Public School Forum

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by Forum Admin

The Friday Report

September 30, 2016

Education Matters Premieres Sunday, October 2, 11:30 a.m. on WRAL-TV

The Public School Forum’s new weekly television program, Education Matters, premieres on Sunday, October 2nd at 11:30 a.m. on WRAL-TV, the NBC affiliate in the Raleigh-Durham/Fayetteville market. The full program will also be available each week online. This new show aims to provide the public with real facts about the state of public education in North Carolina.

Each week, Education Matters will delve into a key topic in public education. The first episode will focus on NC’s teacher pipeline, examining the declining enrollment in teacher preparation programs and increase in teacher turnover. Guests include the Deans of the Schools of Education from NC State and UNC-Wilmington and two teachers, one a beginning teacher and the other a 13-year veteran, sharing their perspectives on what we should be doing as a state to make teaching more attractive.
In addition to the main topic, each show will cover major headlines in education and spotlight great leadership in our public schools. Public School Forum President and Executive Director Keith Poston hosts the show.
Keith Poston (center) with October 2 guests (from left):
Dr. Van Dempsey, Dean, Watson School of Education, UNC-Wilmington; Shemika Banuelos, Teacher, Wilson’s Mills Elementary School, Johnston County; Dr. Mary Ann Danowitz, Dean, School of Education, NC State, and Trey Ferguson, Teacher, Leesville Road High School, Wake County
Education Matters will air on Sundays at 11:30 AM on WRAL-TV through mid-November. The program will move to its permanent time slot, Saturdays at 7:30 PM, beginning November 26, 2016. Education Matters will also be viewable online, with full episodes on WRAL at https://www.wral.com/ (search for Education Matters). 
Click below for a news story about the premiere of Education Matters that aired Thursday on WRAL-TV:
On social media, you can engage with Education Matters on Twitter by following @NCEdmatters and the Public School Forum @theNCForum. We are using the hashtag #NCEDmatters.
On Facebook, you can like the Public School Forum page and the Education Matters show page to get info about the show and other Forum news and education news of interest on your timeline.

State News

53 Apply to Be Superintendent of NC’s New Achievement School District

Fifty-three people from across the country have applied to be superintendent of North Carolina’s newest school system, known as the Achievement School District, which will serve students in some of the state’s lowest-performing schools.
A selection advisory committee appointed by Lt. Gov. Dan Forest has been interviewing candidates and is expected to make a recommendation to the State Board of Education by next week. The state board will have the final say in who is hired.
“We can’t get into specifics, but we have a very diverse group of candidates from across the country that have experience in turning around all types of public schools,” Jamey Falkenbury, the lieutenant governor’s press secretary, told WRAL News by email.
According to the state’s job posting, the ASD superintendent will earn between $80,000 and $140,000 per year and must be a visionary education leader.

In This Issue

Education Matters Premieres Sunday, October 2, 11:30 a.m. on WRAL-TV

53 Apply to Be Superintendent of NC’s New Achievement School District

NC Reports Gains on SAT, AP Exams

7 New Hanover Schools Show Signs of Re-Segregation

NC Creating Plan to Meet New Federal Education Requirements

21st Century Community Learning Centers (CCLC) Program Technical Assistance Webinar

Wake County Public Schools Research Partnership Symposium

World View Fall Programs

Journal for Interdisciplinary Teacher Leadership

Public School Forum Programs

Nominate an Outstanding Education Leader!

The Public School Forum is seeking nominations for education leaders to be profiled on our new weekly TV show, Education Matters, premiering October 2nd on WRAL-TV.
Do you have a great leader in your local school? Nominate them today! We are seeking leaders who make a difference in their school each and every day.
To nominate an education leader, please fill out the form here.

NC Reports Gains on SAT, AP Exams

North Carolina high school students saw performance gains last year on key measures of college readiness – the SAT college admissions exam and on Advanced Placement tests, according to results released Tuesday by The College Board, which administers the national exams.
North Carolina’s average SAT scores for 2016 high school graduates from all schools increased by 1 point each on the critical reading (502) and math (508) portions of the exam, according to a news release from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.
State gains on both parts of the test outpaced gains nationally, which showed a 3-point drop on the critical reading section (494) and a 4-point decline on the math portion (508).
“We continue to see improvement on multiple measures of performance and growth, including the SAT and AP exams,” State Superintendent June Atkinson said in a statement.
The state’s participation and performance continue to increase on Advanced Placement exams, which can help students earn transferable college credit and save on college costs. In addition, research shows that students who take AP classes are more likely to persist in college and graduate in four years.
Nearly 70,000 students (69,957) took at least one AP exam in 2015-16, up from 67,451 in the previous year, an increase of about 3.7 percent. Of those, 37,839 students achieved a score of 3, 4 or 5 on an exam, an increase of 3.9 percent from the year before. Students who earn a 3 or better on the exams, which are scored on a five-point scale, can qualify for college credit, although policies vary by institution.
State education leaders and lawmakers in recent years have made a priority of broadening access to college-level courses for qualified students. During the last two years, lawmakers provided funding to pay the cost of AP exams for all students and appropriated funding for professional development of teachers through the NC AP Partnership.
To continue reading the complete article, click here.
Excerpt from:

