Education Week - September 17, 2014 - 1

EDUCATION WEEK
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Kindergarten:
State Policies
A Patchwork
By Christina A. Samuels
While high-quality preschool tops the
agenda for many federal, state, and local
officials, kindergarten-widely considered
the first year of formal schooling-
has received far less attention.
Despite kindergarten's pivotal role
in preparing children for reading and
other academics, state laws on what
districts must provide still vary widely,
resulting in a patchwork of mandatory
and voluntary half-day and full-day
offerings. Those disparities can leave
children less than prepared for the demands
of 1st grade, some educators say.
According to the Denver-based Education
Commission of the States, just 15
states require students to attend kindergarten.
And while most states require
districts to offer at least a voluntary
half-day program-Alaska, Idaho, New
Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania are
the exceptions-that half-day could be
just a few hours.
Such laws reflect a disconnect bePAGE
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VOL. 34, NO. 4 * SEPTEMBER 17, 2014
edweek.org: BREAKING NEWS DAILY
Kindergartner Mason Schmidgall hangs on tight to his mother, Natalie, on the first day of school at Oak Ridge Elementary School in Eagan, Minn.
Free, full-day kindergarten is new this year in Minnesota, but access to such programs varies widely from state to state.
DIGITAL DIRECTIONS > STARTING UP: First of a series tracking three ed-tech businesses
Startup Founders Apply Education Experience
By Michelle R. Davis
Former educators with technology interests
are increasingly making their way from
classrooms into the startup world as they try
to use their school expertise to create ed-tech
products and services that solve common
problems. What these new "edupreneurs"
are often lacking is the knowledge needed to
launch and run a business.
Even if the concept for the new venture is
sound, experts say, educators-turned-entrepreneurs
must develop their business acumen
to avoid startup failure.
"Most ed-tech startups that don't have a
history or experience with schools generally
don't do well," said R. Keith Sawyer, a professor
of educational innovations at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who is
overseeing the creation of new programs for
education entrepreneurship. "But people who
are experienced at teaching generally don't
know much about entrepreneurship and its
basic elements."
Highly motivated business creators with
education backgrounds are working to close
that knowledge gap to help their ideas succeed.
That is one of the themes of a yearlong
Education Week series that will follow three
ed-tech startups-all with founders who are
former educators or have other classroom experience-as
they try to gain a foothold in the
marketplace.
Presented in partnership with the University
of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education,
the series features startups that were
finalists or winners in the school's MilkenPenn
GSE business-plan competition. One
venture offers a digital tool to boost students'
vocabulary, another provides a platform that
helps teachers use video more effectively in
the classroom, and a third has developed an
online teacher-coaching program.
For Benjamin Levy, a former middle school
PAGE 11 >
Special Charters
Target Students
With Disabilities
By Arianna Prothero
Parents go to great lengths to meet the special
and often demanding needs of children
with disabilities. In Diana Diaz-Harrison's
case, that meant opening a charter school in
Phoenix for her son, who has autism-and for
other students like him-when she felt his
needs weren't being met in regular districtrun
schools.
"For my typical daughter, we chose a charWomen
Face Ed-Tech Opportunity Gap
By Benjamin Herold
Female technology leaders working
for U.S. school districts appear
to earn less money than their male
counterparts and face more limited
access to the top positions in their
field-despite tending to be more experienced
and equally, if not better,
credentialed.
Jean Tower, the director of technology for the Northborough and
Southborough public schools in Massachusetts, says
"superintendents who do the hiring need to own the data" about
gender inequities in the educational technology profession.
Those findings come from original
research conducted by Education
Week and the Consortium for School
Networking, or CoSN, a Washingtonbased
professional association for
school technology officials.
"This is a wake-up call that gender
bias does exist in K-12 technology
leadership," said the consortium's
CEO, Keith R. Krueger. "School districts
need to be conscious that this
is a problem."
The results-drawn from a relatively
small survey administered by
CoSN early this year-do not offer a
definitive verdict on the existence or
scale of gender gaps in pay and professional
opportunities in K-12 educational
technology. They do, however,
offer some quantitative validation of
the concern increasingly being voiced
PAGE 10 >
ter school that specializes in the arts ... that
meets her needs," said Ms. Diaz-Harrison. "So
for my little boy with autism, what can meet
his needs? A school that can help him with his
communication, ease his anxieties, help him
move forward and make academic progress.
We didn't have a school like that-now we do."
The school that Ms. Diaz-Harrison opened
this year-the 90-student Arizona Autism
Charter School-is among dozens of charters
nationwide that focus on serving students
with disabilities. Such schools help counter
the long-running criticism that charters don't
serve enough of those students.
But they also renew questions about the
best educational environment for students
with disabilities: Is it a specialized school or a
more mainstream setting with general education
students?
While parents of students with disabilities
often push for special charter schools, some
experts call those efforts misguided. They
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Charlie Mahoney/Prime for Education Week
Ben Garvin/St. Paul Pioneer-Press

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Education Week - September 17, 2014

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