New Report Finds Truant Students Are 'Skipping to Nowhere'

EWA Interview: Marie Groark from EdWriters on Vimeo.

It’s become a truism in the education world that students can’t learn if they’re not in school. But a new report on student absenteeism suggests many kids don’t believe this behavior hurts them academically, or even gets noticed by their teachers or parents.

Researchers from Get Schooled, a national nonprofit seeking to improve graduation rates and college success rates, conducted over 500 interviews with teenagers in 25 cities nationwide to produce Skipping to Nowhere, a new report released Wednesday. These respondents, interviewed at their local malls, were in grades eight through 12 and reported that they had skipped school at least once a month.

The nation’s school absenteeism rate is significant. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University estimate that from 5 to 7.5 million students each year are not attending school on a regular basis. Students who miss more than 10 days per academic year are 20 percent less likely to graduate from high school than their peers, according to the university's Everyone Graduates Center.

Get Schooled's new report paints a portrait that offers fresh perspective about who, exactly, is skipping school. Among the findings:

• Just over half of the respondents were white, with Hispanics accounting for 24 percent, African Americans for 16 percent, and Asians for 2 percent. 

• Nearly 60 percent of the respondents are growing up in two-parent households.
  
  
• Two-thirds of the respondents described their household’s income to be average or above average.

• About a third of the respondents have parents who graduated from college, and an equal fraction had a parent who had dropped out of high school.

•  Only 6 percent of the respondents said they were skipping school either to work or to help care for a member of their family.

There is no “typical skipper,” said Betsy Landers, National PTA president, one of several experts who participated in a conference call with reporters Tuesday to discuss the report. “The problem has no boundaries and threads across all demographics.”

What might surprise some educators and parents (and should probably set off some alarm bells, as well) is the belief among the school-skippers that their absences go largely unnoticed at home or at school. Students rated their odds of being caught skipping by school officials as 50-50, and described their parents as even less observant. Those findings emphasize that “parents are the first line of defense,” Landers said.

Also on the call with reporters was Todd Peterson, an assistant principal at Chaparral High School in Las Vegas -- one of the 25 cities in the survey -- who said campus efforts to address absenteeism is complicated by a lack of resources for support staff and truancy officers. At the same time, Peterson said, parents don't always treat early warnings from schools as seriously as they should, which means students often miss so many days that they have little chance of catching up.

The report suggests a sizeable disconnect between students’ perceptions of the consequences of their actions and the wealth of research indicating they are significantly hurting their academic prospects by cutting class. The student respondents said their grades and chances of graduating are only really at risk if they skip at least once per week.

When asked why they skip school, most common among students’ “very big reasons” was that they found school boring (32 percent), school starts too early (26 percent) and it was more fun to spend time with friends (23 percent).

I was particularly interested in the students' answers when asked what would encourage them to attend school more regularly. More than half of them said they would be much more likely to come to class if “I could see a clear connection between the classes I take and the job I want.”

That bolsters the argument for students’ coursework to be more in line with their career interests, Steve DeWitt, senior director of public policy for the Association of Career and Technical Education, told me in an interview Tuesday. Unlike traditional vocational education classes where students break off from their peers on the college track, CTE puts equal emphasis on academics and career training. Research indicates that students in CTE programs are more likely to graduate and to continue their educations beyond high school than their peers in traditional academic settings.

(DeWitt described two common hurdles to expanding CTE  – cash-strapped school districts have been cutting the programs,, and there's a lack of support among policymakers who don’t view CTE as an evolved instructional model.)

For some students, trying to capture their interest in high school could be too little, too late. Among the "school skippers" interviewed by Get Schooled, most of them said they started cutting classes regularly in middle school. Among the students in grades 10-12, nearly half --46 percent -- said they skipped school at least once per week.

Hedy Chang, director of the San Francisco-based national initiative Attendance Works, said addressing the problem of absenteeism has to start with the younger grades, rather than waiting until students are in middle or high school when they're already struggling as a result of lost seat time.

The definition of chronic absenteeism is missing 10 percent of the school year. That typically means missing 18 days during an 180-day, nine-month calendar. The new report underscores the fact that too many students and parents don't understand how quickly a few missed days can add up to long-term academic troubles, Chang said.

“Two days a month on average – keep that up and you’re going to fall behind,” Chang told me. “We have to remember what we’re seeing right now is the impact of not reaching those at-risk students early on.”

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

Start-Ups Gamble on Higher Education Innovations

There's a provocative piece in the latest issue of Washington Monthly from Kevin Carey, director of the education policy program at the New America Foundation, in which he takes a deep look at how a new spirit of digital entrepreneurship is changing the higher education landscape.

By investing (relatively) smaller dollar amounts in larger numbers of start-ups, venture capitalists are improving the odds that someone will come up with the Next Big Idea. If they fail on the first try, the investment was modest enough that there's no harm, no foul. And the entrepreneurs can more easily switch gears and try something completely different, a process known as “fail faster,” which Carey describes as “a crucial idea in an ecosystem driven by experimentation and groping around for the new new thing."

While the start-ups might be small, the potential profits are not. Education technology companies raked in $400 million last year, according to Carey's reporting. It's worth noting here there's a fair amount of concern -- and skepticism -- as to how effectively these companies are improving quality of instruction and opportunity for their students.

The experimentation in virtual learning is hardly limited to entrepreneurs. More colleges and universities -- from M.I.T. to the University of Pennsylvania to Stanford -- are now offering courses described as "open source" or “MOOCs ” (massive open online courses), which are typically offered free of charge.

It's too early to tell whether that approach will have a long-term effect on higher education. David Youngberg, an assistant professor of economics at Bethany College, wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education that MOOCs are "the nose rings of higher education," and that employers typically avoid "weird people" who seek unconventional routes to advanced degrees. However, open-source courses could crack open a window for some learners who might otherwise be shut out. Even if that window is only virtual, it's still hard to find a downside to that.