7 New Hanover Schools Show Signs of Re-Segregation

Nathaniel Johnson works with his 2nd grade class at International School at Gregory

on Tuesday in Wilmington. Photo Credit: Ken Blevins/StarNews Photo

In early 1993, after seven years as principal of Gregory Elementary, Dorothy DeShields was tasked with something that seemed impossible: “Make your school a magnet, and do it in six months.”
The New Hanover County Board of Education was trying to quiet suburban white parents who were upset that their children were bused to inner-city schools. So DeShields and her staff spent the summer huddled around kitchen tables designing the county’s first magnet: Gregory School of Science, Mathematics and Technology. The school with a tech focus and computers in every classroom could draw in children from across the district.
For a few years, the program convinced white families to stay. DeShields remembers a school in the mid-1990s with high test scores; and by 1997-98, Gregory was one of 20 district schools “Making Exemplary Growth.” Nearby Williston Middle School, to where Gregory students advanced, also made the exemplary list.
“We had kids from every school in the system,” DeShields said. “Parents wanted their kids to come.”
By the early 2000s, other schools had computers, and the school district’s investment in Gregory as an evolving magnet was fading. As the county’s suburbs boomed and neighborhoods rose around Ogden and Porters Neck and down Carolina Beach Road, the school board moved to redistrict. During that time, members decided on maps that embraced a neighborhood schools philosophy.
To many, including DeShields, who was elected to the school board in 2003, the redrawing of the district map was what sent Gregory’s scores tumbling.
In 2009, before redistricting, the school was 60 percent black, and three-fourths of students passed their EOGs; in spring 2016, Gregory was 85 percent black, and less than a third of students passed their tests.
Gregory is no anomaly: Since 2010, half of the district’s traditional schools have become more racially and socioeconomically imbalanced, some extremely so, and test scores have followed suit, according to a StarNews analysis of school performance scores, capacity numbers and student demographics.
To continue reading the complete article, click here.
Excerpt from:

Pitt County Prepares for Potential Lab School

A recently passed state law means a new kind of school could be coming to Pitt County next school year.
The University of North Carolina laboratory schools program, established as a provision of the most recent state budget, requires that the UNC Board of Governors establish eight laboratory schools across the state at different universities.
While the sites of those schools have yet to be selected, East Carolina University could potentially be selected as one of the first four universities to establish lab schools in the 2017-18 school year, according to Dr. Mike L’Esperance, the interim department chairman of elementary and middle grades education at East Carolina University, who spoke Monday to the Pitt County Board of Education educational programs and services committee.
With this potential on the horizon, East Carolina University has begun looking at what would be needed to set up a school and how best to work in partnership with Pitt County Schools to do so, L’Esperance said.
The school would be open to any student at a school that was labeled as low performing based on school performance data from the 2014-15 school year, and the enrollment process would likely work in a similar way to Pitt County Schools’ open enrollment process, L’Esperance said.
The purpose of the school would be to improve performance across the district by providing teachers with additional training, while also allowing university faculty to test new techniques in a real-world setting.
As a part of East Carolina University, there is also the potential that services from the schools of medicine, dentistry, social work and other areas could be integrated, allowing the school to draw from the university’s resources to help students, L’Esperance said.
While the potential lab school could have some drawbacks for Pitt County Schools, it could also have positives, according to Superintendent Ethan Lenker.
“You could look at it both ways,” Lenker said. “You could say we don’t want to give up our teachers to this school … but, they do have resources, psychologists and social workers that could come in and help some of the kids, plus the medical school is huge … there’s lots of opportunities for some real help for the students, there’s the chance it could really be a win-win.”
To continue reading the complete article, click here.
Excerpt from:

