement away from traditional hardbound materials to instruction delivered through technology. The best-known open resources live online, adding to their value among states and districts looking for low-cost, flexible materials. Such resources are also emerging at a time when states have an incentive to share educational materials and borrow ideas from one another. All but a handful of states have adopted the Common Core State Standards, a uniform set of academic expectations in English/language arts and math that were designed to rePAGE 21> States with waivers from provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act are almost evenly divided on whether they will take U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan up on his offer of extra time to begin using new teacher-evaluation systems to decide which educators to hire, fire, or promote. The federal Department of Educa- tion has decided to allow states that received waivers by the summer of 2012 to push back the deadline for using their new evaluation systems. Initially, schools were supposed to have those systems fully in place by 2015-16. Now states can ask to extend that deadline to the 2016-17 school year, which starts just a few months before President Barack Obama leaves office—meaning the administration will likely have little political juice left to PAGE 30 > ▲ Chris Schneider for Education Week http://www.edweek.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - July 10, 2013

Education Week - July 10, 2013
Camp Sows Activism Against Zero Tolerance
Teacher Ed. Is Facing Higher Bar
Diversity Goal Set Tone for Science Standards
INDUSTRY & INNOVATION: Free Content Challenges Publishers
Waiver States Split on Ed. Dept. Offer of New Flexibility
This Week
News in Brief
Report Roundup
Testing Group Delays Some Components for One Year
PARCC Gives Details on Testing Supports
Disputed Review Finds Disparities in Teacher Prep
Survey: District Chiefs Split on Common Core
FOCUS ON: HISTORY: Advocates Finding Ways to Bulk Up History Learning
Peers Teach Social Skills in Preschool Autism Program
Hands-On Learning for Students With Disabilities
Federal Advice on School Intruders Worries Experts
Blacks, Hispanics See Long-Term Progress
Tenn. Districts Unite Amid Uncertainty
Blogs of the Week
DIGITAL DIRECTIONS: Adaptive Testing Gains Momentum, Prompts Worries
USDA Sets Final Rules on School Snack Foods
Civil Rights Office Proposes Deeper Dig on Discipline Data
Teachers Tell Another Story On Discipline
Race-Related Cases Drew High Court Focus
Uneasy Resolution Reached in Md. Evaluation Feud
Policy Brief
Student-Loan Rates Rise; Fix Eyed
JACK GILLETTE: Memo From the Front Lines
ARTHUR D. SHEEKEY: We Need a State-Based R&D System for Education
Letters
TopSchoolJobs Recruitment Marketplace
GREG ANRIG: From Health-Care Reform, Lessons for Education Policy

Education Week - July 10, 2013