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

The Week Ahead: Tampa Awaits Republican National Convention

 You can now read my full interview with William Bushaw, co-director of the 2012 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll on The Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools, over at  EdMedia Commons. Bushaw also answered questions from reporters, and you can follow that discussion by clicking here.

 For more on the political aspects of the poll's results, click here. I also looked at the findings related to the public's perceptions of teachers, and you can read that blog post here.

**
Out in Las Vegas, President Obama sat down with a few teachers before a campaign rally at a local high school, and the educators said he was "easy to talk to," the Las Vegas Sun reported. The president's speech to supporters focused on education issues, where he reaffirmed his view that the nation's global competitiveness depends heavily on how successful schools are at reaching students.

**

I've never considered the political leanings of a tropical weather system but quite a few pundits are suggesting that Hurricane Isaac just might have some strong opinions.

When the Republican National Convention gets underway in Tampa, I'm relying on Education Week's top-notch trio  -- Politics K-12 blogger Alyson Klein, On Special Education's Nirvi Shah, and editor Mark Bomster -- to keep me informed. In the meantime I hope everyone stays dry -- and safe.

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily. 

Gallup Poll To Teachers: They Like You! They Really Like You!

Lily Eskelsen, vice president of the National Education Association, was at a back-to-school event near Cleveland, Ohio on Tuesday when a special education teacher approached with tears in her eyes and asked: “Why are they being so mean to us?”

The “they,” said Eskelsen, was a combination of unflattering news reports about struggling schools, a blitz of documentaries seen as unfairly blaming teachers for lackluster student achievement, and politicians who seem more interested in pursuing their own agendas than addressing challenges facing public education.

Eskelsen told me she did her best to reassure the Ohio teacher, although in hindsight she wishes she could have shared a particularly heartening piece of information: For a third consecutive year, 71 percent of Americans participating in a Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll on education issues said they had confidence in the abilities of public school teachers.

The poll, published Wednesday, surveyed 1,002 adults in telephone interviews in May and June, and then weighted their responses so that they reflected the nation’s demographic profile. For more on the findings, click here.

“There may be some individuals who, for their own purposes, want to say teachers can’t be trusted -- but people know better,” Eskelsen told me. “Most people do appreciate the work that teachers do.”

William Bushaw, co-director of the poll, says that confidence statistic is one he tries to emphasize when he meets with education groups and organizations throughout the year. “When I talk to educators, they don’t accept that (statistic) – they feel like they’re under attack,” Bushaw said. “But clearly Americans like teachers. I tell them, `They have a lot of questions about the larger organization, but they respect and trust what you do in the classroom.’”

The poll does indicate Americans have significant concerns about the quality of the nation's public schools, particularly whether high school graduates are prepared to succeed in college. At the same time, the responses also suggest Americans want a high-quality teacher workforce. About a third of respondents thought the entrance requirements for teacher preparation programs should be more selective than those for business, law and medicine. (Raising the standards for teacher education is a front-burner issue for policymakers nationally. For more on that issue, click here.)

There were some unexpected changes in this year’s Gallup poll: For the first time in four years, public support for charter schools dropped, to 66 percent this year from 70 percent in 2011. While that might be a decline, Nina Rees, chief executive of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, emphasized to me that the public was still in favor by a 2:1 margin. She also noted that the margin of error for the poll is +/- 4 percent, so it’s possible the level of support stayed the same. (The cynical statistician in me also has to point out that margin could also mean support has fallen even further.)

Rees argues that families are “demonstrating their support with their feet.” Charter school enrollment has doubled in the past five years, with more than 2 million students enrolled and another estimated 600,000 on waiting lists.

For Bushaw, the surprise in the poll’s findings had to do with what he characterized as “lukewarm support” for using student test scores as part of the process for evaluating teacher job performance. Just over half of the poll respondents said they favored using student test scores as a factor.

“We’re focusing a lot of energy right now into how to incorporate standardized test scores into teacher evaluations – there wasn’t as much support (in the poll) given the resources we’re putting into it,” Bushaw said.

Those findings aren’t surprising given the blizzard of public discourse underway on the topic of using standardized tests in evaluations, said Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality. No Child Left Behind has created a stigma around using standardized testing to measure whether a school is judged as successful or failing, Jacobs said, and that stigma has now attached itself to the issue of teacher evaluations.

“Plenty of people think there are evaluation systems being put up all over the country that are structured so that one test that decides a teacher’s future, even though that model doesn’t exist anywhere,” said Jacobs, whose organization is tracking new policies on teacher evaluations nationwide.

While the Gallup question was worded fairly, Jacobs said, she wasn’t sure it conveyed the idea that standardized tests could be used in a way that would measure a student’s academic growth, rather than just taking a snapshot of their performance at a single point in time. That can be tough to do in a telephone poll.

“The rhetoric has been really heated around this conversation in many places,” Jacobs said. “When you hear that teachers are against what’s being proposed without knowing or understanding the complexities of the system, it’s not hard to understand why a person might conclude this is not a good idea.”

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

Gallup Poll Finds Split on Education Issues in Presidential Election

When potential voters' decisions were based solely on a "desire to strengthen public schools," a new Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll gives President Obama a November victory over presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, by a margin of 49 to 44 percent.

Given the poll’s margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points, the race would be almost too close to call, said William Bushaw, executive director of PDK International and the co-director of the poll, which is being published today.

Broken down by party affiliation, Obama had 88 percent of the vote among Democrats while Romney had the same percentage among Republicans. But 46 percent of Independent voters chose Romney, compared with 41 percent that opted for Obama.

The same Gallup poll predicted dead heats in both the 2000 and 2004 elections, and accurately foretold overwhelming support for Obama in 2008. This year's poll is based on 1,002 telephone interviews conducted in May and June. The responses are weighted so that the sample is representative of the nation’s adult population.

Rick Hess, resident scholar and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., told me he was surprised Obama’s lead over Romney wasn’t larger than 5 percentage points given the “glowing press” for the president’s education initiatives, and he was shocked by the low grades Republican respondents to the poll gave the president’s performance in support of public schools. Only 14 percent of Republicans gave him an A or a B grade compared with 71 percent of Democrats.