National News

Yale Study Probes the Complexity of Bias in Preschool

Black children make up only 19 percent of the children enrolled in public preschool, but account for 47 percent of those suspended from preschool one or more times. 
Researchers at Yale University released a new study this week that suggests implicit bias—negative or positive feelings people are unaware that they hold—could be behind that disparity.
But bias manifests itself in complex ways, according to the study results—with white teachers overlooking misbehavior in black students, perhaps because they may not have been expecting much better, and black teachers watching black boys particularly closely when expecting problems.
Researchers shared vignettes with 135 preschool teachers that described a child who was acting out on the playground, ignoring the teacher, pushing classmates, and otherwise showing challenging behavior. The vignettes differed only by the student names given: Jake and Emily were chosen as names connoting white children, and DeShawn or Latoya were offered as black names.
The research found that the black teachers tended to hold “black” preschoolers to a higher standard than white teachers did. In general, black teachers recommended more harsh exclusionary discipline, such as suspension or expulsion, for all children.
For some of the teachers in the study, the experimenters added something extra to the vignettes: that the misbehaving children had a difficult home life, including a mother working several low-paying jobs and a sometimes-violent father. When given that information, teachers showed more empathy to the child—but only when the teacher and the child were of the same race. When the teacher and child were of different races, the same family background information prompted teachers to rate the behavior as more severe and harder to fix.
To continue reading the complete article, click here.
Excerpt from:

School Inspections Offer a Diagnostic Look at Quality

Photography / AP Images / Dominic Lipinski / PA Wire

Educators have gotten used to poring over spreadsheets filled with test scores to get a sense of their students’—and schools’—strengths and weaknesses.
What they don’t often see: feedback from other teachers, administrators, and students who can offer a fresh perspective on where a school stands when it comes to instruction, resources, climate, financial efficiency, and more.
A handful of states—including, recently, Vermont—have worked to change that, using a model borrowed from other countries and known in Great Britain as “school inspections,” in which a team of experts or educators visits a school and offers objective feedback on teaching, learning, management and more.
Several states have experimented with the model for their lowest-performing schools, including Kentucky, Massachusetts, and New York, said Craig Jerald, the president of Break the Curve Consulting, who has studied the strategy.
Vermont, by contrast, plans to eventually conduct inspections, which it calls “integrated field reviews,” in all its schools, whether low-performing or not. The state began piloting the program last school year in about 40 schools and is continuing to test it this year in about 50, with the ultimate goal of reviewing each school every three years.

U.S. Supreme Court to Weigh Level of Benefit Required by Special Education Law

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday granted review in a case about the level of education benefit a child must receive for a school district to have provided an appropriate level of service under the main federal special education law. 
The case, Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District RE-1 (No. 15-827), raises an important question that has divided federal appeals courts: What level of educational benefit must a child receive under his or her individualized education program, or IEP, to satisfy the demands of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act?
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver, ruled last year in the case of a Colorado child with autism that because the child’s public school IEP had provided him with “some educational benefit,” the Douglas County district had provided a “free, appropriate public education” under the IDEA.
The 10th Circuit court thus rejected a private school reimbursement for the parents of the boy identified as Endrew F. after the parents had pulled him from public school amid the dispute over his 5th grade IEP.
In an August 2015 decision, the 10th Circuit court panel acknowledged that several other federal courts of appeals have adopted a higher standard that requires an IEP to result in a “meaningful educational benefit.”
The Endrew F. case is likely to be argued sometime early next year.
To continue reading the complete article, click here.

Excerpt from:

Forum News

Beginning Teacher Leadership Network Accepting Applications for 2016-17

The Public School Forum’s Beginning Teacher Leadership Network is accepting applications for the 2016-17 school year for Mecklenburg, Wake, and Union counties. Application links are available online at https://www.ncforum.org/beginning-teacher-leadership-network/.

The Beginning Teacher Leadership Network (BTLN) offers early-career teachers (1-3 years) the chance to continue their development as classroom instructors while learning how to advocate for the educational profession. Participants in BTLN meet regularly to improve their classroom practice, network with one another, and learn about state and local education policy. It offers beginning teachers the chance to grow in their pedagogical practice, as well as bolster their impact beyond the classroom. BTLN implements specific interventions to retain beginning teachers by fostering their leadership ability and leveraging the skills of veteran teachers. It is completely voluntary and intended as a supplement to the required professional development delivered by the local education agency. It takes a three-pronged approach to teacher-leadership by focusing on the areas of education policy and advocacy, cross-curricular collaboration, and professional development.

More questions? Check out THIS video about the BTLN or contact Forum Program Director James Ford at jford@ncforum.org.

