Education Week - January 11, 2017 - 1

Education Week
VOL. 36, NO. 17 * JANUARY 11, 2017

edweek.org:

Common-Core
Materials Hard
To Find, Poll Says

OBAMA AND EDUCATION, 2009-2017

Obama's Complex Legacy on K-12:
Bold Achievements, Fierce Blowback
President Barack
Obama sits with
Emily Hare as she
completes her
spelling lessons
during his visit to a
preschool
classroom at Powell
Elementary School
in the Petworth
neighborhood of
Washington.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP-File

SPEAKING OUT:
Times when issues,
emotion intersected.
PAGE 17

POLICY IMPRINT:
Tracking eight years
of education impact.

President Barack Obama entered the White
House in 2009 amid the wreckage of the Great
Recession and with education high on his list of
domestic priorities.
He scored some early game-changing policy
victories on teacher quality, academic standards,
and school turnarounds during his first term, but
faced a big backlash in his second. That reaction
threatened the longevity of his signature initiatives and made it virtually impossible to enact
similarly sweeping change in new areas, including early-childhood education.
At the same time, Obama used the bully pulpit-and his historic perch as the nation's first
black president-to shine a spotlight on historically overlooked groups of students through such
initiatives as My Brother's Keeper, which considered how the federal government could better
help young black men succeed.
Now many in the civil rights community are
worried about the fate of black, Latino, and other

minority students should Presidentelect Donald Trump's administration take a less aggressive stance
on civil rights enforcement in education. And it remains to be seen if the
Trump administration will roll back
Obama's spending and accountability regulations for the Every Student
Succeeds Act, and gut or scrap programs he created.

Susan Walsh/AP-File

PAGE 17

By Alyson Klein

Holding the Cards
Obama swept into office in an enviable position
for pushing his school agenda. His education secretary, Arne Duncan, had fans on both sides of
the partisan aisle. The Democrats had hefty majorities in both chambers of Congress, where lawmakers were itching to update the No Child Left
Behind Act. Obama hadn't gotten the teacher
unions' endorsements, but won the Democratic
nomination anyway, freeing him up to push for

When the U.S. Supreme Court made its
first substantive interpretation in 1982 of
the main federal special education law, it
was careful to say that courts should not
impose their own view of education adequacy upon states and districts for children
covered by the law.
In that case, Board of Education of the
Hendrick Hudson Central School District v. Rowley, the court created a definition of a "free, appropriate public educa-

tion" in the special education arena that
has stood for decades. Under the definition,
special education must confer "some educational benefit."
But in a case set to be argued Jan. 11,
the court is weighing in on what "some"
should mean. The question at hand: What
level of educational benefit must school
districts provide to students with disabilities in order for them to receive that free,
appropriate public education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act?
At the center of the latest case, Endrew

But More Teachers Report They
Feel Prepared to Teach Standards
By Jaclyn Zubrzycki
More than six years after states began adopting
the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts and math, most teachers in a recent survey say they are now familiar with the standards,
and a growing number feel prepared to teach them
to their students.
But fewer than 1 in 5 "strongly agree" that classroom resources are well-aligned to the standards
and that professional development is high-quality,
and many are turning to online sites like Teachers
Pay Teachers to find class materials.
That's according to a survey conducted in October by the Education Week Research Center. The
center asked 532 teachers who are registered users
of the Education Week website from elementary,
middle, and high schools in the District of Columbia
and 40 states that have adopted the common-core
standards about their experiences with professional
development, resources, and other aspects of the
standards. This is the third survey about the common core that the center has conducted since 2012.
Over that time, teachers have increasingly reported that their curricular resources are in line
with the standards and that they are more confident in teaching with them. In 2012, for instance,
just 9 percent of teachers strongly agreed that their
resources were aligned with the standards; in 2016,
that share doubled to 18 percent. Thirty-nine perPAGE 8>

The president
embraces Jane
Dougherty, right,
and Sue Connors,
sisters of slain
Sandy Hook
Elementary School
psychologist Mary
Sherlach.

DIGITAL DIRECTIONS

Ransomware Attacks
Force School Districts
To Shore Up - or Pay Up
By Leo Doran

F. v. Douglas County School Board, (Case
No. 15-827), is a 17-year-old Colorado student with autism, called "Drew" in court
briefs. His parents contend that the individualized education program created for
him by the Douglas County district did not
offer him an educational benefit.
The 66,000-student school district argued-and several courts agreed-that
the district's educational program was appropriate.
But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th

A big problem was waiting for Matt Jensen, the
superintendent of the Bigfork public schools, as he
arrived to work on a Monday in November.
His 900-student Montana district was under a
cyberattack. A self-replicating computer virus had
eaten its way through most of the schools' servers-including the student-information system-
and encrypted huge amounts of data, making it
inaccessible to Bigfork employees.
The perpetrators of the breach had also left a
disconcerting message for Jensen's IT director:
They were demanding a ransom in exchange for
a decryption key that would immediately unlock
the data. The alternative to paying up would be to
rebuild the district's data systems from backups or,
in a worst-case scenario, from scratch.
Experts have seen a spike in "ransomware" attacks across all sectors of the economy in recent
years. Criminals have hit all types of organizations,
public and private, including K-12 districts. Multiple
strains of the computer virus exist, but most ver-

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Spec. Ed. Benefits Taking Center Stage at Supreme Court
By Christina A. Samuels

BRE AKING NEWS DAILY

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Education Week - January 11, 2017

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