Indeed, the finding that significantly more respondents thought it was more important to balance the federal budget (60 percent) than to improve the quality of the education system (38 percent) has to be a concern for the Obama campaign, said Andy Rotherham, who cofounded Bellwether Education Partners, a national nonprofit in Washington, D.C. that focuses on improving opportunities for low-income students.

“If that’s really the mood out there, it would have to worry Democratic candidates,” said Rotherham, who was a special assistant for domestic policy during the Clinton administration.

Overall, just 37 percent of the poll’s respondents gave Obama an A or B grade for his performance in support of public schools, down from 41 percent last year and a high of 45 percent in 2009. The Democrats’ reputation as the political party more interested in improving public education continued its steady decade-long climb, with a jump to 50 percent this year from 44 percent in 2008.

The presidential election isn’t the only area where Americans were divided in the poll. There were near-even splits on the issues of school vouchers, whether high schools are producing college-ready graduates, and whether the respondents would give good or bad grades to their neighborhood schools.

Rotherham noted that the results were “all over the map” when it comes to opinions on issues such as school choice, with support for charter schools dropping while more people said they approved of vouchers.

“The last few years there has been so much noise in the education debate, it’s not surprising there’s a lot of confusion out there,” said Rotherham, who writes the Eduwonk blog. “The numbers don’t add up to a coherent poll.”

Rotherham said polls like the Gallup are good at “at probing for big-gut level questions,” such as how people feel about immigration. However, the questions are less useful “for probing on issues where a fair degree of background knowledge is required,” Rotherham said.

On the issue of whether the children of immigrants who entered the country illegally should be eligible for a free public education, school meals, or other benefits, 58 percent of the poll’s respondents were opposed. (The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that they are, up through the 12th grade.)

The idea of blocking those students from attending public school doesn’t make much practical sense either in the short term or the long term, said Lily Eskelsen, vice president of the National Education Association. Eskelsen told me that she actually wondered what the respondents who comprised that 58 percent respondents would prefer for those children to do during the day as an alternative.

“Should they be home alone while their parents are at work?” Eskelsen asked.

If the educational needs of children – regardless of citizenship status – are ignored, “it’s to our detriment, not just theirs,” Eskelsen said. “Certainly, undocumented immigrants don’t have a lot of legal rights. This just happens to be one of them, and it’s because it makes sense.”

Eskelsen said she was heartened by the fact that the 58 percent opposition represents a decline from the 67 percent who opposed providing free education to the children of illegal immigrants back in 1995. (She was also thrilled that the poll found that confidence in the abilities of teachers remained steady at 71 percent for a third consecutive year. I’ll talk more tomorrow about the Gallup poll’s results for teachers, as well as key issues including using standardized tests in teacher evaluations, charter schools, and bullying.)

For 44 years, the poll has opened with the same first question: “What is the biggest problem facing schools in your community?” A decade ago the responses were split among discipline, drugs, and gangs. This year, 35 percent of respondents said a lack of financial support was the leading problem, which is not unexpected given the effects of the economic downturn on local schools.

But that hasn’t dimmed Americans’ optimism as to the future prospects of their own children. Of the poll’s respondents who were parents, just over 90 percent said they “strongly agreed” that their child would graduate high school. And nearly two-thirds of parents polled said they believed their child would find a good job after graduating.

One hallmark of the annual Gallup poll is that respondents consistently give higher ratings to their local schools than they do to public schools nationally, and that held true again this time around. Those perceptions “do defy some of the data we have,” said the poll's co-director Bushaw, referring to the nation’s graduation rate which hovers around 74 percent. For the most part, that kind of optimism “is a really good trait of Americans,” Bushaw said. The downside is that it can make it difficult for policymakers and educators to build a sense of urgency for reform.

Rather than try and convince people they are misinformed in their perceptions about public schools, something Hess termed an “unpromising slog,” he recommended education advocates try to explain to people what it is that the reformers plan to change, and “why that will help make their particular school, system, or classroom better.”

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

Smaller School Districts Might Not Reach Race To The Top's Starting Line

The rules for the latest round of the Race To The Top grant program, offering school districts the chance to apply directly for a slice of $400 million in federal funds, could make it difficult – if not impossible – for many of them to even have a shot at the prize.

The U.S. Department of Education has announced the final guidelines for school districts to apply either individually (in the case of larger districts) or in consortiums (for smaller districts with fewer than 2,000 students). In prior rounds, applications had to come from each state’s education department.

As Education Week's Politics K-12 blogger Michele McNeil points out, that minimum number of students means about half of the districts nationwide are excluded from applying on their own. They could certainly try to team up with other districts on a joint proposal for spending the school improvement and reform dollars. But given the tight deadline – districts are supposed to let the Education Department know they intend to apply by the end of the month -- finding partners could be tough. And then there’s still a complex, 116-page application to wade through.

Many of the nation’s larger school districts employ full-time grant writers who focus on applying for those crucial extra dollars from the federal government, as well as private foundations. But many smaller districts don’t have that luxury.

Lucy Gettman, director of federal programs for the National School Boards Association,
said the shift from the traditional federal funding formula based on a per-pupil headcount to a more competitive landscape hasn't exactly been equitable. Competitive grants “generally put rural, and high-need, high-poverty districts, at a disadvantage,” said Gettman, whose organization has members in 13,800 districts nationwide. “We’ve asked Congress and the administration to provide funds without this competitive element.”

The federal grant applications, whether its RTTT or the new Investing In Innovation (i3) program,  represent “an enormously challenging process for districts, even those that are fortunate enough to have full-time grant writers,” Gettman said.

The level of enthusiasm among districts for the latest incarnation of RTTT is “all over the map,” Gettman told me.

