Education Week - February 24, 2016 - 1

Education WEEk

VOL. 35, NO. 22 * FEBRUARY 24, 2016

edweek.org:

BRE AKING NEWS DAILY

This issue includes Education Week's
annual report on exceptional district-level
leaders across the country who put new
ideas to work and have lessons to share.
See the special magazine in the center of this issue.

MATH FEVER: From left, Luna Rodriguez,
Sabrina Vulpio, and Justin Burgher,
7th graders at PS 232, dance on the
light-activated Math Square at the
Museum of Mathematics in New York.
MoMath and other museums are
trying to make the subject enjoyable.
PAGE 8

Disparities in Test Accommodations Eyed
Justice Dept. Exploring Why Students With Disabilities Miss Out on Supports for Required ACTs, SATs
By Catherine Gewertz
As more states embrace the SAT or the ACT
as their mandated high school test, a new gulf
is opening between students with disabilities
and those without, and it's caught the eye of
the U.S. Department of Justice.
The department's office for civil rights is
gathering information about the practices of
the College Board and ACT Inc. after persistent complaints that the testing organizations
reject many requests for accommodations

that are routinely provided by schools, such as
extra time or frequent breaks.
That practice puts students with disabilities in a tough spot, particularly in the
23 states that now require high school students to take one of the two college-entrance
exams. Students who can't get the testing accommodations they're used to can take the
exams without them and risk a compromised
performance, or, in some states, they can insist on their usual accommodations and give
up a key benefit their non-accommodated

peers receive: a "college-reportable" score.
That's because the College Board and ACT
Inc. won't certify scores for use in college admissions if their tests aren't taken with accommodations they approved. The organizations
defend their practices, and say relatively few
students end up with non-reportable scores.
Questions of equal test access are mounting
as states push harder than ever to find ways to
ensure that students are college-ready. Many
states offer the SAT or the ACT for free to all

ESSA Spotlights
Strategy to Reach
Diverse Learners
By Christina A. Samuels

dedicate time to stand-alone grammar lessons
and tasks-diagramming sentences, for instance, or memorizing the differences between
adjectives and adverbs? Or can students learn
the language system through broad writing
and reading?
Questions around whether and how grammar should be taught in schools have long
been the cause of a tug of war within the language arts community.
In an article published in the January/Feb-

Sprinkled throughout the newly reauthorized version of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act are references
to an instructional strategy that supporters think has enormous potential for
reaching learners with diverse needs.
The next thing to do, those proponents
say, is getting more educators to understand just what
it means.
Called uniThe New Federal K-12 Law
versal design
for learning, or UDL for short, the strategy
encompasses a wide set of teaching techniques, allowing multiple ways for teachers
to present information and for students to
engage in lessons and demonstrate what
they know.
A universally designed lesson, for example, might include audiovisual components,
illustrations, traditional lectures, enlarged
print, or glossaries so that students can
have easy access to unfamiliar terms. Universal design for learning also encourages
students to use a variety of techniques,
such as group projects, multimedia pre-

PAGE 16 >

PAGE 24 >

PAGE 14 >

INSIDE ESSA

Will the Common Core Step Up Schools' Focus on Grammar?
By Liana Heitin
Grammar instruction may have waned in
some classrooms starting in the early 2000s,
largely because the high-stakes tests required
by the No Child Left Behind law didn't assess
grammar specifically.
But with most states now using the Common Core State Standards, there's some
thought that grammar is making a comeback-along with perennial debates about
how best to teach it.

"We are asking kids to dive into complex
texts and understand them, so we need to
teach them how to read complex sentences,"
said Chris Hayes, a veteran elementary
teacher in Washoe County, Nev. And that requires deep knowledge of grammar.
If it's true that grammar instruction dropped
off but is now enjoying a resurgence-and
even that is tough to track with certainty-
then determining the best approach for teaching syntax and semantics is now once again
a critical conversation topic. Should teachers

http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - February 24, 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - February 24, 2016