Education Week - January 28, 2015 - 1

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Poor Children Now Make Up a Majority
By Evie Blad
Students from low-income
households have made up a rising
share of the public school
population for years, but their
recent shift into the majority
serves as an urgent signal to
policymakers and schools to
address the needs of poor children,
and the challenges of educating
them, researchers and
educators say.
Kathleen Jasper, left, a former educator and school administrator, and Cindy Hamilton, a parent and the
co-founder of Orlando Opt Out, lead a session at United Opt Out's national conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Activists Learn Art of 'Test Refusal'
At Conference, Anti-Testing Groups
Strategize on Ways to Grow Their Ranks
By Liana Heitin
Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Anti-testing advocates meeting here to advance their cause
tossed around a list of protest strategies: Twitter campaigns,
parent test-taking parties, quiet conversations in the teachers'
lounge, organized walkouts.
The 75 or so parents, educators, union leaders, and selftitled
"agitators" at the United Opt Out National: Standing
Up for Action conference, which took place over a weekend
earlier this month, strategized on getting more people involved
in the growing practice of "test refusal"-in the hope
of ultimately ending what they consider punitive and overly
burdensome testing practices in K-12 schools.
"You have to know this is an act of civil disobedience," Cindy
Hamilton, a parent and the co-founder of Orlando Opt Out,
told a group of attendees. "This is not for the faint of heart."
The convening offered a small window on an anti-testing
movement that is heating up at both the grassroots and national
levels. As Congress works to update the Elementary
and Secondary Education Act-better known in its current
version as No Child Left Behind-many lawmakers have
expressed interest in cutting back the number of tests
required by the law.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the new chairman of the
Senate education committee, introduced a draft bill this
month with two proposed paths for testing, one of which
would give states leeway to test students just once in particular
grade spans rather than yearly. Now, most students take
state standardized tests each year in grades 3-8 and once in
high school.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, while remaining
steadfast in his commitment to keeping the annual
testing in place, has said he'd like to help schools
and districts weed out unnecessary tests. And in October,
state schools chiefs and a national group representing
big-city districts announced a plan to review district testPAGE
10 >
Ed. School Deans Join Forces
To Bolster Teacher Preparation
By Stephen Sawchuk
More than a dozen education
school deans are banding
together, aiming to design a
coherent set of teacher-preparation
experiences, validate
them, and shore up support for
them within their own colleges
and the field at large.
Deans for Impact, based
in Austin, Texas, launches
this month with a $1 million
grant from the Charles and
Lynn Schusterman Family
Foundation.
The new group's embrace
of data-informed changes to
teacher-preparation curricula-
even, potentially, based on
"value added" information-is
likely to generate waves in the
insular world of teacher preparation.
It's also a testament to
teacher-educators' search for an
alternative to traditional associations
and accreditation bodies.
And, the deans say, it's a
chance to move away from talking
about which information on
teacher preparation to collect to
beginning the use of such data.
"This information is necesPAGE
14 >
An analysis released last
week by the Southern Education
Foundation showed that
public schools crossed a new, significant
threshold in 2013, when
a majority of the nation's nearly
50 million students qualified for
free or reduced-price lunches.
Research shows that poor
VOL. 34, NO. 19 * JANUARY 28, 2015
edweek.org: BREAKING NEWS DAILY
Poverty Data Signal
Urgency for Schools
children often enter school
behind other students academically,
they often struggle
to catch up, and they tend
to lag behind their higherincome
peers in areas like
attendance.
"If you have a majority of
your schoolchildren who are
low-income, ... the nation as a
whole is not going to fare well
in the future as those kids
struggle through school, as
some drop out of school, and
as those kids become the kind
of adults who are not as welleducated
as society needs,"
said Steve Suitts, a senior fellow
at the Southern Education
Foundation, an Atlanta-based
organization that advocates
PAGE 16 >
DIGITAL DIRECTIONS
N.C. District Rebounds From Ed-Tech Meltdown
By Benjamin Herold
Thirteen months after pulling the plug on a
$33 million student-computing effort gone awry,
North Carolina's Guilford County school district
has managed to get its signature technology initiative
up and running.
But the costs of starting over for the 73,000-student
district -including wasted time, damaged credibility,
and considerable staff frustration-have been high.
And those burdens pale in comparison to the price
paid by Amplify, the vendor that last school year supplied
the district with thousands of digital tablets
plagued with hardware problems. In order to keep
its contract in Guilford County, the New York Citybased
company absorbed millions of dollars in losses,
according to documents provided by the district.
"Believe me, none of us would ever ask for something
like this to happen," said Nora K. Carr, the
chief of staff for the Guilford County district.
Challenges are to be expected when deploying
thousands of digital devices inside schools, say experts
on 1-to-1 student computing. And given the
unusual problems that arose in Guilford County,
the district was probably correct to press the
reset button rather than forge ahead, said Leslie
Wilson, the chief executive officer of the Oneto-One
Institute, a nonprofit organization based
in Mason, Mich., that helps districts implement
student-computing initiatives.
Taking that dramatic action, though, was
PAGE 12 >
NCLB REVISITED: Chairman Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., left, listens to a staffer during a
Jan. 21 Senate education committee hearing on the testing provisions of the No Child
Left Behind Act. Congress is gearing up to rewrite the law. PAGE 18
Swikar Patel/Education Week
T.J. Kirkpatrick for Education Week

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Education Week - January 28, 2015

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