“We’ve heard from school districts saying they have just the population this grant program is designed to assist, the grant is consistent with the kind of work they are doing with high-need students, and they have a vision for how to put the grant to work,” Gettman said. “We’ve talked to other districts that don’t believe the time required to complete the application—knowing how few of these awards there will actually be—is worth the investment. “

When the first draft of new round of RTTT was announced earlier this summer, there was strong opposition from some quarters to a proposed requirement that districts evaluate the job performance of school board members. Gettman said the NSBA was glad to see that provision dropped from the final regulations.

“Since most school board members are elected officials, there is already a process for them to be evaluated before they are placed in their positions, and there is a transparent process for the public to express pleasure or displeasure with their leadership,” Gettman said.

As I noted in a recent post, school board races typically draw minimal voter interest, and many candidates run unopposed or face only token opposition. Would an evaluation process, presuming one could be designed that would be equitable, actually raise the profile of elected officials who often control massive operating budgets and are ultimately responsible for setting district policy? Or would it only discourage people from seeking an already hard-to-fill position?

A reader of the Educated Reporter made an interesting suggestion, arguing that it’s the upper-level district administrators – like the region superintendents and other central office staff who actually implement the education policies and reforms – who should be evaluated. It’s a reasonable point but given that many states and districts are already struggling to comply with federal demands for more rigorous measures of teacher performance, I doubt school boards will be subjected to report cards any time soon.

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

`Deferred Action' Program for Undocumented Immigrants Starts

On Wednesday, undocumented youth and young adults who were brought to the United States illegally began applying for President Obama’s controversial “deferred action” program, which offers a chance to obtain a work permit and avoid deportation for two years.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, announced in June, does not offer a path to legal status or citizenship. Rather, it’s considered a stopgap measure that could help more than 1.2  million undocumented individuals.

To qualify for DACA, individuals must meet strict criteria, including having been younger than 16 when they were brought into the United States by their parents; being under the age of 31 as of June 15, 2012; and having been in the U.S. at least since June 15, 2007. Individuals must also not have been convicted of a serious crime, and they must be in school, have graduated, or earned a GED.

Hundreds of young adults lined up outside the offices of the Coalition for Humane Immigrants Rights of Los Angeles on Wednesday, looking for more information about how to apply. As the Los Angeles Times reported,  Juliana Davila, one of those waiting in line, told KTLA News that the program "gives hope to get a better chance to get a better job, more education. It's a great chance."

To be sure, DACA is not a substitute for the Dream Act, a long-stalled federal initiative that would give some undocumented students a means of continuing their education in the United States. Federal law requires that these school-age students receive equitable educational opportunities through the 12th grade, but after that they are on their own. So far, there are no policies at the national level that have been approved to answer the question of what to do with undocumented students beyond high school.

Currently, 12 states have passed laws allowing undocumented students to qualify lower in-state tuition rates for higher education. Maryland’s legislature approved its own version of the law but that was challenged by opponents, and implementation has been delayed until after a referendum is put to voters in November.

In Colorado, Metropolitan State University of Denver announced earlier this month that it intended to offer reduced tuition rates to undocumented students, a plan some critics say circumvents existing law. Tom Tancredo, a former Republican congressman from Colorado  told the Denver Post he intends to pursue legal action to block Metro State from offering the reduced tuition.

"It's clear they've talked with a number of people who have encouraged them, but there should be some who would discourage them from the reckless course they're on," said Tancredo, who heads the Rocky Mountain Foundation. "Their attorneys should have told them that they're violating federal and state law."

In the meantime, the National Council of La Raza, the nation’s largest Hispanic civil rights advocacy organization, praised the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for the speed with which the DACA program was launched

“August 15 is a momentous day for hundreds of thousands of undocumented youth who know no other home but the U.S., and for all the people who worked so hard to give these deserving young people the chance to contribute to this great country without living in constant fear of deportation,” Janet Murguía, La Raza’s president and chief executive said in a written statement. “Our job now is to work with USCIS to make sure that these students have the information and support they need to get this relief.”

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

Food For Thought: More Debate Over Teaching Students About Nutrition

A new study published in Pediatrics suggests there could be a link between more stringent laws limiting junk food to students at school and children being at healthier weights, boosting the argument that schools can play a role in the fight against childhood obesity.

It’s important to keep in mind that the national study’s measured effect was relatively small, and that it’s not definitive evidence that school bans on junk food are working. But it’s enough to boost confidence among advocates of such policies.

I wrote recently about the question of how much responsibility for addressing childhood obesity should rest with schools, and the American Medical Association’s proposal for a tax on sugary soft drinks that would help pay for educational programs on health and nutrition. That proposal has drawn heat from educators who say the school day is already too crowded, and that families are ultimately responsible for their children’s weight. But even if you believe schools are straying too far from their academic mission by taking on such issues, it’s hard to ignore that there’s an impact on learning when children are not healthy.

As for whether the junk food bans will show much of a measurable effect on health outcomes, Dr. David Ludwig, an obesity specialist at Harvard Medical School and Boston's Children's Hospital, told the Associated Press "what are the downsides of improving the food environment for children today? You can't get much worse than it already is."

This new study is getting plenty of coverage (along with the AP, see Time, and the New York Times). But my favorite take so far comes from Lindsay Abrams, an editorial fellow for The Atlantic's Health Channel. Hers is the first article I’ve seen on this issue that comes from the point of view of someone who is actually a member of the generation the more rigorous rules were intended to protect.

Abrams says that when she was in middle school a decade ago, she wrote an editorial for her school newspaper opposing the campus vending machines – which were removed by the administration soon after. That result didn’t exactly make her popular, and I have to admire her willingness to stand her ground. School districts across the country have enacted similar bans, a move that's looking wiser in the light of the new study's findings.

But as Abrams writes now, “Schools shouldn't just be forcing healthier foods on students. The partially-supervised years of middle school are the perfect time to expose them to more options while simultaneously teaching them to make better choices.”

Laying a healthier foundation in middle school could mean students enter high school in better shape physically, Abrams argues, and more prepared to make smart food choices when they are likely to have more direct control over what they eat.

