Education Week - May 20, 2015 - 1

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AMERICAN EDUCATION'S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD * © 2015 EDITORIAL PROJECTS IN EDUCATION * $4
VOL. 34, NO. 31 * MAY 20, 2015
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Civil Rights Data
Detail Increase
In Complaints
By Caralee J. Adams
A recent surge in complaints to the U.S. Department
of Education's office for civil rights
involving students with disabilities and other
alleged discrimination likely stems from
ramped-up outreach efforts and broader awareness
of the agency's willingness to address such
complaints, according to advocacy organizations,
school administrators, and department officials.
Advocacy groups for students with disabilities
welcome the increased vigilance outlined in an
April ocr report, which found that nearly half of
all complaints to the civil rights office continue
to involve students with disabilities, with sexand
race-discrimination complaints making up
a lesser part of the caseload.
But some organizations representing school
districts and administrators, while maintaining
they are committed to equity in education,
complain in some cases that the federal government
is overreaching its authority, underfunding
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EMBRACING DIFFERENCE: Tai D. Matthews leads a lesson on ancient Greece in her 6th grade humanities class at the Paterson (N.J.)
Academy for the Gifted and Talented. She says the school's cultural, linguistic, and economic diversity enriches her teaching. Page 16
Gifted Programs Miss Disadvantaged Students
By Sarah D. Sparks
Paterson, N.J.
What does it take to find the country's most promising,
academically talented students?
In wealthier enclaves, where gifted education programs
often flourish, it can be simply a matter of
testing to cream the best
from a pool of youngsters
who have had high-quality
early enrichment and
academics.
UNMET PROMISES
High-Achieving,
Low-Income Students
But with more than half of public school students
now coming from low-income families and deepening
concentrations of poverty in many communities,
standard screening and pullout programs may not
be enough to find and support the most vulnerable
talented students.
In response, more educators and researchers who
work with gifted students are calling for another
look at who is considered gifted and how schools can
locate and support those students.
"I think there's a significant shift going on in the
field," said Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, the director of
the Center for Talent Development at Northwestern
University in Evanston, Ill., and the past-president
of the National Association for Gifted Children. "The
field is really wrestling with whether to jettison the
notion of giftedness as this fixed, inborn trait of IQ,
and adopting the sense that giftedness is something
malleable, that experience matters a lot, and we
need to develop it."
Thirty-six states require at least that districts
identify students with high academic potential, according
to the 2015 report "Equal Talents, Unequal
Opportunities," commissioned by the Leesburg, Va.based
Jack Kent Cooke Foundation-though not
all those states require districts to serve gifted students.
Of those, 28 audit or otherwise monitor gifted
PAGE 16 >
ABOUT THIS SERIES:
This package of stories is
the first in an occasional
series examining the
challenges facing
disadvantaged students who
show academic potential.
NEW DEMOGRAPHY
16 Most students at this
New Jersey school for the
gifted are from low-income
families.
SEEKING TO DIVERSIFY
18 Admissions policies
prevent many selective schools
from drawing a wider array
of students.
Groups Aim to Smooth
Student-Police Relations
By Corey Mitchell
Mario Conway experiences a range of emotions
when he sees police officers patrolling his South
Side Chicago neighborhood.
Fear. Anger. Frustration.
Two years ago, Chicago police fatally shot his
friend, 17-year-old Cedrick Chatman, as he fled
a stolen car. During the foot chase, Mr. Chatman
turned toward officers with a "dark object" they
assumed was a firearm. The officers opened fire.
No weapon was recovered.
His friend's death and his own tense encounters
with police have left Mr. Conway's confidence
in law enforcement shaken.
"They always mess with me and my friends,"
said Mr. Conway, an 18-year-old senior at Hyde
Park Academy High School. "I'm always thinking,
'That could be me the next time.' "
Recent tensions between youths and poPAGE
14 >
DIGITAL DIRECTIONS
U.S. Senate Proposal Puts Spotlight
On Open Educational Resources
By Michelle R. Davis
& Sean Cavanagh
Federal lawmakers want to encourage
schools to consider using
free, modifiable learning resources
for students before investing in
costly textbooks and curricula.
A move in the U.S. Senate to promote
schools' use of open educational
resources, if enacted by Congress
and ultimately embraced by
schools, could have a major impact
on the development of curricula
and on the companies that provide
content to schools, some education
experts say.
The latest Senate version of the
main federal law on K-12 education
includes new wording to encourage
the use of open education
resources-alternatives to proprietary
products created by commerPAGE
12 >
Army of Scorers Tackles Common-Core Tests
By Catherine Gewertz
Westerville, Ohio
It's the middle of spring testing season, and a bevy
of accountants, technology geeks, lawyers, unemployed
corporate executives-and oh, yes, teachers-are scoring
the parcc exam.
The room has the generic feel of any high-volume office
operation: Seated in front of laptop computers at
long beige tables, the scorers could be processing insurance
claims. Instead, they're pivotal players in the
biggest and most controversial student-assessment
project in history: the grading of new, federally funded
common-core assessments in English/language arts and
mathematics.
The parcc and Smarter Balanced assessments aren't
the only tests that require hand-scoring, but the sheer
scope of the undertaking dwarfs all others. Twelve million
students are taking either the parcc or the Smarter
Balanced assessments in 29 states and the District of
Columbia this school year. Large portions of the exams
are machine-scored, but a key feature that sets them
apart from the multiple-choice tests that states typically
use-their constructed-response questions and multistep,
complex performance tasks-require real people
to evaluate students' answers.
And that means that 42,000 people will be scoring
109 million student responses to questions on the two
exams, which were designed by two groups of states-
PAGE 10 >
Mark Abramson for Education Week

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Education Week - May 20, 2015

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