Education Week - August 31, 2016 - 1

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Calls to Halt
Charters
Stir Friction
Civil Rights Stance Tests
Black Support for Sector

Deanna Del Ciello/Education Week

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TECH GIRLS: Yousra Bensouda, left, Ibtihal Aboussad, second from right, both of Morocco, and Natalie Aziz of Egypt, far right, laugh with their counselor
during a U.S. State Department-sponsored TechGirls program at American University that aims to bridge the gender gap in the tech industry. 0!'%

DIGITAL DIRECTIONS

Head Start Benefits Underscored

By Benjamin Herold
& Jason Kazi
Maine Gov. Paul LePage has called
for a review of his state's groundbreaking 1-to-1 student computing initiative,
highlighting the growing pains nagging an educational-technology movement now well into its second decade.
Among the questions increasingly
faced by states and districts that have
given computers to every student: How
to demonstrate the impact of such programs on student achievement? How
to navigate the explosion of new device options now available to schools?
And, perhaps most signiﬁcantly, how
to maintain a focus on teaching and
learning, even while fighting for the
millions of dollars necessary to maintain and refresh growing hardware
inventories?
Once a national and international
leader, the Maine Learning Technology
Initiative recently has struggled with
such challenges.
"We drifted away from our central
goals," said Mike Muir, the program's
policy director, in an interview.
"We need to get back to conversations about what kind of learning
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Research Suggests Long-Term Impact for Key Outcomes

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"Y#HRISTINA!3AMUELS
Almost since Head Start's creation half a century ago as part of the War on Poverty, advocates
have sought a research-based answer to this
question: Does it work?
Two new studies examining the long-term impact of the $8.6 billion federal preschool program
offer support to those who say the answer is yes.
Those studies-one of which took a look at Head
Start participants in middle school and another
that examined life outcomes at adulthood-say
that Head Start has measurable long-term beneﬁts for certain outcomes. Those include higher
levels of high school and college completion found
in one study, and lower levels of chronic absenteeism and grade retention found in another.

Whether Head Start can work "is an antiquated question at this point," said Deborah
Phillips, a professor of psychology at Georgetown University and the co-author of a study
that looked at middle school outcomes for children who took part in a Head Start program in
Tulsa, Okla.
"The answer is, yes it can," Phillips said. "The
question now is, under what circumstances does
the Head Start program produce these effects?"
At the same time, these studies raise other
questions: While both showed some positive effects for students overall, that wasn't always
the case when looking at some subgroups, such
as black students or boys. And both studies
acknowledge that there might be unknowable
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Shane Bevel for Education Week

1-to-1 Computing
Under Microscope
In Maine Schools

African-American students make up
a major share of enrollment in the nation's charter schools-and in some cities, they dominate.
But since two black civil rights organizations born from different generations called for a halt to opening new
charters, debate has been raging over
how the groups' demands will affect
black support for the publicly funded,
but independently run schools.
In recent weeks, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the venerable civil rights
organization, took its ﬁrmest stance to
date on charter schools in calling for a
moratorium. Soon after, the Movement
for Black Lives, a coalition of over 50
organizations that includes activists
from Black Lives Matter-a powerful
new advocacy force-also called for a
ban on charter school growth.
The rationale at the core of both
groups' stances: Black families and
communities are losing control of their
public schools.
It's a critique that some charter
school supporters empathize with.
"Education reformers basically dis-

Head Start teacher
Yolanda Gladney
reads to 3-year- olds
LaTruth Alexander,
Rome Williams, and
Emily Valdez-Rojo,
during the first week
of school at the
Skelly campus of the
Community Action
Project
in Tulsa, Okla.

Efforts to Boost
Teacher Diversity
Seen Falling Short
By Madeline Will
Creating greater diversity in the
teacher workforce has increasingly become a priority for school districts, state
lawmakers on both sides of the aisle,
and even the federal government. But
a new report suggests that there's still
a steep road ahead.
The goal of reaching a broadly diverse teacher workforce likely won't be
achieved within the next half-century
without substantial patches to the
teacher pipeline, according to the report, a joint effort by the Brown Center
on Education Policy at the Brookings
Institution and the National Council on
Teacher Quality.
Students of color make up about half
of all U.S. public school students, yet
only 18 percent of teachers are of color.
Research has shown that students
of color benefit from having teachers
who look like them, and proponents of
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Education Week - August 31, 2016

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