Education Week - January 8, 2014 - 1

EDUCATIONWEEK
VOL. 33, NO. 15 * JANUARY 8, 2014
AMERICAN EDUCATION'S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD * © 2014 Editorial Projects in Education * $4
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State Legislators
Fire Up Engines
Common Core Likely Flash Point
By Andrew Ujifusa
State legislators begin their 2014 sessions this
month grappling with the best way forward on the
Common Core State Standards in a tricky political
climate, with a majority of governors and lawmakers
up for election in the fall.
For many states, this year will be a key juncture
for decisions about the standards-and related
exams-before their full weight is felt in classrooms,
district offices, and state education departments
in the 2014-15 school year.
Many lawmakers will be working to help ensure
that state accountability and assessment systems
lead to students who are better prepared for study
and work after high school, said Jeremy Anderson,
the president of the Denver-based Education Commission
of the States.
"For many governors, this transition from secondary
to postsecondary is all about the future of
the workforce in their states," he said.
But the large slate of elections this year, including
gubernatorial contests in 36 states and legislative
races in 46, could tamp down many lawmakers'
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NEW ERA: Incoming New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio listens as Carmen Fariña, his appointee as schools chancellor, speaks during a news
conference at a middle school in Brooklyn last week. Ms. Fariña is the first educator in more than 12 years to lead the district. PAGE 6
INDUSTRY & INNOVATION
InBloom Sputters
As Data Privacy
Hits the Spotlight
By Ben Kamisar
The education nonprofit inBloom
burst onto the scene last February,
touting a program to synthesize
student data to help target the
needs of individual children and
revolutionize personalized learning.
Backed by $100 million in grants
from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
and the Carnegie Corporation
of New York, the company formed
partnerships with nine states that
together have more than 11 million
students.
But instead of leading a nationwide
movement to improve the use of
student data, inBloom has sputtered.
Six states initially listed as partners
with inBloom dissolved their relationships
with the company, leaving
only Illinois, Massachusetts,
and New York-and those ties are
now uncertain. The state school
board in Illinois recently announced
that districts' use of inBloom was
optional, plans to move forward
in Massachusetts are unclear, and
a lawsuit threatens inBloom's plans
PAGE 13 >
CLOUD COMPUTING: Storing data in the
"cloud" raises security concerns. PAGE 9
The Rainey family listens, as Emily Rainey, center, presents a speech
on what she has learned at Da Vinci Innovation Academy, a charter
in the Los Angeles area exclusively for home-schooled students.
Inspections Piloted for Teacher Prep
By Stephen Sawchuk
A handful of states and universities are piloting
British-style inspections to get a better
sense of how their teacher-preparation standards
are playing out in lecture halls and
K-12 classrooms.
It's the latest attempt to crack a difficult
nut that has generated increasing policy interest:
what's really happening on the ground
in preparation programs and how the training
can be strengthened.
Four institutions, two each in New Mexico
and Texas, participated this fall in inspections
of their elementary education programs,
which were conducted with the aid of a British
inspectorate, the Tribal Group. Though
small in scale, the initiative will expand next
Student Views Shifting
On Risks of Marijuana
year, in what's likely to trigger closer scrutiny
of U.S. states' ill-understood, frequently
obscure processes for approving teacher-preparation
programs.
"You can read the tea leaves," said Michael
A. Morehead, the dean of the college of education
at New Mexico State University, in Las
Cruces, which took part in the inspection.
"With all of the national rhetoric, there will
be much more of an emphasis in the next
three to five years on ways to determine
whether teacher ed. programs are of appropriate
quality."
Although it's early yet, participating
universities say they've found the inspections,
which focus particularly on the quality
of instruction in coursework and studentPAGE
10 >
By Evie Blad
Campaigns in individual states to legalize marijuana
use may be contributing to a drop in the percentages
of teenagers nationwide who see risk in
regular use of the drug and to an increase in its use
by students themselves, public-health leaders say.
Experts say that shifting attitudes about the drug
complicate schools' drug-abuse-prevention classes,
where teachers must navigate conflicts between
state and federal drug laws, disputes about the effects
of marijuana, and, increasingly, a contrast between
how marijuana is discussed in the classroom
and how it is discussed in students' homes.
The changes in students' attitudes toward marijuana
were highlighted last month by findings from
the National Institutes of Health's annual Monitoring
the Future Survey, a nationally representative
PAGE 10 >
L.A. School Bridges
Home-School Gap
By Sarah D. Sparks
Los Angeles
It's a truism that a child's most important
teacher is his or her parent, but one
charter school here uses that mantra literally
as a blueprint to reconnect one group
of families that has become disengaged
from public schools: home schoolers.
The Da Vinci Innovation Academy
draws home-schooled students who live
within a 90-minute drive of Los Angeles
International Airport. The school, a part-
nership between the Da Vinci chartermanagement
group and the Wiseburn
school district, has developed intensive,
connected parent-and-teacher professional
development to help widely disparate
students stay on the same page.
"There are 270 kids attending DVIA, and
they all have very different programs
because every parent is seeing their role
a little bit differently," said Tom R. Johnstone,
Wiseburn's superintendent.
The most recent data from the National
Center for Education Statistics show that
roughly 3 percent of all school-age American
children, or 1.77 million, were homeschooled
in 2011. As the practice becomes
PAGE 12 >
David Walter Banks for Education Week
Mark Lennihan/AP

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Education Week - January 8, 2014

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