Opportunities

NC Creating Plan to Meet New Federal Education Requirements

What will the new federal education law, Every Student Succeeds Act, mean for North Carolina students? State educators and policymakers are crafting North Carolina’s plan now for submission to the US Department of Education during its March submission calendar.
Academic indicators will continue to include proficiency on English language arts/reading and mathematics, progress of English language learners, graduation rates, and a to-be-decided other academic indicator for elementary and middle schools. In addition, the new law requires the inclusion of other measures of school quality or student success as long as those indicators are valid and reliable, comparable, available statewide, and meaningful indicators of student success.
Input is being collected online through the “Let’s Talk” application, which may be accessed from the Department’s website; in regional meetings with superintendents and school officials; as well as in six public comment sessions to be held from 4-6 p.m. on each of the following dates:
October 6 – North Wilkesboro
October 12 – Jacksonville
October 18 – Fayetteville
October 19 – Tarboro
October 24 – Waynesville
October 25 – Burlington
Reprinted from:

21st Century Community Learning Centers (CCLC) Program Technical Assistance Webinar

Topic: 
Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partners and Community-Based Entities: Applying for U.S Department of Education (ED) Grants
Wednesday, October 5, 2016
1:30-3:00 PM (E.D.T.)
Purpose of Webinar:
This technical assistance session will focus on sharing strategies for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (FBNPs) and Community-Based entities in applying for ED grants.  By bringing together community organizations with school districts, 21st CCLC centers can take advantage of multiple resources and strengthen collaborations throughout the community.
Who Should Attend:
21st CCLC State Coordinators
SEA 21st CCLC program staff
Community-Based Organizations (CBOs)
Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (FBNPs)
Other CBO and FBNP personnel
Click here to register – – 21st CCLC FBO Webinar
Space is limited.  Pre-registration is required to participate in this event.

Wake County Public Schools Research Partnership Symposium

The Wake County Public School System will be hosting a day-long (9:00-4:00) symposium on November 1st to highlight WCPSS’s research partnerships with various universities across the Triangle and beyond. The symposium will be held at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation.
The morning agenda will include a plenary session about partnership work broadly (with guests from Durham and Guilford Public Schools), as well as a discussion among district and university grants directors about navigating the grantmaking process. 
The afternoon agenda will include short sessions in which district staff and their university partners will highlight collaborations and share results. Such collaborations include the following, among other projects: 
  • An examination of the relationship between students’ civic engagement and achievement (partnership with Duke University)
  • The impact of a contemporary career academy on high school graduation and beyond (partnership with UNC Chapel Hill)
  • A look at “summer melt,” whereby students intend to enroll in college but fall off course during the summer (partnership with NC State)
Coffee and snacks will be available before we kick off at 9:00. Lunch is included. 
Please RSVP here.

World View Fall Programs

World View at UNC-Chapel Hill offers exciting professional development opportunities in global education for K-12 teachers, school administrators, and community college educators. Our fall programs for K12 educators feature innovative strategies to drive global learning. Continuing Education Units earned can be applied toward the NC Global Educator Digital Badge process. Register for the fall global education symposium and online course today!
Innovation and Technology to Drive Global Learning 
October 19-20, 2016
  • Fuel the drive with dynamic presenters, interdisciplinary sessions, curriculum development opportunities and a wide-range of exhibitors.
  • Be in the passenger seat as you experience lessons that demonstrate technology and innovation.
  • Support your road trip by collaborating with colleagues as you consider your own classroom.
  • Drive away with tools, strategies, resources and a professional network to drive global learning.
Location: The Friday Center for Continuing Education, Chapel Hill, NC
Cost: $175 per person. $600 for a team of four; $150 for each additional member
CEU: 1.5 CEUs offered

October 6 – November 16, 2016
Join World View’s online course for an exploration of global topics such as the economy, the environment, diverse populations and the U.S.’s place in the world. Educators will gain hands-on experience with web-based resources for teaching about global issues in the classroom.
Location: Online!
Cost: $250 per person for World View Partners; $300 for Non-Partners
CEU: 4 CEUs offered

Journal for Interdisciplinary Teacher Leadership

The Kenan Fellows Program for Teacher Leadership is accepting articles and literary reviews to be featured in the second issue of the Journal for Interdisciplinary Teacher Leadership (JoITL). The peer-reviewed publication features original work on K–12 educational topics from research to pedagogy to policy, and more.
Special consideration will be given to works that address:
  • STEM education and science literacy
  • Project and inquiry based learning
  • Teacher leadership and research experiences for educators
  • Data literacy and digital learning
Submissions will be accepted through Monday, Oct. 31, 2016.
For submission guidelines, visit kenanfellows.org/journals. Please send questions to the managing editor, Amneris Solano, at asolano@ncsu.edu.

The Friday Report is published weekly by the Public School Forum of NC and is distributed to Forum members, policymakers, donors, media, and Forum subscribers. Archived editions can be found at www.ncforum.org.

©2016 Public School Forum of North Carolina. All Rights Reserved.

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