Education Week

VOL. 34, NO. 34 * JUNE 10, 2015

edweek.org:

BRE AKING NEWS DAILY

School Choice
Supercharged
In Nev. Statute

In Drought's Grip, California Communities Try to Cope
Schools Face Dry Wells, 'Dust Days,' and Student Anxieties

Parents Given Broad Control
Over State Per-Pupil Dollars

Matt Black

By Arianna Prothero

These children live at a trailer park in Mendota, Calif., a farmworker community hit hard by the state's historic drought. Schools statewide are
feeling the impact, but it's especially acute for districts in the Central Valley, where farm jobs are drying up with the water. PAGE 8

Cleveland Embraces Social-Emotional Learning
By Evie Blad
Cleveland

In a kindergarten classroom at Wade Park
Elementary School this spring, students
huddled around their teacher in a tight circle
while she held up cards that said "proud" and
"ashamed" and explained to them what it's
like to feel those emotions.
"I felt proud when I graduated from

college," she said.
The children had started the day by writing
one-word descriptions of their emotions on the
classroom's whiteboard, completing the prompt,
"Today I feel," with words like "happy," "love," and
"tired" in shaky penmanship.
The simple morning classroom exercises
are a small part of a data-driven, districtwide
social-emotional learning plan in Cleveland
that aims to boost students' ability to make

Challenge of Co-Teaching
A Special Education Issue
By Christina A. Samuels

responsible decisions, regulate their own
emotions and behavior, and build healthy relationships with their peers.
As a growing body of research links such
competencies to higher academic achievement,
school systems such as the 40,000-student
Cleveland district have started to take notice.
It is one of eight large, predominantly urban
districts that have committed to a multiyear

PAGE 11 >

Statesville, N.C.

If you want to see President Barack
Obama's approach to reimagining K-12
education in full force, take a road trip
down I-40, through two North Carolina
school districts that have used a patchwork of one-time federal grants to spur
big change.
Talk to 4th graders in the IredellStatesville district about how strategies
financed by an Investing in Innovation
grant have improved their reading.
Watch a veteran high school teacher
make "Romeo and Juliet" relevant for
students using 1-to-1 laptops and per-

PAGE 18 >

DIGITAL DIRECTIONS

N.Y. 'Open' Content
Going Nationwide
By Sean Cavanagh

sonalized learning, hallmarks of the
administration's district-level Race to
the Top grants.
Then drive about an hour to Guilford County, where Parkview Village
Elementary Expressive Arts Magnet
School is in the midst of a turnaround
effort fueled by a School Improvement
Grant. Chat with a 5th grade math
teacher who has moved students' test
scores so far and so fast she's received
a $20,000 bonus, thanks to a program
that's been financed with help from the
Teacher Incentive Fund.
But you'll have to make the trip soon:
The districts' federal grants are waning

An online library of academic materials created in New York state to align with the Common Core State Standards has improbably
found a vast, nationwide audience-which
doesn't have to pay a cent for the content.
The resources, developed through a
project called EngageNY and housed on a
state-managed website, have been downloaded an estimated 20 million times by
educators and others in states around the
country, and even in foreign countries, according to estimates provided by New York
officials.
The project is one of the most ambitious
to date in K-12 to develop and disseminate
"open educational resources," typically defined as materials created on licenses that
permit their free sharing and repurposing.
While interest in those materials in
states and districts has risen, some say the
adoption of the common core has intensified demand for them among school officials
dissatisfied with traditional commercial
offerings and wary of absorbing hefty new

PAGE 16 >

PAGE 14 >

As Federal Grants Taper Off,
Two N.C. Districts Tally Impact
By Alyson Klein

In 2003, about half of school-age students with disabilities
spent most of their school day in classrooms with their typically developing peers. By 2013, that number had risen to
61 percent.
At least part of that change can be tied to wider use of coteaching, an instructional method that pairs a general and a
special education teacher in the same classroom. Co-teaching
is meant to provide specialized services to students with disabilities in regular classrooms, while ensuring they also get
access to the same academic material as their peers.
But poorly implemented co-teaching practices may be taking the "special" out of special education, say many who train
teachers and districts in best collaboration practices. School
administrators and even teachers themselves end up believ-

PAGE 12 >

Sweeping. Groundbreaking. Historic.
Those are the words school choice advocates are using to describe a new Nevada
law that will give parents near-total control
over the way state education dollars are
spent on their children.
The reason: The level of school choice the
law will permit is unprecedented. All parents
of public school students will be allowed to use
state aid earmarked for their children, placed
in education savings accounts, or esas, for tuition or other expenses related to a nonpublic
education.
That includes religious private schools
and home schooling.
By comparison, in the handful of other
states that offer similarly styled programs,
they're reserved for certain populations--
mostly students with disabilities. Those
states also have caps on how many students
can participate, while Nevada does not.
Under the law, which was passed by the
Nevada legislature at the end of May and
signed by Gov. Brian Sandoval last week,
the only stipulation for eligibility is that a
student must have been enrolled in a public
school for 100 consecutive days. That means
93 percent of the 459,000 public school stu-

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Education Week - June 10, 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - June 10, 2015

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Education Week - June 10, 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - June 10, 2015