Education Week - January 15, 2014 - 1

EDUCATIONWEEK
Renewals of Education Laws Languish in Congress
VOL. 33, NO. 17 * JANUARY 15, 2014
AMERICAN EDUCATION'S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD * © 2014 Editorial Projects in Education * $4
By Alyson Klein
As the 113th Congress returns for its second
year, nearly every major education law remains
overdue for reauthorization, leaving issues
from early childhood to workforce development
caught in a vortex of partisan rancor.
Education advocates are fearful that Congress-which
triggered the government shutdown
late last year and has a historically low
approval rating-won't be able to get any of
the pending bills across the finish line by De-
cember, when this Congress comes to a close.
And observers across the political spectrum are
highly skeptical that much work will get done
by the time President Barack Obama leaves office,
three years from now, on laws badly in need
of updating.
The slow pace of legislative progress has
put the Obama administration largely in the
driver's seat on education policy, through such
initiatives as a complex series of waivers easing
parts of the No Child Left Behind Act.
Those moves have given the U.S. Department
of Education more say than ever on what happens
in schools across the country. But the administrative
solutions are far from permanent,
making the future uncertain for educators, from
teachers to state schools chiefs.
"We've kind of gotten used to Congress not
taking any action," said Terry Holliday, who
serves as Kentucky's commissioner of education
and is the president of the Council of Chief
State School Officers. Temporary fixes such as
the Obama administration's NCLB waivers "help,
but they're not a long-term solution. We abso-
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lutely need Congress to establish a vision and
expectations for education."
Chief among the lingering legislation is the
reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act, whose current version is
the No Child Left Behind law. The renewal has
been pending since 2007.
Lawmakers also must rewrite measures
governing federal policy and programs for
education research, special education, career
and technical education, and adult learners, as
PAGE 19>
Cities Take Lead
On Expanding
Early Education
Christina A. Samuels
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio's plan to create a
universal preschool program for the city's 4-yearolds-through
a tax on the city's highest earners-is
the latest example of city leaders around
the country taking early-childhood education into
their own hands, sometimes well in advance of
state or federal officials.
In 2012, San Antonio residents approved a sales
tax of an eighth of a cent to pay for expanded
preschool to serve 3,700 4-year-olds, a program
that got underway this school year. The Seattle
City Council voted last year in support of a preschool
program to serve 3- and 4-year olds and has
started a feasibility study. Those efforts join older
city-run preschool programs in cities such as Boston,
Denver, and San Francisco.
"You don't find a lot of people arguing about the
value of full-day pre-K," said Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat,
at a Jan. 6 press conference where he was
PAGE 14>
TECH. UPGRADE: Val Anderson hollers orders to a crew member while they install fiber-optic cable at the Butte High School Career
Center in Montana. The new fiber-optic network will deliver faster Internet connections to 12 city school buildings.
Districts Get Creative to Speed Up Internet
High-Speed Fiber-Optic Cable
Seen as Key to Quality Access
By Benjamin Herold
Desperate for access to high-speed fiberoptic
cable that can meet their demands
for bandwidth, and frustrated with the
ways in which federal regulations and
large telecommunications companies often
get in the way, some districts are getting
creative.
Take the 5,000-student Butte district in
southwestern Montana. It recently initiated
a public-private partnership to build a
brand-new fiber network after its plans for
using technology were thwarted time and
again.
"I don't want you to think we tie our
horses to the fence post out here," Superintendent
Judy M. Jonart said of her rural
mining town. "We want to get to 1-to-1 computing.
We're not doing as much videoconferencing
or collaborating across classrooms
as we want to. We'd like to get phone over
the Internet."
But over the past decade, Ms. Jonart said,
a lack of viable on-the-ground options has
left Butte, like thousands of other school districts,
struggling with Internet connections
far too slow to take advantage of the digital
revolution in K-12 education.
"We had to do it ourselves," she said. "We
didn't have any other choice."
Fiber is generally regarded as the fast-
est, most reliable, and most adaptable vehicle
for satisfying schools' huge appetite for
more bandwidth, but only about 40 percent
of U.S. districts are believed to have direct
fiber connections to an Internet service pro-
vider, based on the most recently available
data from the National Center for Education
Statistics.
Many districts have also struggled to establish
internal fiber connections among all
of their schools. Experts say changing those
realities is the surest way to realize President
Barack Obama's goal of bringing highspeed
Internet connections to nearly every
school within five years.
But because installing fiber-optic cable
entails significant upfront costs, large telecommunications
companies have declined
to build out such networks in many rural
and remote sections of the country, leaving
districts such as Butte with few existing options
to tap.
Making matters worse, districts are prohibited
from using federal E-rate funds to
build and manage their own fiber connecPAGE
12>
TFA Alumni Groomed
For Leadership Roles
By Stephen Sawchuk
A spinoff of the controversial Teach For America
teacher-placement program has expanded rapidly
in recent months, pursuing a goal both specific and
dizzyingly broad: helping TFA's 32,000 alumni rise
to civic-leadership roles.
Leadership for Educational Equity has grown
from just a handful of staff members a few years
ago to nearly 60 today. The Washington-based group,
known as LEE, now boasts a $3.9 million annual budget.
In 2011, it launched a series of national workshops
for TFA alumni eyeing careers in policy and
advocacy, and in 2013 expanded it to include community
organizing.
The ambitions of LEE are bolder, though, than to
serve as a development center of sorts for those
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MORE ADVOCACY NEWS: Read how new organizations are
enlisting parents in the school-choice movement. PAGE 6
Jeremy Lurgio for Education Week

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Education Week - January 15, 2014

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