Education Week - September 11, 2019 - 1

To inspire and empower.

8 in 10 Educators Are
White, Unlike Students
By Corey Mitchell
& Madeline Will
It's a constant struggle for school districts
across the country to find qualified special
education teachers. An extra challenge:
finding special educators of color to help
meet the needs of a student population that
can be disproportionately nonwhite.
Just over 82 percent of special education
teachers in public schools are white, according to 2011-12 federal data, the most recent available. Meanwhile, only about half
of students receiving special education services are white, according to 2017-18 data.
Yet teacher diversity matters: Decades
of research has shown that students often
perform better academically when they are
taught by teachers of the same race.
"The special education field is really
prime to recruit faculty of color," said
Jacqueline Rodriguez, the assistant vice
president for programs and professional
learning at the American Association of
Colleges for Teacher Education. "We do
have a disproportionate representation of
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Schools Say No
To Cellphones:
Should They?

Vol. 39 * Issue 4 * September 11, 2019

edweek.org

LETTERS FROM

ALASKA

Alaska's Rural
Schools Struggle
To Keep Teachers
By Victoria Petersen
Anchorage, Alaska

As summer was waning in Alaska's largest city, Hoonah City schools Superintendent Ralph Watkins was
among a dozen or so other school officials from around
the state spending a precious sunny day recruiting
teachers at a job fair in a hotel conference room. Fewer
than 30 prospective teachers attended the fair, and the
competition for their services was intense.
Watkins was offering a $1,000 signing bonus to fill
vacancies in his small district, which sits in a Tlingit
village 500 miles away on the island of Chichagof on
Alaska's southeast panhandle. Other districts in the
room offered signing bonuses of up to $3,000, a free
laptop, free and subsidized housing, free airfare to their
remote village if hired, and more.
"It's tough," said Watkins, who has lived in Hoonah
for over four years. "I don't want to be here right now-
trying to hire. It's hard and heartbreaking for me, but it
is my job, and I'm going to make it work."
Recruiting and retaining good teachers is difficult
in many communities across the United States-especially rural ones-but in rural Alaska and its Native
Villages, it can be even tougher. That's because schools
rely heavily on out-of-state teachers to staff classrooms, and many of the teachers the rural schools hire
struggle to adapt to the harsh weather, isolation, high

Jared Wickerham for Education Week

Special Ed.
Field Pushes
For Teachers
Of Color

cost, and cultural differences that come with living in
remote Alaska.
The problem is about to get worse. In January, the education school at the University of Alaska-Anchorage-
the state's largest teacher-preparation program-lost
its accreditation. The Council for the Accreditation of
Educator Preparation, one of two national bodies that
accredit teacher training programs, revoked accreditation for all seven of the teacher-preparation programs at
UAA, due to the school's failure to meet four out of five
standards set by the group.
The school graduated its last accredited class of education majors in May. And the state's current budget

Joshua Gill, director of
personnel and student
services for Lower
Kuskokwim schools in
Alaska, recruits teachers at
a job fair in Homestead, Pa.

PAGE 12 >

" I don't want to be here right now-trying to hire. It's hard and
heartbreaking for me, but it's my job, and I'm going to make it work."
-Ralph Watkins, superintendent, Hoonah City schools
This is the second in a series of articles offering snapshots of schooling and student and teacher experiences in the
49th state. The project is sponsored by the Education Week Gregory M. Chronister Journalism Fellowship.

By Alyson Klein

Bite-Sized Lessons Aim to Make
SEL Easier for Schools to Teach
By Arianna Prothero
Teaching social-emotional skills in
class sounds great, and the idea has a
broad and growing following in K-12
schools.
In practice, however, executing evidence-based strategies to teach skills
like empathy and self-control to students can be challenging for schools,
and prohibitively so.
Comprehensive SEL curricula on
the market today can be expensive,
putting them out of reach for lower-

income school districts. They are
complex and can be difficult to graft
onto existing curricula and school day
routines. And they may not be culturally relevant to all students.
Enter kernels: a cost-effective
method to teach social-emotional
skills in flexible, bite-sized lessons
being pioneered and piloted by the
Ecological Approaches to Social Emotional Learning-or EASEL-laboratory at Harvard University.
The idea for developing kernels
PAGE 8 >

Salgu Wissmath for Education Week

Sexting. Cyberbullying. Googling test answers. Taking a picture of a quiz and sending it to friends who have the same class
later in the day. Paying more attention to
Instagram notifications than biology class.
Smartphones have transformed the way
we communicate, but there's no question
they can be a major headache for teachers
and administrators.
That's why a flurry of schools have recently put in place restrictions or bans on
students' use of cellphones in school. The
changes represent a pivot away from the
more open student cellphone policies that
districts instituted in previous years. But
not everyone thinks the new restrictions
are a step in the right direction.
The recent changes are fueled by frustrated educators, who worry that by
PAGE 10 >

Second graders shake hands with classmates at Hagginwood
Elementary School in Sacramento, Calif. The school uses small
lessons to build social-emotional learning skills.

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Education Week - September 11, 2019

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