The larger question is whether students will continue to practice better eating habits when they leave the school setting. That might be the trickiest part of this equation. Schools that simply ban junk food don’t do much more than drive up the sales during the early morning and late-afternoon hours at the minimarts near campus. When those junk food bans are part of a well-structured initiative that encourages entire families, and not just students, to live healthier, I’d guess that the odds of making a difference would have to improve.

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

Race To The Top: School Districts Will Compete For $400 Million

The U.S. Department of Education sent out a rare Sunday press release yesterday to announce the next phase of the Race To The Top Grant program is underway, with individual school districts now able to apply directly for a share of $400 million in federal grants.

As the Politics K-12 blog reports, the rules have been heavily revised since the draft was first put out for public comment back in May, and more than 475 comments were received. I was particularly interested to note the provision requiring districts to have a mechanism in place for evaluating school board members has been scrapped. In a way that's not surprising, given the vocal opposition by the individuals who would have faced a new level of public scrutiny. According to Politics K-12 blogger Michele McNeil, the Education Department still believes performance evaluations for school board members are a good idea but "they don't think this contest is the place to get at it."

It's too soon to know whether school board evaluations will actually become a piece of the accountability puzzle. However, it's hard not to find reasonable arguments why it should at least be part of the conversation, particularly for large urban districts where school boards set policy and oversee massive operating budgets. 

At the same time, it's important to remember that many school board members receive only nominal compensation for the time they give to the work, and are the subject of scant voter interest during election season. It's not a job that many people are willing to take on, and subjecting them to what they might consider an unfair evaluation process could dim enthusiasm for an already tough-to-fill position.

Have a comment, question or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

Free Speech vs. Hate Speech: Where Should the University of California Draw the Line?

A controversy roiling the University of California highlights a familiar tension in higher education: What is the best way to encourage an open exchange of ideas on campus without fostering an environment that leads to harassment and discrimination?

In response to concerns about incidents of discrimination on the campuses in its system, a UC fact-finding team has issued a report recommending bans on hate speech and campus-backed protests against Israel as a means of curbing anti-Semitism.

Now several thousand members of the campus community are asking UC President Mark Yudof not to follow those recommendations because of the impact they could have on free speech, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Among the report’s recommendations: banning hate speech, requiring “cultural competency training” for the entire UC community, and potentially prohibiting campuses from sponsoring “unbalanced and/or biased events.” (For the full report, click here.)

The UC system should “push its current harassment and nondiscrimination provisions further, clearly define hate speech in its guidelines and seek opportunities to prohibit hate speech on campus,” the report concludes.

The report -- put together by a fact-finding team following complaints of anti-Semitism on UC campuses, including harassment of Jewish students during pro-Palestinian demonstrations -- was issued by the President’s Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture, & Inclusion.

The Chronicle reported Thursday that more than 2,200 students, faculty and staff have signed the petition that protests the report's recommendations. According to the language of the petition, the signees “believe in the principles of free speech and that these principles stand on their own and do not require any additional regulation.”

In an open letter to Yudof posted on the change.org website, 27 UC faculty, students and alumni say the fact-finding team’s’s report and the recommendations “omit the experiences of many students and faculty in the Jewish community, grossly misrepresent educational initiatives focused on Israel and Palestine and political organizing in support of Palestinian rights, and threaten academic freedom on our campuses.”

On the webpage, one commenter who identifies herself as a UC-Berkeley parent writes that she “always loved that Berkeley was the place where the freedom of speech movement began in the U.S. Still love it. Would like to continue loving it.”

Incidents of harassment at UC campuses haven’t just been verbal or directed only at the Jewish communities. In March at UC-Riverside, the word “terrorists” was scrawled on an Israeli flag belonging to a Jewish students’ organization. And in 2010, a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender resource center at UC-Davis was defaced, and a noose was found in a campus library at UC-San Diego.

But as San Francisco Chronicle higher education reporter Nanette Asimov points out in her story Thursday, “The dispute is a collision between civil rights and free speech, where allegiances can't always be sorted out by religion.” Many of the more vocal critics of the fact-finding team's report are Jewish, Asimov notes.

It seems unlikely that Yudof, a law professor and First Amendment scholar, will embrace the report’s recommendations. The Chronicle cited the UC president's written response to Jewish students saying that he believed the university system’s current policies already go “as far as they can, given constitutional limitations.”

If the UC System were to follow the report’s recommendations and test those constitutional limits, there’s no shortage of potential challengers waiting in the wings. The proposed campus ban on hate speech would be “a very serious mistake,” Harvard law professor and author Alan M. Dershowitz told the Forward, the nation’s largest Jewish-American newspaper. “The first victims of the policy would be pro-Israel advocates. It will backfire.”

The report’s recommended adoption of a system-wide hate-free policy is where it “offends the Constitution,” said Adam Goldstein, attorney advocate for the Student Press Law Center, a First Amendment advocacy organization in Arlington, Va.

A hate-free campus “would be a Constitution-free campus,” Goldstein told me in an interview Thursday.

"The entire concept of free speech is that you're entitled to say offensive, hateful things,” Goldstein said. “Nobody is trying to stop you from saying nice things -- the First Amendment would be utterly meaningless if all it meant was the right to hold up signs with pictures of flowers and puppies on them.”

As for the question of whether anti-Semitism is being allowed to flourish on UC campuses, Goldstein said he’s more concerned about the potential harm of the proposed remedies.

“The most anti-Semitic thing currently happening at the University of California is the attempt to abandon American principles in the name of the Jewish people, as if that was something Jews needed or wanted,” Goldstein said. “It's condescending to assert that, somehow, anti-Semitism can't be confronted and dissolved by truth.”

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

Nevada Raises Stakes in School Accountability With NCLB Waiver

Nevada received a waiver from some of the most rigorous requirements of No Child Left Behind Wednesday, bringing the total exemptions to 33 states and the District of Columbia.

“Nevada joins the growing number of states who can’t wait any longer for education reform, and we’re thrilled that more than 1 million new students will now be protected under these 34 flexibility plans,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a statement announcing the news. “We still remain hopeful that Congress will come together to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, but we know states need this relief now.”

