Friday News Roundup

It’s Friday, time for the News Roundup.

University of Virginia Leadership Program Helps Transform Struggling Schools (The 74)

We’ve talked about this before. Small victories in our K-12 public schools don’t amount to systemic change – they just make good headlines.

The 74 posted an article this week highlighting the work of the University of Virginia’s Partnership for Leaders in Education:

“Latrice Smalls’ first year as principal of South Carolina’s Edith L. Frierson Elementary in 2023 came with a hefty task: improve the school’s unsatisfactory state report card rating.”

“With roughly 160 students – nearly two-thirds of them low-income – the rural Charleston County school recorded math and reading test scores well below district and state averages. One-third of students were chronically absent, and school climate was ranked low by teachers.”

“’The school was a failing school, and it had been a failing school for a few years,’ Smalls said.”

“Smalls’ first year coincided with the school’s acceptance into the University of Virginia Partnership for Leaders in Education, a program that helps improve low-performing schools through administrator training and professional development.”

Frierson Elementary is one of three schools that transformed from struggling to succeeding because of the turnaround program. After one year, the school went from an unsatisfactory to excellent rating, the highest performance tier in the state’s report card system.”

“Since 2004, the partnership has worked with more than 900 schools from 33 states. Roughly half achieve double-digit gains in reading, math or both, within three years of starting the program.”

In the 2022-23 school year, there were 99,409 public elementary and secondary schools operating in the United States. Most education policy-makers define five to 10 percent of these schools as low-performing, or between 4,500 and 9,000

So, unless you are a proponent of the starfish theory, the parable emphasizing the importance of making a difference, even in seemingly small ways, the Virginia program is just another example of a small-scale win that hasn’t either grown or replicated enough to help the rest of the low-performing schools needing improvement.

Scholar Douglas Harris Debuts New ‘Wikipedia’ of K-12 Research (The 74)

At the same time the Trump administration is cutting funding to the Institute of Education Sciences and its parent the U.S. Department of Education, Tulane University’s Douglas Harris and his team unveiled this week a Live Handbook of education policy research.

The 74 reports:

“Its 50 chapters address a bevy of questions ranging from preschool to higher education, including the makeup of local school boards, performance of charters and school vouchers, teacher preparation programs, the effects of education spending, and more. The Association [for Education Finance and Policy] hopes the extensive and growing site, an update of previous printed versions, can provide educators and lawmakers alike with something akin to a Wikipedia for research.”

When asked about the purpose of the project, Harris answered:

“The idea is to make research more useful and make researchers more useful. One of our purposes is to just get research summarized and discussed in a way that’s actually accessible to a broad audience, and another is to connect researchers to policymakers and journalists. If you’re looking for an expert on an issue, you can find their names in these articles, click on them to get their information, and just email that person.”

Remote Learning Was Supposed to Make Snow Days Obsolete. But Did It Really? (The 74)

The 74 reported last week that:

“Since January 1, roughly a dozen major winter storms have shuttered school doors around the United States and kept students home.”

“Before COVID-19, snow days like these were routine, not even worth mentioning. But with the switch to virtual schooling came predictions that days off from school because of weather would soon be a thing of the past. There would be no reason to cancel classes if they could just go remote. An EdWeek survey from November 2020 even reported that around 70% of principals and school district officials had converted or were considering converting snow days to remote learning days.”

“But a 74 survey of policies around the country finds that while some districts have made the shift – or tried to – others have gone back to that time-honored tradition.”

None of us should be surprised by this. Like most innovation, our traditional K-12 system just doesn’t embrace change – so returning to making up snow days instead of going remote, although disappointing, should be expected.

Trump Wants to Send Education ‘Back to the States.’ Are States Even Ready? (EducationWeek)

This week, Dale Chu, a past assistant state superintendent in Indiana and chief of staff in Florida’s Department of Education, wrote the following:

“…the reality is that allowing each state to pursue its own education reforms without any meaningful federal guardrails is a risky bet, though it’s important to recognize that the history of American education policy has long been marked by pendulum swings between state authority and federal intervention. The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, for all it good intentions, proved that relinquishing federal control didn’t guarantee improved outcomes. In fact, when the federal government loosened its grip, student achievement took a nose dive. Pandemic-related school closures made matters worse: The bottom has fallen out on National Assessment of Educational Progress scores, and too many states are looking to lowering cutoff scores as a remedy to declining results on state tests.”

I hope the Trump administration knows what they are doing. Special needs kids, English language learners, and kids’ civil rights hang in the balance.

See you Monday. Til then. SVB