Education Week - January 22, 2014 - 1

EDUCATIONWEEK
VOL. 33, NO. 18 * JANUARY 22, 2014
AMERICAN EDUCATION'S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD * © 2014 Editorial Projects in Education * $4
WAR ON POVERTY: Progress & Persistent Inequity
edweek.org: BREAKING NEWS DAILY
A K-12 Titan
In Congress
To Move On
Miller Called 'Irreplaceable'
By Alyson Klein
U.S. Rep. George Miller's decision
not to seek another term after decades
as an education-policy powerhouse on
Capitol Hill will create a void in Congress,
at a time when other pivotal legislative
positions are likely to change
hands in both the House and Senate.
The California Democrat, who an-
THEN AND NOW: Children play at
recess outside of Hays-Porter
Elementary School in Cincinnati's West
End neighborhood. The yearbook photo
on the left depicts the neighborhood
around 1990. On the right, Aaryn Hill, 9,
and her 2nd grade classmates stand in
the same spot earlier this month. The
school is still largely racially and
economically segregated, despite
decades of government anti-poverty
efforts. PAGE 16>
FOLLOW THE MONEY: School
spending has skyrocketed since the
beginning of the War on Poverty, but so
have the disparities in states' per-pupil
funding. PAGE 18>
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
50 Years Later, Verdicts Are Mixed
On the Nation's War on Poverty
By Sarah D. Sparks
In 50 years, the faces and dynamics of child
poverty in the United States have changed
dramatically, but the nation's approach to
ending it is still based largely on the policies
and programs laid out at the onset of the War
on Poverty, launched by President Lyndon B.
Johnson this month in 1964.
ABOUT THIS OCCASIONAL SERIES
This package of stories is the first of a series of
articles in Education Week during the next 18 months
to reflect on the 50th anniversary of the War on
Poverty and its impact on the lives of children,
especially those living in poverty.
Many of those programs focus on community
planning and social services for families
in poverty: Medicaid, as the first national
health-care program for low-income children;
community health centers and the first widescale
school immunization and screening programs;
the predecessors to the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program, and Section 8
housing vouchers.
But in speech after speech, President Johnson
presented education-from Head Start
preschools and Title I grants to help level the
educational field for disadvantaged students,
to the forerunner of Pell Grants to help them
afford college-as the linchpin of the Great
Society efforts.
"Very often a lack of jobs and money is not
the cause of poverty, but the symptom," he
said as he declared an "unconditional war on
poverty" in his Jan. 8, 1964 State of the Union
address. "The cause may lie deeper in our failure
to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to
develop their own capacities."
So where are we now? By the U.S. Census
Bureau's official count, 16 million children
under 18, representing 23 percent of all
PAGE 14>
nounced his retirement last week
after nearly 40 years in Congress, has
pushed through game-changing legislation,
from the bipartisan No Child Left
Behind Act in 2002 to a complete reimagining
of the federal student-lending
program in 2010. And he is stepping
down as Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa,
the chairman of the Senate education
committee, is also set to retire.
Former members of Congress and
congressional aides from all parts
of the political spectrum say Rep.
Miller is a rarity among education
leaders, combining a wonk's policy
expertise with the shrewdness of
a seasoned political operative, who
has a commitment to educational
equity for poor and minority students.
They see no one on the scene
PAGE 23>
DIGITAL DIRECTIONS
Personal Danger
Of Data Breaches
Prompts Action
By Benjamin Herold
Privacy advocates say the increased
collection, storage, and sharing of educational
data pose real threats to children
and families, from identify theft
to nuisance advertising, misguided
profiling to increased surveillance of
everyday activities.
There is even the potential for
Fla. Pushes Longer Day With More Reading in Struggling Schools
By Catherine Gewertz
Two years ago, Florida took a step no other
state has taken to improve students' reading
skills: It required its 100 lowest-performing elementary
schools to add an extra hour to their
school day and to use that time for reading instruction.
Early results suggest the new initiative
may be paying off.
After only a year with the extra hour, threequarters
of the schools saw improved reading
scores on the state's standardized test, the Florida
Comprehensive Assessment Test, or FCAT. Seventy
of the schools earned their way off the lowest-performing
list altogether.
"That extra time for reading instruction was
really important for us," said Kathy Shuler, who
oversees the school transformation office in Orlando's
Orange County district, where all seven
schools in the extra-hour reading program's first
year, 2012-13, improved their reading scores and
are no longer on the list.
The Florida program arose from a 2012 law
mandating the additional hour each day for "in-
tensive reading instruction." The law's author,
Republican state Sen. David Simmons, had taken
note of a pilot program for four schools in 2007-08.
Three boosted their school grades from D's or F's
to C's in Florida's accountability ratings, and one
vaulted to an A. He wanted to see more schools do
what they had done.
"Done right, the benefits of this program are
extensive and in some cases dramatic," Sen. Simmons
said.
Despite being a state mandate, the program
PAGE 12 >
physical harm to students, alleges
one Arizona legislator who authored
a recently passed privacy law in response
to complaints that low-income
children had been subjected to unnecessary
dental work by corporateaffiliated
"mobile dentists" relying on
easy access to school records.
But while some parents, advocates,
and academics are raising alarms
that sensitive student data are being
poorly safeguarded and improperly
shared, it remains difficult to document
the scope of the harm caused by
the misuse of such information.
For a decade, proponents have called
PAGE 11>
Photos from left: Hays-Porter Elementary School, Swikar Patel/Education Week
Circa 1990
2014
http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - January 22, 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - January 22, 2014