The reauthorization of ESEA is more than four years overdue. With the election cycle looming and the deeply partisan mood on the Hill, a resolution isn’t expected anytime soon. In the meantime, the number of states receiving waivers has surged past the halfway mark, and four more -- California, Idaho, Illinois and Iowa – are waiting to hear if their requests will be granted. States have until Sept. 6 to apply for the next round.

It’s important to remember that the waivers are not a free pass from accountability. In exchange for being released from some of the law’s requirements the states had to agree to a number of provisions, including use student testing data as a factor in evaluating teacher job performance, and to focus their efforts on reforming the lowest-performing campuses. States must also have a plan in place for extending learning time for students. (For more on this issue, check out a recent report from the Center for American Progress detailing a “troubling lack of detail” as to how the states receiving the first round of waivers planned to comply with the extended learning time requirement.)

Nevada's waiver is considered conditional until some of the fine print is hammered out to the satisfaction of the U.S. Department of Education. As I mentioned in a recent blog post, in some ways Nevada was harder on itself than other states were when it came to developing its benchmarks for complying with NCLB. Each state was given a fair amount of leeway in designing its framework for meeting the federal requirements, including in how student achievement would be quantified. Each state was required to set hard-target goals for student achievement both overall and by smaller subgroups: race, special education status, non-native
English speakers, and students coming from low-income homes. But each state got to decide the minimum number of students that qualified for a subgroup. Some states set a relatively high minimum number for subgroups, making it easier to avoid having to count the test scores for a smaller number of students. Nevada’s subgroup size of 25 turned out to be one of the smallest in the nation, meaning it was holding its schools to an even tougher standard.

So here’s where it gets interesting. As part of its waiver application, Nevada pledged to decrease its subgroup size to 10 from 25. In a conference call with reporters Wednesday, federal Education Department officials praised that decision, saying it would sharply increase the number of Nevada schools held accountable for the achievement of high-need students who might otherwise be overlooked. Of course, balancing that out is the fact that the most punitive elements of NCLB, and the risk that might come with having to report achievement for a larger group of students, disappear with the waiver.

At the same time, the waiver likely will be welcome news in Clark County, the nation’s fifth largest school district. Southern Nevada’s schools have struggled in recent years, first with meeting the needs of one of the fastest-growing student populations in the country (boom) and then the massive budget cuts that came in the wake of the economic downturn (bust). A long-standing complaint had been that NCLB’s inflexible hard-target benchmarks for student achievement didn’t take into account progress made by schools serving high-need student populations. The waiver will allow Nevada’s schools to switch a growth model – adopted by 18 states -- which recognizes incremental gains from one year to the next.

On a related note, the Clark County School District opted last month not to pursue a federal Race To The Top grant, potentially as much as $6 million, on the grounds that the money wasn’t worth the accompanying strings that would have been attached. If you’re wondering why anyone would turn down a chance at $6 million in federal dollars in this cash-strapped environment, keep in mind the district’s annual operating budget tops $2 billion.

“My concern is that a grant, once awarded, becomes a contract,” School Board member Erin Cranor told the Las Vegas Sun. “Sounds like selling your soul for $6 million.”

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

Punting the Problem: When Athletes Struggle As Students

Update: My interview with Chronicle of Higher Education senior writer Brad Wolverton -- discussing the remarkable backstory to his reporting, and the challenges of access and objectivity -- is now available at Ed Media Commons. This post first appeared June 6, 2012. 

In case anyone needed further evidence of just how difficult it can be for students to catch up once they've fallen behind on their reading skills, consider "The Education of Dasmine Cathey."

This powerful (and often heartbreaking) narrative by Chronicle of Higher Education senior writer Brad Wolverton is the result of three months spent with Cathey, a football player at the University of Memphis, documenting his struggle to complete his college career on and off the field. Cathey managed to make it to his senior year despite being semi-illiterate, and finds himself at a crossroads with the safety net of his athletic scholarship about to disappear.

Cathey is far from alone. Colleges and universities nationwide are confronting similar issues of student athletes who are ready for the field but not for the classroom. In recent years the NCAA has stepped up its academic eligibility requirements and oversight, but significant problems persist. As Wolverton reports, University of Memphis officials were unaware of how widespread the problem was on their campus was until a reading test became a requirement for incoming athletes.

“'I was like, 'Holy crud, I can't believe how many kids are reading below a seventh-grade level,'” the university’s athletic director Joseph Luckey told the Chronicle.

Cathey still needs to complete a course this summer in order to graduate, according to the Chronicle story. He failed to advance after an NFL tryout, and has since found work driving a truck and delivering beer.

Much has been written about insufficient academic standards for college athletes, particularly at top-ranked campuses where big games can bring in big money. But I don't think I've seen a better example of how this system affects an individual student.

Cathey's experiences also reinforce the message of organizations like the Campaign For Grade Level Reading, which is pushing for better collaboration among schools and community groups to improve literacy at all levels. Some research indicates that students who are not reading at grade level by the end of third grade have only a 25 percent chance of ever catching up to their proficient peers. By those standards, Cathey was well behind the curve long before he was recruited to play for the Memphis Tigers.

Indeed, the odds of academic success for African-American student athletes like Cathey are particularly daunting, according to a recent study by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida. When looking at the 70 college football teams playing in the 2011-12 bowl games, the institute determined that the average “graduation success rate” was 20 percentage points higher for white student athletes than for their black teammates. The one exception among the individual campuses was Notre Dame, where the graduation success rate was actually higher for black football players.

To be sure, many of Cathey's struggles started before he even enrolled at Memphis. But it's also interesting to read the comments on the Chronicle's Web site, with some readers putting blame on Cathey's inability to seize the opportunities put before him. Others saw a collegiate athletics system that exploits students, rather than helps them overcome their deficits.

“I’m not finding this a heartwarming s story,” wrote reader Maureen Basedow. “Too depressed about an education system that regularly graduates below-7th grade reading level from high school, and then admits them to college if they can do a fast 40. And when they're there, they can take an entire year of courses without reading (or presumably, writing) anything. Is Memphis proud of this? Are any of us?”

