Education Week

VOL. 35, NO. 36 * JULY 20, 2016

edweek.org:

BRE AKING NEWS DAILY

Data Loom Large in Quest for New School-Quality Indicator
States look
hard at
what's
required to
meet ESSA's
mandate

By Daarel Burnette II
States scrambling to come up with
more nuanced ways to measure school
quality under the new federal K-12
law are running smack into an old
problem: how to make sure they have
the right data.
The Every Student Succeeds Act
requires that states-in addition to

using English-language proficiency,
graduation rates, and scores on statewide achievement tests-add at least
one new indicator of school quality
or student success, such as school climate, chronic absenteeism, discipline,
or college and career readiness.
For many states, adding that new
indicator may mean spending more on
data systems and collection, avoiding

approaches that might demand too
much of a data lift, or picking something off the shelf rather than crafting
a more challenging indicator, because
the information isn't easily available.
Complicating the matter, the law
requires that the data for the new
school-quality indicator must be valid,
reliable, and comparable across districts, and that officials be able to

break out the information by student
demographics.
That presents a challenge for state
education agencies that want to pick indicators that use classroom observations
or teacher and parent surveys to measure schoolwide indicators. Those might
include whether parents feel engaged or
if teachers are participating in effective
PAGE 27 >

Detroit District Splits
To Shore Up Schools

Alyssa Schukar for Education Week

By Corey Mitchell

Betty Torres, a high school senior from Mission, Texas, talks with fellow student Rob Schaefer, from St. Louis, on the University of
Notre Dame campus. Both are in a summer program that acquaints academically promising high schoolers with college life.

First-Generation College-Goers Try Campus Life
Summer Programs Help Students Like Betty Torres Brave the Leap to Higher Ed.
By Catherine Gewertz
South Bend, Ind.

Betty Torres did her best to be brave
as she packed up to leave her workingclass Texas border town. An academic
powerhouse at 16, she felt ready for her
summer courses at elite colleges in New
England and the Midwest. But when her
dad left her at the airport in San Anto-

nio, she crumpled a little inside.
"He waited in the airport until I got
through security. I could see him from the
other side. And I went, 'Oh, no, Dad, don't
leave me!' " the rising high school senior
recalled, putting her hand on her heart
and laughing. "I started having second
thoughts."
Second thoughts like: How am I going to
do this? I'm a Latina from a humble fam-

ily; will I fit in? Can I handle the workload? Will I get lost?
Eating breakfast in a noisy dining hall
at the University of Notre Dame the
following week, in late June, Betty had
regained her trademark cheerful composure. The aspiring neurologist had
PAGE 15>

FAFSA: Will earlier filing mean quicker

Dig into where presumptive Democratic and Republican
presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump
stand on education issues as Education Week gets ready
to cover the party conventions. PAGES 22 AND 23 >

PAGE 18>

Dose of Empathy Found
To Cut Suspension Rates
By Sarah D. Sparks
"R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Find out what it means to me."
In schools working to reduce suspension rates, teachers could take a cue from Aretha Franklin: Considering
how young people view respect can greatly improve
classroom management, new studies show.
A one-time intervention to help teachers and students empathize with each other halved the number of suspensions at five diverse California middle
schools, and helped students who had previously been
suspended feel more connected at school, according to
Stanford University research published in April in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Changing the mindset of one teacher can change
the social experience of that child's entire world," said

financial-aid decisions? PAGE 14

PAGE 20>

Vouchers Put Some Parents in Squeeze on Spec. Ed. Rights
By Christina A. Samuels

K-12 IN THE CAMPAIGNS

One of the nation's most troubled school districts is
now two.
Under controversial legislation pushed by Michigan
Gov. Rick Snyder, the Detroit school system is now divided into two separate entities: a new district tasked
with educating the city's 46,000 regular public school
students; and the old district, left intact solely to pay
off hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.
Detroit is probably the first school system in the nation to adopt the approach, said Michael Griffith, a
senior school finance analyst with the Education Commission of the States.
The change is meant to allow the new district to devote more of its money to educating students. Under
the old system, nearly $1,100 per student in state
funding went toward retiring the district's crushing

Bernadette Kerrigan was concerned,
though not alarmed, when her daughter
Emma was identified as having dyslexia
and dyscalculia as a 1st grader.
A mother of two, Kerrigan had stretched
her budget to buy a home in an affluent
suburb of Cleveland, in large part because

of the quality of the school district. The
teachers there would certainly be qualified,
she thought, to help her daughter overcome
her struggles with reading and math.
But to get the help she felt her child
needed, Kerrigan said she had to make
a choice she had never considered-and
which would require her to give up some
protections under federal education law.

In her public school, Emma repeated
1st grade, but was still behind. One
school year turned into two, and then
three. By 4th grade, Emma was years
behind her peers academically, with
the district saying that things were just
about to click. Meanwhile, Emma was
coming home exhausted. Homework took
PAGE 16>

http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - July 20, 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - July 20, 2016

Education Week - July 20, 2016 - 1

Education Week - July 20, 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - July 20, 2016