Education Week - February 8, 2017 - 1

Education Week
VOL. 36, NO. 20 * FEBRUARY 8, 2017

edweek.org:

Trump Orders
On Immigration
Rattle Educators

n POLICING AMERICA'S SCHOOLS: An Education Week Analysis
Reboot for Police
In Atlanta Schools
The Atlanta school
district is building its
own police force, which
aims to forge healthy,
respectful relationships
with students. School
resource officer Derrick
Hammond, at right,
greets senior Kemari
Averett at Grady High
School in Atlanta.

Travel Ban and Uncertain Fate
For DREAMers Stoke Fears

Ackerman + Gruber for Education Week

Fighting to Build
Trust in St. Paul
By Daarel Burnette II
St. Paul, Minn.

lice, school, and county attorney data
suggests a more temperate climate-
and makes clear just how hard it is to
reconcile perception and reality in the
realm of school safety and student-police interactions.
Between 2011 and 2016, the number
of high school fights in the district that
involved the intervention of a police
officer dropped by half. The number of
student arrests during that time declined to 56 in 2016 from 342 in 2011.
For several years, there had been no

Toy Vixayvong,
a school resource
officer in St. Paul,
Minn., mingles with
students between
classes at Como
Park High School.
Officers are working
to build supportive
relationships with
students.

expulsions, but in 2015-16, the district
expelled five students. Out-of-school
suspensions rose 21 percent last school
year from the year before. And formal
charges brought by authorities against
students who assaulted staff members
in a workforce of 5,300 have fluctuated
slightly, from a high of 18 in 2013 to a
low of eight in 2016.
"Perception becomes reality," said
John Thein, the district's interim superintendent. "If people feel safe, feel
PAGE 12>

DIGITAL DIRECTIONS

Ed-Tech Skeptic Finds a New Perspective
Larry Cuban
impressed by
Silicon Valley
personalizedlearning
efforts

By Benjamin Herold

Q&A
With Stanford
University professor
LARRY CUBAN

Few observers have been more skeptical of technology's role in K-12 education than Stanford University professor Larry Cuban, whose books are an essential guide to understanding how technological innovations are frequently "domesticated" by schools and teachers.
But after three decades of writing about the classroom limitations of technology,
Cuban decided a year ago to take a different tack.
Since then, he's been poking around Silicon Valley's most tech-savvy educational efforts, from the
Facebook-affiliated Summit Public Schools charter network, to private-school-network-slash-softwarecompany Alt School, to the algorithm-driven Teach to One model, to a handful of traditional public
schools that have adopted technology "whole hog."
The goal is to better understand how such models are using the internet, computers and tablets, software, and social-media platforms for teaching and learning.
That's significant, he said, because such schools have shifted their focus to using technology to sup-

PAGE 11>

President Donald Trump's sweeping order that halts
residents of seven Muslim-majority countries from
entering the United States sent shock waves through
some of the nation's schools, leaving educators scrambling to assure frightened refugee and immigrant students that their schools should be safe places.
The effort to calm those fears comes as some educators grapple with uncertainty of their own: not
knowing the next steps the White House will take
on immigration and how it will affect their students.
"[There are] a lot of unknowns right now," said
Elizabeth Demchak, the principal at Claremont International High School in New York City. "Anytime
you're talking about people's status in the country,
there will be fear. We have to try and give [students]
as much stability as possible."
Based in the South Bronx, Demchak's school
is home to hundreds of Spanish-, Arabic-, and
PAGE 16>

Would a DeVos Victory
Earn Diminished Prize
For Bruised Winner?
By Alyson Klein
School choice advocate and billionaire GOP donor
Betsy DeVos, President Donald Trump's pick to lead
the U.S. Department of Education, has been at the
center of a social-media maelstrom and stirred
more opposition than any other nominee to lead the
agency in its more than three-decade-long history.
But regardless of those strong feelings, it remains
to be seen whether DeVos-if confirmed, as appeared likely late last week-would have the clout
to be an effective education secretary.
The litany of prohibitions on the secretary's role
in the year-old Every Student Succeeds Act means
DeVos would take office with far less executive firepower than such predecessors as Arne Duncan and
Margaret Spellings, who used waivers and pilot programs to reimagine implementation of the No Child
Left Behind Act, the law's previous version.
For instance, language in ESSA prohibiting
the department from attempting to sway states
PAGE 23>

T.J. Kirkpatrick/Redux for Education Week

Melissa Golden for Education Week

By Corey Mitchell
& Francisco Vara-Orta

See article, Page 13.

To hear some teachers and students tell
it, the St. Paul school system was out of
control in the 2015-16 school year, and in
dire need of action.
Fights broke out in classrooms and
high school hallways. Students assaulted staff members. School police officers arrested students for the slightest
offenses and treated them with gross
disrespect.
Faced with student walkouts, a
threatened teachers' strike, and the firing of its longtime superintendent, the
38,000-student Minnesota district has
since rolled out measures aimed at ensuring the safety of staff and students
and creating an environment conducive
to learning.
But a review of several years of po-

BRE AKING NEWS DAILY

Betsy DeVos is the nominee for U.S. secretary of education.

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Education Week - February 8, 2017

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