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

With A Spike In Brain Injuries, High School Football Faces Questions About Safety

The Educated Reporter is taking a brief summer hiatus, and will return Wednesday, Aug. 8. For the next few days you'll have a chance to catch up on some past posts. 

The  National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research is reporting an increase in catastrophic brain injuries among high school football players, raising questions about whether recent changes to safety protocols are enough to protect young players, and if the game is worth the risk.

According to the center's annual report, 13 high school football players sustained catastrophic brain injuries in 2011, up from nine in the prior year. The injuries included subdural hematoma requiring surgery, as well brain trauma resulting in strokes and comas. In most of the cases, the players had not fully recovered.

There was an average of five catastrophic brain injuries among high school players between 1992 and 2001, but that 10-year average jumped to 8.2 for the years 2002-11. Fred Mueller, director of the center at the University of North Carolina and the report's lead author, told the Raleigh News & Observer that the jump “is a major problem.”

The center makes specific recommendations for continuing to improve the safety of high school football, including the proper execution of blocking and tackling. Pre-season physical exams are advised for all student players, and coaches and athletic trainers must make sure helmets fit properly. Another recommendation – have a physician on the field to assess players in the event of an emergency.

“I think a part of it is that we are educating people better, and injuries that might not have been reported in the past are being reported now,” Bob Colgate of the National Federation of State High School Associations told the News-Observer. “But we also have a responsibility to keep emphasizing that the head has to be taken out of tackling and blocking.”

The total number of young players seriously injured each year represents just a tiny fraction of the estimated 1.1 million high school students who play football. But that doesn’t negate the seriousness of the injuries or the potential benefits of learning from the statistical data.

To be sure, football safety is under intense scrutiny from Pop Warner leagues to the NFL. Each year there are about 67,000 concussions among high school players, a figure researchers say would top 100,000 if more of the head injuries were properly diagnosed and reported.

And there could be more to fear than just one unlucky hard hit. Recent studies have found football-related head trauma – even injuries that might once have been considered minor – can result in long-term health problems, particularly when players have successive concussions. A new study by Purdue University researchers, looking at high school football players over a two-year period, suggests that repeated hits over time, and not just one massive blow, cause concussions.

Over the past decade, emergency room visits for children and adolescents with sports-related traumatic brain injuries has jumped 60 percent, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The most common injuries were among football players, with an incident rate of 0.47 per 1,000 athlete exposures. The second-place finisher for riskiest sport? Girls’ soccer, with an incident rate of .36 per 1,000 athlete exposures. (And those are just the figures from the emergency rooms, and don’t include injuries diagnosed by private physicians or neighborhood clinics.)

After a weekend of particularly brutal collisions among NFL players in 2010, Michael Sokolove, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, asked “Is it morally defensible to watch a sport whose level of violence is demonstrably destructive? … What if the brain injuries are so endemic — so resistant to changes in the rules and improvements in equipment — that the more we learn the more menacing the sport will seem? Where will football, and its fans, go from there?”

I asked Sokolove for his take on the new report on brain injuries among high school players, and he said he was surprised the numbers had gone up given the increased focus on improving the safety of the game. He wondered if greater awareness of the risk of concussion, along with better methods to recognize the subtleties of the symptoms, might be a factor.

“It’s a difficulty injury to diagnose – there’s no broken bone you can see on an X-ray,” Sokolove said. “In the past the phrase people used was you `got your bell rung.’ The coach said you were OK, and they pushed you back out on the field. Clearly, there’s less of that happening, and that’s a good thing.”

While football gets the most attention, the safety protocols for other high school athletics – particularly girls’ soccer – also need scrutiny, said Sokolove, author of three books, including “Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports.”

Keeping young players safe requires diligence among coaches and trainers to follow recommended protocols, Sokolove said. That would include cognitive testing and clearance by doctors before an athlete with a suspected concussion returns to play and, where possible, even preseason cognitive testing to establish an athlete's baseline, Sokolove said.

“Everyone has to pay attention to these things,” Sokolove said. “And every parent has to be aware of them. If the protocols aren’t being adhered to, the parents have to step up.”

Sokolove’s discussion of the ethical dilemma posed by watching football was focused on professional players for whom the level of contact and potential for harm is arguably higher. But given the relative risk of injury that comes with high school football, should there be a similar discussion of the ethics of supporting the game, particularly as a school-sponsored activity?

High school football is too deeply ingrained in the nation’s fabric to ever be entirely eliminated, Sokolove said. So then the question is how to make it safer for players, something he said will be hard to do when many school districts and community teams lack the certified trainers and experienced coaches. Had any of his own children wanted to play football, Sokolove said he would have tried to talk them out of it.

“It’s never going to be entirely safe -- that’s difficult to do when the culture of football is about toughness,” Sokolove said. “It’s a destructive sport. It’s a great sport, and I still watch it. But I can’t defend it.”

Have a comment, question or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

A New Prelude to Student Debt: Food Stamps

The Educated Reporter is taking a brief summer hiatus, and will return Wednesday, Aug. 8. For the next few days you'll have a chance to catch up on some past posts.

Like most clichés that arise by virtue of their accuracy, there are most certainly cash-strapped college students who owe a debt of gratitude to the ever-affordable ramen noodle. However, as tuition costs continue to soar --  and part-time work remains hard to find --  more and more college students apparently are turning to an unexpected source for help: food stamps.

Danielle Ford, a junior at Georgia State University, told WXIA TV in Atlanta that “with the (state financial aid) budget cuts, students are definitely going to have to think of different ways to get money and finances for things such as groceries … food stamps will definitely be a big help, absolutely. Without food stamps, they wouldn't be able to eat."

In Oregon, Portland State University even has information on its Web site for students about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP. Students are directed to a statewide nonprofit agency to sign up. As in other states, Oregon students must meet specific criteria to qualify, based on their family circumstances, how many hours they are working and how many classes they are taking. (My attention was particularly caught by one of the factoids on the site: Over half of all U.S. citizens will use SNAP at some point during their lifetime.)

