Education Week - May 31, 2017 - 1

Education Week
VOL. 36, NO. 33 * MAY 31, 2017

edweek.org:

BRE AKING NEWS DAILY

Trump Priorities
On Full Display
In K-12 Budget
Big Boost Sought for School Choice
Amid Deep Cuts to Other Programs

Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times /TNS

By Andrew Ujifusa

MAJOR UPSET: Steve Zimmer, the recently ousted president of the Los Angeles school board, embraces Anika Fernandez following his

concession speech last week. Zimmer, a two-term incumbent who was backed by the city's teachers' union, lost in an historically
expensive campaign that ushered in a new majority of board members who favor charter school expansion. PAGE 6 >

For Schools, Rating
Students' Character
Is a Tricky Prospect
By Evie Blad

CAREER TECHNICAL EDUCATION

AT A CROSSROADS

Where Career Plans Start Early
Ark. Sends College and Career Coaches to Secondary Schools

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By Catherine Gewertz
Wynne, Ark.

Erika Faircloth is only 14, but the high
hopes of Arkansas leaders are riding on
her shoulders.
That's because the 8th grader skipped
class on a rainy spring day to get a
glimpse of her future. Erika spent the
day at a local veterinary office, watching
intently as the vet and her technicians
spayed a tabby cat and cleaned a golden
doodle's teeth.
Nearly all of Erika's 8th grade classmates at Wynne Junior High School participated in this "job shadow" day, too. In
this small eastern Arkansas town, they

fanned out to drug stores, medical suites,
banks, lumber yards, soybean farms, police
headquarters.
Arkansas is betting big that this kind
of early career exposure-embedded in a
career-planning process that spans middle
and high school-can launch more students into its workforce and its college
classrooms with a clear idea of where
they're headed.
To make that happen, the state has
dispatched full-time college and career
coaches to the middle and high schools in
34 of its 75 counties. The coaches work with
students to craft college and career plans
and shepherd them through the nittyPAGE 10>

Andrea Morales for Education Week

Where report cards may have once had a
handwritten teacher's note saying a student
"plays well with others," parents in some districts are now more likely to see a box that
shows whether their child performs at grade
level in such areas as "relationship skills."
Schools are increasingly rating students on
a variety of social competencies and "learning skills" alongside their traditional grades
in academic subjects.
In Montgomery County, Md., elementary
school report cards indicate whether students are exhibiting traits like "intellectual risk-taking" and metacognition, which
is an awareness of their own learning
processes.
In Austin, Texas, elementary report cards
feature a matrix of "personal-development
skills" that show if teachers think a student demonstrates tasks including taking
"responsibility for own actions."
Telling parents how their children are
doing on those types of skills, educators say,
helps include families in the work of cultivating the qualities that research links to
academic success.
"We give a lot of lip service in education
about parent involvement," said Maurice
Elias, a psychology professor at Rutgers
University who has studied how schools
present character-trait information on
report cards. "But for a lot of parents, the
math curriculum, the science curriculum is
very hard for them to get involved with. ...
But when it comes to their child's character,
you would be hard-pressed to find a parent

Eighth grader Erika
Faircloth watches
veterinarian Julie
Boone perform an
operation in Wynne,
Ark. Erika's jobshadowing experience
at the veterinary clinic
grew out of a push by
the state to provide
better career advice
to students headed
into the workforce as
well as to college.

President Donald Trump's budget proposal for
the U.S. Department of Education made plenty
of waves for its emphasis on school choice and its
cuts to long-standing programs-but Congress has
no obligation to go along with the plan, and there
hasn't been a show of overwhelming support for either idea on Capitol Hill just yet.
The fiscal 2018 proposal from the Trump administration emphasizes the commitment to choice and
austerity, despite the political sensitivities involved.
It would cut $9.2 billion, or 13.5 percent, from
the Education Department's budget, bringing it
down to $59 billion. It would launch a new $1 billion grant program for public school choice under
Title I; increase charter school funding by about 50
percent, to $500 million; and create a $250 million
grant program in the Education Innovation and Research program to fund private school vouchers and
research their effects.
The $250 million grant program would be enough
to provide 17,500 to 26,000 vouchers to private
schools, including religious ones, in the range of
$8,000 to $12,000 per student. However, a spokeswoman for the department denied that the new
$250 million program would constitute a federal
voucher program, arguing instead that the department would be supporting states that applied for
the grants to expand school choice.
Meanwhile, $2 billion in grants for teacher development and class-size reduction under Title II would be
eliminated in Trump's budget, along with $1.2 billion
in after-school and summer programs, and $400 milPAGE 19>

States Struggle to Define
'Ineffective Teachers'
By Daarel Burnette II
Teacher evaluations-both their role and the
mechanics of carrying them out-are a politically
fraught subject, and the Every Student Succeeds
Act has kicked the dust up once again as states
wrestle with how to comply with teacher-quality
sections of the new law.
ESSA, which goes into effect this fall, does away
with the "highly qualified teacher" mandates
under its predecessor, the No Child Left Behind
Act. It also bans the U.S. secretary of education
from dictating the ways in which states grade
their teachers, a sore spot under the NCLB law.
At the same time, ESSA requires states to provide a single definition of "ineffective teachers" in
the plans they submit to the federal government
and then describe how they will ensure that poor
and minority students aren't being taught by a
disproportionate number of them.
This shift in policy has reignited battles over
who should stand in front of America's classrooms, whether state or local leaders should make
those decisions, and what information about
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Education Week - May 31, 2017

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