Education Week - April 22, 2015 - 1

Education WEEk
AMERICAN EDUCATION'S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD * © 2015 Editorial Projects in Education * $4
By Sean Cavanagh
Two of the biggest names in testing
are locked in a dispute over one of the
most coveted jewels in the K-12 market:
the right to oversee a suite of assessments
in California, a state with about
one-eighth of the country's students.
The state's recent decision to award a
tentative three-year, $240 million contract
to the Educational Testing Service
drew an angry response from a rival
vendor, Pearson, which has accused reviewers
of missteps that include sloppy
scoring and improperly discarding records
of their deliberations.
The California dispute is just the
'FRANCHISING' A LEADER: Principal Kathleen L. Decker talks with art teacher Michael Cababe at Walter Bracken STEAM Academy, an elementary school in
Las Vegas. Under a pilot program for successful school leaders, Ms. Decker is also serving as principal at Walter V. Long Elementary School. PAGE 8
Traction Limited
In Rolling Back
Common Core
Standards Foes Push On,
But State Bills Languish
By Andrew Ujifusa
For many foes of the Common Core
State Standards, this was supposed
to be the year their advocacy and passion
would translate into victories.
Emboldened by last year's experience,
when three states-Indiana,
Oklahoma, and South Carolina-decided
to at least nominally reject the
common core, opponents of the standards
aimed to keep the ball rolling
in the 2015 state legislative season.
But with the clock ticking on many
of those sessions, the opponents have
little to cheer about so far.
To date, 19 states this year have
considered bills to repeal the common
core, according to the National Conference
of State Legislatures-but
none has adopted such legislation. In
Arizona, Montana, North Dakota, and
South Dakota, repeal proposals have
lost what amounted to do-or-die votes,
while states including Mississippi and
West Virginia have changed repeal
proposals into legislation requiring a
review of the standards instead.
"I treated it as if I were teaching
PAGE 19>
Charters Pull Back From Memphis Takeovers
By Arianna Prothero
Three national charter school networks have scaled
back plans to take over failing schools in Memphis
through Tennessee's state-run district, underscoring
the challenges and risks involved in the high-stakes,
politically charged endeavor of school turnarounds.
What has unfolded in Memphis in recent months is
a complex tale of balancing old systems with the new
in the pioneering work of state-led school turnaround
efforts that have only been brought to scale in one city:
New Orleans. As other states look into launching their
latest example of the legal and procedural
scrapes playing out as state testing
goes through a period of enormous
change, shaped by such factors as the
shift from print-based to online testing
and the adoption of new assessments
aligned with the Common Core State
Standards.
As numerous contracts to design
own state-run districts, experts say the situation in
Tennessee's Achievement School District could offer
valuable lessons when it comes to tapping charter operators
to turn around troubled schools in high-needs
communities.
Some of the challenges that have confronted chartermanagement
organizations in Memphis echo concerns
from charter network leaders five years ago, when
many were reluctant to get involved in federally driven
school turnaround efforts. At the time, U.S. Secretary of
Education Arne Duncan exhorted them to play a key
PAGE 14>
and administer state tests have been
snapped up, companies are fighting
with increasing tenacity to lock in remaining
deals and protect what they
have, said Doug McRae, a retired
testing executive who has worked for
numerous assessment businesses, including
what is now McGraw-Hill Education
ctb, one of the unsuccessful bidders
in California.
Mr. McRae, who did not work for
any of the companies on their California
bids, was critical of the process
the state followed in awarding the conPAGE
12>
VOL. 34, NO. 28 * APRIL 22, 2015
edweek.org: BREAKING NEWS DAILY
Titans Fight
Over Calif.
Testing Deal
Pearson and ETS Battle
As U.S. Market Evolves
Research on Quality of Conversation
Holds Deeper Clues Into Word Gap
By Sarah D. Sparks
Thirty million words.
For 20 years, a chasm of words has
yawned between the children of college-educated
professionals and those
of high school dropouts, quantifying
the academic disadvantage faced by
the latter group long before they even
start school. That statistic has led to
a generation of vocabulary-centered
interventions to close achievement
gaps, including the federal Race to
the Top Early Learning Challenge,
the Clinton Foundation's "Too Small
to Fail" initiative, and many others.
The "30 million-word" gap is arguably
the most famous but least significant
part of a landmark study,
Meaningful Differences in the Everyday
Experiences of Young Children,
by the late University of Kansas
child psychologists Betty Hart and
Todd R. Risley. As the work turns
20 this year, new research and
more advanced measuring techniques
have cast new light on longovershadowed,
and more nuanced,
findings about exactly how adult
interactions with infants and young
children shape their early language
development.
"We don't want to just distill it
PAGE 11>
Tough Sentences for Atlanta Educators
Calling the Atlanta test-cheating conspiracy the "sickest thing that's
ever happened in this town," Fulton County, Ga., Superior Court Judge
Jerry Baxter last week sentenced most of the convicted former educators
to significant time in state prison. PAGE 6
Josh Hawkins for Education Week
Kent D. Johnson/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/AP

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Education Week - April 22, 2015

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