Education Week - March 23, 2016 - 1

Education Week

VOL. 35, NO. 25 * MARCH 23, 2016

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AMERICAN EDUCATION'S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD * © 2016 Editorial Projects in Education * $ 4 

BRE AKING NEWS DAILY

Federal i3: Giving Wing to Promising Ideas
Intervention Targets
9th Grade Transition
By Sarah D. Sparks

Sarah Rice for Education Week

Bucksport and North Berwick, Maine

It's critical for students making the transition from middle to high school to know that
the adults around them understand and care
about them, but high school is also the time
when parent and teacher attention can become hard to come by.
"When you have 100 kids on your caseload, you
have to deal with the bigger issues in class, and
the kid who comes 30 seconds late to class every
day can slip under your radar," said Josh Tripp,
who was a math teacher in the nearly 400-student Bucksport High School four years ago when
the school district, located on the state's far-north
coast, volunteered to participate in a $5 million
development grant in the first round of the federal Investing in Innovation program.
The grant's purpose was to evaluate the Building Assets-Reducing Risks program, aimed at
smoothing students' transition from middle
to high school through a system that enables
teachers to direct more attention to students'
academic, emotional, and social needs.
BARR is among a handful of programs that
started out as promising ideas under i3's development grants but have built up enough
evidence to scale up and move to a new grant to
validate their model in other districts. That first
development grant, which included four lowperforming schools including Bucksport, built
enough success to earn the fledgling program
a $12 million, still ongoing, validation grant in
2013-which includes the 1,100-student Noble
High School several hours south in North Berwick and a pilot to potentially expand statewide
in Maine.
The grants enabled BARR to expand from a
single high school in Minnesota to 45 urban,
suburban, and rural schools, representing
more than 17,000 students and more than 800

Science teacher Andrea Froburg, math teacher Jessica Cutliffe, and special educator Aimee Hall, from left to right, review a student's file in a
Building Assets-Reducing Risks meeting at Noble High School in North Berwick, Maine. Noble is testing the BARR program with i3 funding.
ABOUT THIS PACKAGE: As the first grants
issued under the federal Investing in
Innovation, or i3, program wind down,
Education Week examines the yield from the
politically popular program.
INTRODUCTION TO i3: A primer on the federal
government's main "innovation pipeline."
PAGE 12

WRITING RESULTS: An i3 evaluation of the
National Writing Project points to positive
results. PAGE 8

PAGE 12 >

ESSA May Offer Megaphone
For Parent, Community Voice
Advocates See Chance for Greater Impact Under New K-12 Law
By Andrew Ujifusa and Sarah Tully
Advocates for parent and community engagement see the newly revised federal K-12
law as an opportunity to expand their impact
on states' academic goals, plans for school improvement, and other areas of policy.
Requirements in federal education law for
parental involvement in public schools are
nothing new. But because the new Every
Student Succeeds Act shifts significant responsibility over accountability and other
matters to states and districts, there's renewed hope that parent, community, civil
rights, and other groups will have more sway
over what has been, in many cases, a narrower decisionmaking process.

There are some caveats, however.
Since ESSA deals only with authorizations for programs, federal funding for
some of these engagement efforts is not
guaranteed. And various groups say that
it's up to all sides-including policymakers,
advocates, and community members-to
become more active so that the promise
ESSA holds for them is fulfilled.
The new law, like its predecessor, the No
Child Left Behind Act, requires districts
to set aside at least 1 percent of their Title I
funds, which are aimed at helping disadvantaged children, to involve parents in
the school community (although the wording to describe those activities has changed
PAGE 20 >

Grant Boosts 'Early College' High School Effort
By Alyson Klein
Pilot Mountain, N.C.

The students bent intently over their desktop
computers at East Surry High School on a recent afternoon weren't all working on the same
lesson, or in the same course-or even as part
of the same school.
Senior Ben Chilton sat in a corner, reading
for an online political science class at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, while

New Scrutiny
On Schools'
Drinking Water
In the wake of the lead-water
crisis in Flint, Mich., and the
recent revelation that
thousands of Newark, N.J.,
students may have been
exposed to elevated levels of
lead, districts around the
country are dealing with rising
demands for more regular
testing to ensure drinking
water supplies in public
schools are safe. PAGE 6

a handful of other students were earning credits
at East Carolina University in a classroom in an
online community in which students and teachers are represented by avatars. And another senior, Timothy Crotts, highlighted passages from
an old-fashioned textbook in a personal-finance
class, also for an ECU course.
High school students earning college credit
may sound like nothing new. But over the past
few years, students in East Surry and 17 other
PAGE 15 >

State Solidarity Erodes
On Standards Testing
By Catherine Gewertz
Only 21 states still plan to use shared tests designed
for the common core, a continued erosion of the unity that
emerged six years ago, when 45 states embraced the standards and pledged to measure student learning with common
assessments.
The high school testing landscape is even more fragmented,
as states increasingly choose the SAT or ACT college-entrance
exam instead of common-core tests.
An Education Week survey of states' testing plans in English/
language arts and math-the two subjects covered by the common core-found that states have continued in 2015-16 to drift
away from the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for
College and Careers, or PARCC, and Smarter Balanced tests.
Those assessment systems were crafted by two groups of
states to reflect the Common Core State Standards, which
were the product of an initiative launched by the nation's
governors and chief state school officers. The U.S. Department of Education awarded $360 million in grants in 2010 to
PAGE 10 >
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Education Week - March 23, 2016

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