In some states, budget shortfalls have meant severe cuts to social services, including nutrition programs. Last spring, Michigan decided to revise its food stamps requirements, and to enforce stricter federal guidelines. The intent was to both save money and to reduce fraud. As a result of those changes, an estimated 30,000 college students were no longer eligible for help. Michigan will save an estimated $75 million as a result, according to the Associated Press.

It makes sense that universities might be worried about what, and how often, their students are eating. There’s no shortage of studies at the elementary and secondary school level proving that student achievement and nutrition are closely linked. Why should college be any different?

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

Is State Of U.S. Public Schools A Threat To National Security?

The Educated Reporter is taking a brief summer hiatus, and will return Wednesday, Aug. 8. For the next few days you'll have a chance to catch up on some past posts. 

A Council on Foreign Relations task force, led by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, claims that the poor quality of America’s public education system represents a threat to national security. But the group's recommendations for fixing schools have no shortage of detractors, including some of the  experts who were asked to serve on the task force.

According to the task force, the nation’s education system is failing to turn out enough engineers or students competent in foreign languages. And as a whole, the nation’s youth doesn’t have a deep enough understanding of the wider world.

The solutions, as laid out in the final report released in March, are: more choice (in the form of vouchers and charter schools); an expanded version of the Common Core curriculum being adopted by most states that includes skill sets such as foreign languages, science and technology;  and a national security readiness audit to make sure students are being adequately prepared for the challenges ahead.

In a dissent included in an appendix to the report, Stanford education Prof. Linda Darling-Hammond wrote that the report’s “great strength is that it properly highlights the critical and too often ignored nexus between education and national security.” However, Darling-Hammond takes issue with the suggestion that vouchers and charter schools would solve the underlying problems facing public education.

The countries that routinely score at the top of the chart on international exams such as the PISA tests, including Finland and South Korea, “have invested in strong public education systems that serve virtually all students,” wrote Darling-Hammond, who was joined in her dissent by Harvard international relations Prof. Stephen M. Walt, education advocate and Global Kids founder Carole Artigiani, and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

At the same time that some countries are seeing measurable returns on their investment in public education, Darling-Hammond wrote, “nations that have aggressively pursued privatization, such as Chile, have a huge and growing divide between rich and poor that has led to dangerous levels of social unrest.”

Walt, taking the lead in another section of the dissent, argued that vouchers and charter schools have not proven to be "sustainable or systemic ways to improve our schools." (Research on charter school effectiveness has been at best mixed, with recent studies suggesting they perform no better, and in some cases, do even worse, than traditional public schools.)

Additionally, the task force’s recommendations "go to great lengths to blame a current generation of educators for their assumed institutional resistance to innovation when, in fact, the problem is less about an opposition to change than it is about too much churn and change," Walt wrote. "This adds to disrespect and the sharp demoralization of our current teaching force—something that is never seen in the countries that outcompete us.”

I asked Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, for his take on the task force's report, and he said it was “stunning” that the Council on Foreign Relations didn’t look abroad for answers.

“That is the last organization in this country I would have expected offer up what amounts to an isolationist view of education,” Tucker said. “They looked for solutions inside a country that hasn’t been able to find a way out of this box, instead of countries that are beating the pants off us on every measure of student success.”

Tucker, whose new book is “Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems,” said the U.S. is being outpaced when it comes to teacher quality. The countries with the most robust public school systems are more selective in their recruitment of teachers, train them better before they let them take charge of a classroom, and pay them respectable salaries that reinforce their societal status as valued professionals, Tucker said.

John Jackson, president and chief executive officer of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, which focuses on issues of equity and opportunity in preschool through 12th grade, suggested to me another place the task force might have looked for solutions – the U.S. Department of Defense. American students attending schools on military bases, which are freed from the rigorous testing and accountability requirements of No Child Left Behind,  routinely outperform their civilian peers on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as 'The Nation's Report Card." 

As the New York Times' Michael Winerip noted in a particularly pithy column in December, "It has become fashionable for American educators to fly off to Helsinki to investigate how schools there produce such high-achieving Finns. But for just $69.95 a night, they can stay at the Days Inn in Jacksonville, N.C., and investigate how the schools here on the Camp Lejeune Marine base produce such high-achieving Americans — both black and white."

The military base schools "have already realized that to have strong outcomes, you need equitable solutions,” Jackson said. “Regardless of a military person’s rank, they all send their children to the same school on base. You don’t have soldiers or officers living in impoverished situations without the appropriate support for their families to survive.” 

Indeed, the nation’s public schools have seen sharp increases in populations of high-need students, and the numbers remain high even as the economic recovery progresses.

Socioeconomic status is a better predictor of academic success in the United States than in all but four of the other countries in the database of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers the international PISA exam, Tucker said. What’s more, coming from a low-income household and/or a home with one parent seems to take a greater toll on an American student’s academic performance than it does on their peers in most other countries.

If the state of public education does indeed pose a risk to the security of the United States, “let’s approach it with a national plan that includes appropriate levels of federal support,” Jackson said. “Anything short of that is not a serious conversation or plan to address the national threat."

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA Public Editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

What's New From EWA

I wanted to take a moment to let you know that EWA's website -- Ed Media Commons -- is now open to the public. You still need to be an EWA member in order to take part in online discussions, but visitors are welcome. I encourage you drop by, take a look around, and consider joining EWA.

A good place to start at EMC is with videos from one of the standout sessions of our 65th National Seminar, held at the University of Philadelphia in May. We invited 11 speakers to each take 12 minutes to talk about "Tomorrow's Teacher: Paths to Prestige and Effectiveness." (All of the presenters were terrific but you definitely don't want to miss Miami educator and author Roxanna Elden's explanation of the "Myth of the Super Teacher.")

Also for education reporters, EWA has a valuable new resource to announce: the Story Starters website. You'll find background information on topics ranging from classroom technology to school safety, in addition to suggested sources, related organizations, and recent research.

 Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.