Education Week - November 15, 2017 - Cover1
Education WEEk VOL. 37, NO. 13 * NOVEMBER 15, 2017 edweek.org: AMERICAN EDUCATION'S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD * © 2017 Editorial Projects in Education * $ 5 BRE AKING NEWS DAILY New Survey Details Effect of Inclusion On Teaching Time Preston Gannaway for Education Week By Christina A. Samuels GIVING PARENTS VOICE: Parents (from left) Silvia Servin (with daughter Victoria Torres, 4), Abigail Perez, and Andrea Cortez listen during a parent-training session in Modesto, Calif. The session was organized by PIQE, the Parent Institute for Quality Education, which teaches parents how to advocate for their children and navigate an education system that may be unfamiliar to them. PAGE 6 E-Schools Adapt To Transgender Students' Needs Software, not bathroom access, is most pressing issue By Benjamin Herold Indiana Connections Academy faced a dilemma. Around 2013, a growing number of transgender students at the K-12 school began telling staff they wanted to be recognized by a different name and gender than was listed on their birth certificates. But Indiana Connections Academy is a full-time online charter. That means most student interactions with teachers and classmates occur online, using technology platforms that display each child's name and other information. The school couldn't change what was displayed publicly without first wrestling with serious questions about student privacy, as well as changing what was stored in its back-end database, which at the time required students' legal name and gender for state reporting purposes. Finding a technical fix was just part of the ongoing challenge, according to Melissa Brown, Indiana Connections Academy's longtime executive director. The school has also had to consider its legal obligations around serving transgender students, which have shifted over the past two presidential adminPAGE 11 > PAGE 12> Are States Changing Course on Teacher Evaluation? Test-Score Growth Plays Lesser Role in Six States By Liana Loewus Bolstered by new research and federal incentives, experts decided about a decade ago that better teacher evaluation was the path to better student achievement. A flood of states started toughening their teacherevaluation systems, and many of them did it by incorporating student-test scores into educators' ratings. And while those policies are still in place in a majority of states, there are signs the tide is turning: Over the past two years, a handful of states have begun reversing mandates on using student-growth mea- sures-and standardized-test scores, in particular-to gauge teacher quality. Six states-Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Oklahoma- have now dropped requirements that evaluations include student-growth measures and begun letting districts decide what elements to include in assessing teachers, according to analyses from the Education Commission of the States and the National Center on Teacher Quality. Connecticut, Nevada, and Utah passed policies that require some evidence of student learning but prohibit using state standardized-test scores for that purpose. Florida kept student-growth measures but PAGE 16> OLIVE BRANCH: New Mexico is giving teachers a seat at the policy table-now. N.M. at a Crossroads on Reviews By Alyson Klein Santa Fe, N.M. If you're a teacher, it's almost a sure bet that you will get a satisfactory performance rating, even if your state tries to make the process more objective by incorporating student-test scores into evaluations. That is, unless you happen to live in New Mexico. The Land of Enchantment has either the toughest evaluation system in the country or the most accurate, depending on who you talk to. Experts at Brown and Temple universities looked at evaluation systems in 24 states, including New Mexico, that incorporate student growth on tests and found that 95 percent of teachers get proficient or better ratings. By contrast, more than a quarter of New Mexico's teachers are labeled as "mini- PAGE 17> PAGE 16> In Florida, Laissez-Faire Approach to Monitoring Private School Vouchers By Arianna Prothero Josh Ritchie for Education Week DIGITAL DIRECTIONS A new analysis that looks at how much time educators spend teaching in classrooms with students with disabilities adds a new twist to the debate over inclusion. Data from a survey of educators in more than three dozen countries and regions, including the United States, shows that time spent teaching goes down as the number of students with disabilities in a classroom goes up. But inclusion of special education students by itself doesn't appear to be the main driver. Instead, the survey offers a complex picture of how countries all over the world handle classes with high numbers of students with disabilities. Among the other contributing factors putting a damper on teaching time, the analysis says classrooms with high numbers of students with disabilities also tend to have teachers who have less training and less experience. Such classrooms also tend to have high percentages of students with other needs, such as language minorities, low academic achievement, and low socioeconomic status. And while having a high percentage of students with behavior problems also cuts into teaching time, it's not Erica Florea and daughter, Jessica, 14, at home in Jupiter, Fla. The family had a difficult experience with private school choice. Erica Florea was fed up. The Jupiter, Fla., mother had feuded for months with her daughter's middle school over her special education needs. Florea believed Jessica, who has dwarfism and epilepsy, also had autism. But the school system, Florea said, had missed the diagnosis and was not providing the supports she insisted her daughter needed. So, before school resumed in the fall of 2015, she took a friend's advice and applied for one of Florida's publicly funded voucher programs to help pay tuition expenses for Jessica to attend a private school. With a taxpayer-funded McKay Scholarship worth nearly $6,000, Florea pulled Jessica out of a public school system that faces some of the most stringent accountability in the country and entered into a largely unregulated private school sector with wide latitude over who it admits, who it kicks out, and few requirements for informing the public on how it serves students PAGE 12 >