Friday Report – February 3, 2017

Photo Credit: Ann Doss Helms, The Charlotte Observer

Raleigh’s Magellan Charter School 8th grader Ethan Celata got down and horizontal to spray paint

his team’s brightly colored blowfish in April 2016. Photo Credit: News & Observer File Photo.

The State Board of Education renewed 29 charter schools on Thursday – including 11 in the Triangle – allowing the non-traditional public schools to stay open for as many as 10 more years.

In Wake County, the State Board gave the maximum possible renewal of 10 years to Sterling Montessori Academy in Morrisville and three Raleigh charter schools: Casa Esperanza Montessori, Magellan Charter School and The Exploris School. PreEminent Charter School in Raleigh only received a three-year renewal because of its test scores.

In Durham, The Central Park School for Children, Maureen Joy Charter School and Voyager Academy all received 10-year renewals. Voyager’s renewal is contingent upon no issues being found in an upcoming financial audit.

Also on Thursday, Eno River Academy in Hillsborough and Chatham Charter School in Siler City received 10-year renewals. Neuse Charter School in Smithfield received a seven-year renewal due to questions about its finances.

To continue reading the complete article, click here.

Excerpt from:

Hui, T. “29 North Carolina charter schools get approval to stay open.” The News & Observer. 2/2/17.

The future of Kestrel Heights High School is on hold for a month while the State Board of Education reviews information from the school, students and the public.

The board unanimously voted Wednesday to postpone action until March 1-2. At those meetings the board will discuss and likely vote on recommendations that include closing the charter school’s high school for at least three years following the discovery that 40 percent of its 399 graduates from 2008-16 had not completed the required credits.

“Of course a decision of this magnitude deserves serious evaluation,” Board of Education member Becky Taylor said.

School officials hope they will be able to keep the high school open, Kestrel Heights executive director Mark Tracy said. “We do want to do right by our students. We want to do right by our community,” Tracy said. “I think with the changes that have already occurred in our organization we will be able to do that.” A student demonstration Tuesday and an online petition with more than 570 supporters shows what the school means to students, Tracy said.

The state Charter School Advisory Board recommended last month that the 18-year-old charter school close its high school this summer and remain a K-8 school for at least three years.

The school’s charter expires this year, and it was being considered for a 10-year renewal. Last year the school self reported concerns about graduates missing credits. An audit revealed that about 160 students didn’t have enough credits to graduate. The missing courses included math, English, American history and physical education.

To continue reading the complete article, click here.

Excerpt from:

Bridges, V. “NC Board of Education delays decision on Kestrel Heights in Durham.” News & Observer. 2/1/17.

Numbers of reportable acts of school crime, long-term suspensions, expulsions and corporal punishment events decreased in 2015-16, while the number of short-term suspensions increased, according to the N.C. Department of Public Instruction’s 2015-16 Consolidated Data Report. This report will be presented Feb. 2 to the State Board of Education. The total number of reportable acts of school crime decreased 3.2 percent from the 2014-15 school year. Approximately 1.5 million students attended public schools in 2015-16.

State Board Chairman Bill Cobey said he was glad to learn that school crime and violence acts and the disciplinary consequences for such acts decreased last year for the most part. “Schools must be safe havens if we want our teachers to be effective and our students to excel academically,” he said. Cobey added that it is imperative for educators to have strong support from parents and the school community to have the most positive impact on this key measure of school success.

Key findings of the 2015-16 Consolidated Data Report show that:

Reportable Acts of School Crime

• The total number of reported acts of school crime decreased 3.2 percent to 10,020 from 10,347 acts in 2014-15. The rate of acts per 1,000 students decreased by 3.9 percent to 6.62 acts per 1,000 students, compared to 6.89 acts per 1,000 students in 2014-15.
• 2,057 schools (79 percent of all) reported five or fewer acts of crime.
• Four districts – Clay, Jones, Polk and Washington – reported no acts at the high school grades.

Short-Term Suspensions

• Short-term suspensions (10 days or fewer) among students in all grades increased for the second year in a row, up last year by 4.0 percent. There were 216,895 short-term suspensions reported, compared to 208,650 reported in 2014-15.
• Of that total, 40.8 percent or 88,559 were given to high school students – a 2.3 percent increase from the 2013-14 total of 86,578.
• More males than females received short-term suspensions, though both genders showed increases in short-term suspensions from the previous year.
• American Indian students experienced the only decrease in short-term suspensions; all other racial subgroups showed increases.

