Education Week - July 20, 2016 - 1

Education Week VOL. 35, NO. 36 * JULY 20, 2016 edweek.org: AMERICAN EDUCATION'S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD * © 2016 Editorial Projects in Education * $ 4 BRE AKING NEWS DAILY Data Loom Large in Quest for New School-Quality Indicator States look hard at what's required to meet ESSA's mandate By Daarel Burnette II States scrambling to come up with more nuanced ways to measure school quality under the new federal K-12 law are running smack into an old problem: how to make sure they have the right data. The Every Student Succeeds Act requires that states-in addition to using English-language proficiency, graduation rates, and scores on statewide achievement tests-add at least one new indicator of school quality or student success, such as school climate, chronic absenteeism, discipline, or college and career readiness. For many states, adding that new indicator may mean spending more on data systems and collection, avoiding approaches that might demand too much of a data lift, or picking something off the shelf rather than crafting a more challenging indicator, because the information isn't easily available. Complicating the matter, the law requires that the data for the new school-quality indicator must be valid, reliable, and comparable across districts, and that officials be able to break out the information by student demographics. That presents a challenge for state education agencies that want to pick indicators that use classroom observations or teacher and parent surveys to measure schoolwide indicators. Those might include whether parents feel engaged or if teachers are participating in effective PAGE 27 > Detroit District Splits To Shore Up Schools Alyssa Schukar for Education Week By Corey Mitchell Betty Torres, a high school senior from Mission, Texas, talks with fellow student Rob Schaefer, from St. Louis, on the University of Notre Dame campus. Both are in a summer program that acquaints academically promising high schoolers with college life. First-Generation College-Goers Try Campus Life Summer Programs Help Students Like Betty Torres Brave the Leap to Higher Ed. By Catherine Gewertz South Bend, Ind. AP Betty Torres did her best to be brave as she packed up to leave her workingclass Texas border town. An academic powerhouse at 16, she felt ready for her summer courses at elite colleges in New England and the Midwest. But when her dad left her at the airport in San Anto- nio, she crumpled a little inside. "He waited in the airport until I got through security. I could see him from the other side. And I went, 'Oh, no, Dad, don't leave me!' " the rising high school senior recalled, putting her hand on her heart and laughing. "I started having second thoughts." Second thoughts like: How am I going to do this? I'm a Latina from a humble fam- ily; will I fit in? Can I handle the workload? Will I get lost? Eating breakfast in a noisy dining hall at the University of Notre Dame the following week, in late June, Betty had regained her trademark cheerful composure. The aspiring neurologist had PAGE 15> FAFSA: Will earlier filing mean quicker Dig into where presumptive Democratic and Republican presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump stand on education issues as Education Week gets ready to cover the party conventions. PAGES 22 AND 23 > PAGE 18> Dose of Empathy Found To Cut Suspension Rates By Sarah D. Sparks "R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Find out what it means to me." In schools working to reduce suspension rates, teachers could take a cue from Aretha Franklin: Considering how young people view respect can greatly improve classroom management, new studies show. A one-time intervention to help teachers and students empathize with each other halved the number of suspensions at five diverse California middle schools, and helped students who had previously been suspended feel more connected at school, according to Stanford University research published in April in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Changing the mindset of one teacher can change the social experience of that child's entire world," said financial-aid decisions? PAGE 14 PAGE 20> Vouchers Put Some Parents in Squeeze on Spec. Ed. Rights By Christina A. Samuels K-12 IN THE CAMPAIGNS One of the nation's most troubled school districts is now two. Under controversial legislation pushed by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, the Detroit school system is now divided into two separate entities: a new district tasked with educating the city's 46,000 regular public school students; and the old district, left intact solely to pay off hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. Detroit is probably the first school system in the nation to adopt the approach, said Michael Griffith, a senior school finance analyst with the Education Commission of the States. The change is meant to allow the new district to devote more of its money to educating students. Under the old system, nearly $1,100 per student in state funding went toward retiring the district's crushing Bernadette Kerrigan was concerned, though not alarmed, when her daughter Emma was identified as having dyslexia and dyscalculia as a 1st grader. A mother of two, Kerrigan had stretched her budget to buy a home in an affluent suburb of Cleveland, in large part because of the quality of the school district. The teachers there would certainly be qualified, she thought, to help her daughter overcome her struggles with reading and math. But to get the help she felt her child needed, Kerrigan said she had to make a choice she had never considered-and which would require her to give up some protections under federal education law. In her public school, Emma repeated 1st grade, but was still behind. One school year turned into two, and then three. By 4th grade, Emma was years behind her peers academically, with the district saying that things were just about to click. Meanwhile, Emma was coming home exhausted. Homework took PAGE 16> 1 http://www.edweek.org

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