Education Week - October 1, 2014 - 1

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Education WEEk
After Decades of Action, High Court Cools on School Cases
VOL. 34, NO. 6 * OCTOBER 1, 2014
AMERICAN EDUCATION'S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD * © 2014 Editorial Projects in Education * $4
edweek.org: BREAKING NEWS DAILY
Justices have
gone five years
without hearing
a case involving
a school district
By Mark Walsh
Justice Robert H. Jackson famously
warned in 1948 that the U.S. Supreme
Court should not become "a super board
of education for every school district in
the nation."
Those words came in his concurrence in
McCollum v. Board of Education of School
District No. 71, a decision striking down
release time for religious instruction in
public school classrooms. Justice Jackson,
who died just months after the 1954
ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of
Topeka, did not live to see decades
of deepening-and in some quarters
welcomed-high court involvement in
questions of desegregation, school prayer,
student and teacher speech, discipline,
student searches, sexual harassment, and
special education.
But more recently, something unexpected
has been happening-or not
happening-at the court, which opens
its 2014-15 term next week. Over
the past five years, the justices have
not taken up a single case directly involving
a school district or local school
officials, either as the party bringing
an appeal to the court or as the
respondent.
The court's June 2009 ruling in Safford
Unified School District v. Redding
was the last such case. It held
that a search by school personnel of a
student's undergarments for prescription
painkillers violated the Fourth
Amendment.
Although the court continues to
decide nonschool cases that hold
some significance for K-12 education,
one would have to go back before
the court's landmark decision in
Brown to find a comparable fiveyear
period in which the justices
heard no school cases.
From the 1954-55 term-the one
PAGE 20 >
DIGITAL DIRECTIONS
Common-Core
Testing Awards
Suit Big Vendors
By Sean Cavanagh
Most of the biggest contracts being
awarded by the two main consortia creating
online common-core assessments-
perhaps the most ambitious and complex
testing projects in U.S. history-are flowing
to some of the education industry's most familiar
and entrenched players.
Testing companies and organizations such
as Pearson, McGraw-Hill Education ctb,
and the Educational Testing Service are
among the top winners of prime assessment
contracts awarded through those state consortia
with federal money-awards worth
more than $300 million combined so far.
Some assessment experts say that even
large companies could be stretched by
heaping the demands of the common-core
PAGE 13 >
CONNECTING STUDENTS TO SERVICES: Nicole Young, at center in white sweater, a City Connects coordinator at Josiah Quincy Elementary School in
Boston, leads a tour of the school for college students who will be volunteer tutors there. New research suggests there is an academic payoff
from the City Connects program, which links students and their families to supports and resources that align with their needs. PAGE 9
PIECING TOGETHER A
SMART LMS STRATEGY
This special report-the latest
installment in an ongoing
series about educational technology-aims
to give district
leaders a better sense of what
it takes to build an effective
strategy for buying, using, evaluating,
and upgrading learning
management
systems for
K-12 schools.
See the
pullout section
opposite
Page 16.
Ga. Governor, Schools Chief Contests Heat Up
Contrasts, Parallels Seen on K-12 Issues of National Scope
By Andrew Ujifusa
Atlanta
A range of volatile K-12 issues with national
resonance-including governance, accountability,
common standards, and funding-are
center stage in the tight races for governor and
state schools superintendent in Georgia.
In the gubernatorial campaign between state
Sen. Jason Carter, the Democratic nominee,
and incumbent Republican Gov. Nathan Deal,
Georgia's hobbled and underfunded school
funding system is firmly in the spotlight.
And the state chief's race between Democrat
Valarie Wilson and Republican Richard Woods
has also highlighted controversial topics like
the Common Core State Standards, testing,
and the federal role in public schools-in some
cases, with the two superintendent-hopefuls
sounding similar. (The current state chief,
John Barge, sought the gop nomination for
governor, but lost.)
"I think the battle lines here are probably
representative of national arguments,"
said Peter Smagorinsky,
a professor in the college of education
at the University of Georgia,
in Athens.
New assessments aligned to the
standards slated to be given next spring, along
with the potentially rapid growth of charter
schools under state control, also set up a very
different atmosphere from 2010, when Gov.
Deal won his first term and when the state
claimed an eventually problematic federal
PAGE 20 >
BIG WINNERS: See an analysis of the
organizations that have won federally funded
common-core testing contracts. PAGE 18
Military Surplus Gear
Given to School Police
By Evie Blad
A U.S. Department of Defense program
that has been criticized for "militarizing"
local police departments by providing
them with free surplus equipment has
also provided school police around the
country with armored vehicles, semiautomatic
rifles, and grenade launchers.
The revelations about the military
equipment provided through the agency's
1033 surplus equipment program
have stoked concerns by civil rights
groups that law enforcement is overreaching
into school matters and contributing
to a punitive atmosphere.
Since the 2012 shooting deaths of 20
children and six adults at a Newtown,
Conn., elementary school, districts around
PAGE 16 >
ELECTION
2014
Charlie Mahoney/Prime for Education Week

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Education Week - October 1, 2014

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