Friday Report – November 11, 2016

I’ll be honest; I’d pre-written a piece on what a Clinton presidency might mean for education. The polls pointed in her direction and she’s been talking about children and schools for years, meaning there was plenty to mull. I’d interviewed a number of both conservative and liberal education wonks who had a general idea of what to expect and a relatively uniform belief that she would work across the aisle.

Now, what happens education-wise under Donald Trump’s administration is unclear.

What he’s said on the campaign trail about schools and students obviously won’t transfer directly into policy, but his words offer clues. Will Trump shutter the U.S. Education Department entirely, as he’s suggested? That seems highly unlikely, but there’s a very real chance he’ll scale back its scope drastically. Looking at the big picture, with Republicans controlling the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, more decision-making power is likely to be transferred back to states and local governments. And Trump is likely to push what he’s called a “market-driven” approach to education. That makes civil-rights groups and many Democrats who see the federal government as something of a safety net for vulnerable low-income students and children of color nervous.

Last year, when Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, a new version of the nation’s federal K-12 education law, it returned a significant amount of authority to the states. The Obama administration had sought to retain some control as it hammered out how the law would be implemented by issuing regulations telling states, for instance, that federal money allocated to the education of poor students had to supplement and not replace local dollars. The regulations angered both Republicans and teachers’ unions on the left. The Obama administration has seen the Education Department as a critical watchdog when it comes to making sure students’ civil rights are protected. But Republicans and unions have balked at what they see as a department that has far overstepped its authority. The chance that a Trump administration backs the regulations the current Education Secretary John King and his team are developing now seems shaky.

But there are other elements of U.S. education policy that are likely to remain relatively entrenched. Perhaps Trump’s most oft-quoted education promise on the campaign trail was a pledge to “repeal” Common Core. That’s not actually possible, though, because Common Core is not a federal policy but a set of standards states have adopted for what students at each grade level should be able to do, and the federal government doesn’t dictate those. More than 40 states have adopted the standards, and the idea that they will suddenly abandon them is not realistic.

One area where the Trump administration could make changes, and where officials might use the muscle of the Education Department, is in expanding the use of vouchers that would let students use federal money to attend the schools of their choice, be they charters, private or parochial schools, magnet programs, or traditional public schools. Trump has proposed $20 billion to move that idea forward. Whether it becomes a reality is obviously unclear, but with Republicans controlling both the House and the Senate, there’s a good chance some sort of federally backed voucher program could move forward.

To continue reading the complete article, click here.

Excerpt from:

Durey, E. “Donald Trump and the Future of Education.” The Atlantic. 11/9/16.

Most of the 3rd-graders in Anita Parameswaran’s class at Daniel Webster Elementary in San Francisco have had experiences so awful that their brains won’t let them easily forget. “Whether it be that they’ve been sexually molested, or they’ve seen domestic violence, or shootings, or they know somebody who’s passed away,” Parameswaran said, “I would say every single year about 75 percent, give or take, come in with a lot of trauma.”

Now a national campaign is recognizing, backed by research on brain development, the power of teachers like Parameswaran to lower the levels of stress hormones in a child’s body and strengthen the neural connections needed for learning and self-control. The campaign, called Changing Minds and launched last month, is a partnership of the U.S. Department of Justice, the nonprofit group Futures Without Violence and the Ad Council, a nonprofit agency that creates public service advertisements.

While the message of the campaign is a truism — caring teachers and school staff can have a life-changing impact on struggling students — Changing Minds cites research that suggests the impact of  these relationship extends to preventing or repairing imbalances in the brain that interfere with learning.

The need for adults to take steps, small or large, to encourage these children is urgent, the campaign said. More than 60 percent of children from birth to age 17 in the United States were exposed to violence, crime and abuse in the past year, according to a paper published in 2015 in JAMA Pediatrics that analyzed the results of the 2013-14 National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence.

Exposure to violence “is not limited to one community or one group of children,” noted the co-chairs of the U.S. Attorney General’s National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence in a 2012 report that called for a public awareness campaign. “It occurs among all ethnic and racial groups; in urban, suburban and rural areas; in gated communities and on tribal lands.” The Changing Minds campaign, which includes publicity materials as well as teacher tools, is the result of that call.

Exhausted, overwhelmed, unhappy, underpaid – those are just some of the reasons North Carolina public school teachers have given for leaving their jobs in recent years. 

Their comments were collected as part of the state’s annual report on teacher loss, which shows how many North Carolina educators leave their jobs and the reasons why. But these comments, and hundreds of others, have never been reported publicly – until now.

WRAL News examined the state’s data on teacher loss and found that, in the past three years, nearly 2,000 teachers reported leaving their jobs for “other reasons.” That represents nearly 5 percent of all teachers who left in that timeframe. In more than 700 of those cases, additional comments were submitted to the state to explain why the teachers were leaving, giving more insight into their decisions. 

Some complained about low pay, excessive testing and overwhelming workloads. Others said they wanted to spend more time with family, start a new career or teach overseas.

But those comments and hundreds of others were not included in the state’s annual reports on teacher loss, which are presented to lawmakers and the State Board of Education to help with policy-making decisions. The reports simply count them as teachers who “resigned for other reasons.”

To continue reading the complete article, click here.

Excerpt from: 

Hinchcliffe, K. “Exhausted, unhappy, underpaid: Inside the ‘other reasons’ NC teachers leave.” WRAL. 11/10/16.

Just 24 percent of students use the learning software each day. A program called “FAST and Furious” allows kids to earn a year’s worth of credit for a week of work. The school’s leader helped direct millions of taxpayer dollars to his own for-profit management company. Despite it all, Ken Crowell keeps winning contracts to operate more schools. An Education Week investigation shines a light on what’s wrong with the country’s cyber charter sector.

It took a fishing trip to a remote lake in Canada for Paul Jones to finally blow the whistle on the founder of Colorado’s largest online charter school.

Decades earlier, Jones and Ken Crowell had become friends, then business partners.

Around 2009, the pair renewed their acquaintance during a chance encounter at the supermarket. By then, Crowell was a serial entrepreneur deeply interested in alternative education programs for former high school dropouts like himself. He invited Jones to join the board of his latest venture: GOAL Academy, part of a wave of new schools aiming to educate students full time over the internet.

The year before, GOAL had emerged from the wreckage of Colorado’s Cesar Chavez charter school network. Once hailed as one of the best brick-and-mortar charters in the country, Chavez fell apart when state auditors found top executives had given themselves exorbitant salaries, hired numerous family members, used school credit cards to pay their children’s cellphone bills, and given students extra time to complete state tests.

Crowell, though, helped convince regulators that the online education program he had been running at Chavez should survive as its own school.

It was a decision that some of those officials soon came to regret.

From the beginning, GOAL’s academic performance was weak. In 2012, fewer than 20 percent of the school’s students graduated on time. Fewer than 4 percent scored proficient on state math tests. And that’s just the public information: Even now, only 1 in 4 students uses the school’s learning software on a typical day, according to internal school data obtained by Education Week as part of an eight-month investigation.

Each year, the North Carolina Science, Mathematics and Technology Education Center awards individuals and organizations whose extraordinary contributions to science, mathematics and technology education in North Carolina help advance education in North Carolina.

Awards are presented in eight different categories. Educator and student award recipients receive $1,000 and are honored during the Celebration of Science, Mathematics and Technology event in the spring.

Visit the North Carolina Science, Mathematics and Technology Education Center website for more information. The deadline to nominate is December 1st.