To continue reading the complete press release, click here.

Excerpt from:

NCDPI. “Reportable Public School Crimes/Consequences Decrease in 2015-16; Short-Term Suspensions Increase.” 1/25/17.

Excerpt from:

Douglas, A. “Betsy DeVos nomination triggers massive phone campaign in North Carolina.” McClatchy. 2/1/17.

Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) chats with Betsy DeVos before her hearing to be next

Secretary of Education on Capitol Hill.  Photo Credit: Yuri Gripas, Reuters.

Sen. Tim Scott, the South Carolina Republican who is one of the most ardent supporters of vouchers and charter schools on Capitol Hill, this week introduced a bill that offers some insight into where and how the new Congress and Trump administration could make good on their promises to push for the expansion of alternatives to traditional public schools.

Scott’s bill — the Creating Hope and Opportunity for Individuals and Communities through Education Act, or CHOICE Act — is a three-pronged approach to devoting more federal funding to voucher programs for children to attend the private schools and, in some cases, the public schools of their choice.

First, the CHOICE Act would give states start-up funds to begin such programs for students with disabilities, and also would allow states to voucherize federal funds authorized under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, allowing students with disabilities to take those federal funds to whatever private school they choose to attend.

Second, the act would create a pilot program to offer vouchers to military children who live on Department of Defense bases. The vouchers would be worth up to $8,000 for elementary school and up to $12,000 for secondary school. They could be used at the private or public school of the child’s choice.

Third, the act would expand eligibility for an existing federally funded voucher program, the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, by allowing low-income D.C. students who currently attend a private school to qualify.

Scott introduced the same bill during the last session of Congress, but — unsurprisingly, at a time when President Obama was firmly opposed to vouchers — it went nowhere.

President Trump has pledged to redirect $20 million in federal spending to expanding vouchers and charter schools, and his nominee for education secretary, Betsy DeVos, has spent nearly three decades lobbying to create and expand voucher programs nationwide.

The bill also has the support of key Republicans, including co-sponsors Mitch McConnell (Ky.), the Majority Leader, and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

Photo Credit: Ted Warren, Associated Press

“There are lots of people at the place where I work, but there is one person who is really special. This person is really, really smart,” said Lin Bian. “This person figures out how to do things quickly and comes up with answers much faster and better than anyone else. This person is really, really smart.”

Bian, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, read this story out to 240 children, aged 5 to 7. She then showed them pictures of four adults—two men and two women—and asked them to guess which was the protagonist of the story. She also gave them two further tests: one in which they had to guess which adult in a pair was “really, really smart”, and another where they had to match attributes like “smart” or “nice” to pictures of unfamiliar men and women.

The results were stark. Among the 5-year-olds, both boys and girls associated brilliance with their own gender. But among those aged 6 or 7, only the boys still held to that view. At an age when girls tend to outperform boys at school, and when children in general show large positive biases towards their own in-groups, the girls became less likely than boys to attribute brilliance to their own gender. You could frame that as a good thing: While boys continued to believe in their own brilliance, the girls, on average, developed a more equal view. But that view has consequences—Bian also found that the older girls were less interested in games that were meant for “really, really smart” children.

“It was really heartbreaking,” she says.

The stereotype that brilliance and genius are male traits is common among adults. In various surveys, men rate their intelligence more favorably than women, and in a recent study of biology undergraduates, men overrated the abilities of male students above equally talented and outspoken women. But Bian’s study shows that the seeds of this pernicious bias are planted at a very early age. Even by the age of 6, boys and girls are already diverging in who they think is smart.

To continue reading the complete article, click here.

Excerpt from:

Yong, E. “6-Year-Old Girls Already Have Gendered Beliefs About Intelligence.” The Atlantic. 1/26/17.

The Burroughs Wellcome Fund has opened its application for the 2017 Student Science Enrichment Program (SSEP) grant awards. SSEP supports diverse programs with a common goal: to enable primary and secondary students to participate in creative, hands-on scientific activities for K-12 students and pursue inquiry-based exploration in BWF’s home state of North Carolina. These awards provide up to $60,000 per year for three years. The application deadline is April 18, 2017.

For more information or to access the application, visit https://www.bwfund.org/grant-programs/science-education/student-science-enrichment-program.