RISE is a day-long, bipartisan conference assessing the American education landscape in commemoration of the 35th anniversary of the seminal report: A Nation at Risk. RISE 2018 took place on April 12, 2018 in Washington, D.C..
This luncheon plenary conversation will explore federal priorities in education, including the ways in which the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was conceptualized, developed, and put into action. The discussion will also delve into the progress and process of reauthorizing the Higher Education Act. Finally, the conversation will illuminate areas where we have made progress in achieving excellence for our students and areas of opportunity for continued collaboration.
Introduction by Mr. John Heubusch, Executive Director, Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute
Moderated by Ms. Judy Woodruff, Anchor and Managing Editor, PBS NewsHour
Panelists include:
– Senator Lamar Alexander, US Senate, Tennessee, 5th US Secretary of Education
– Senator Patty Murray, US Senate, Washington
For more information on the ongoing works of President Reagan’s Foundation, please visit http://www.reaganfoundation.org
Karthik Nemmani of McKinney, Texas, has been declared winner of the 2018 Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Although Karthik, 14, didn’t win his regional spelling bee nor his county bee, he withstood the pressure of 18 rounds of back-to-back spelling in Thursday night’s finals at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Oxon Hill, Md., where he correctly spelled “koinonia” (Christian fellowship or communion, with God or, more commonly, with fellow Christians).
“I knew how to spell it the moment I heard it,” Karthik exclaimed shortly after winning the competition.
The soft-spoken Karthik, who entered the competition through a newly-instituted “wild card” program, snared the first-place $40,000 cash prize from Scripps, as well as other perks including a $2,500 prize from Merriam-Webster and a trip to New York City to appear on ABC’s “Live with Kelly and Ryan.”
Second-place honors went to Naysa Modi,12, of Dallas, who learned that just one letter made the difference in her being awarded the grand prize. Instead, she took home a $30,000 cash prize after misspelling “Bewusstseinslage” — a German-derived word meaning “a state of consciousness or a feeling devoid of sensory components” — for which she left out the second “s.”
Karthik, an 8th-grader who admitted not knowing about nine words in the finals, was complimentary of his final-round foe, calling Naysa “a really, really good speller.”
[/media-credit] Jah’Quane Graham, an 11-year-old student from the U.S Virgin Islands, seen here with parents Warren and Jamina Graham, fell short of the final round of the 2018 Scripps National Spelling Bee.
“She deserved the trophy as much as I did,” he said. “I got lucky.”
He added that having friends like Naysa in the competition helped.
“I guess [they] gave me a little more confidence,” Karthik said.
The field for this year’s bee, with 516 spellers ages 8 to 15 from the United States and several countries, was the largest in its 91-year history.
Washington Informer-sponsored spellers Noah Dooley, Robert Foster and Simon Kirschenbaum didn’t make it to the finals and neither were immediately available for comment.
However, as a first-time Scripps participant, 11-year-old Jah’Quane Graham from St. Croix, U.S Virgin Islands, also missed out competing in Thursday and Friday’s rounds. Yet, he smiled good-naturedly, saying he still enjoyed the participation.
“I was glad I got the chance to be in the national bee,” he said. “I practiced spelling a lot of words but didn’t get in the final rounds [Wednesday] which disqualified me from further participation. But I plan to keep entering until I can’t be in it anymore. Best of all, I got a free trip to Washington, D.C., and I can’t wait to see the White House.”
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ team is working on guidance to help districts and states puzzle through changes to a key spending rule—known as “supplement-not-supplant”—in the Every Student Succeeds Act, multiple education advocatessay.
ESSA made some key changes to “supplement not supplant” that says federal Title I funds targeted at low-income students must be in addition to, and not take the place of, state and local spending on K-12. And districts and states have questions about how those changes are supposed to work.
The Education Department did not respond to multiple requests to confirm that it would be issuing new guidance on ESSA spending…
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The question: This one comes from a school-based leader who preferred to remain anonymous. This leader wants to know “What are the federal guidelines for ‘testing transparency?’ Schools are mandated to get 95 percent participation, but how is that possible is we tell parents of their opt out rights?”
The answer: ESSA is actually really confusing when it comes to test participation. The law says that states and schools must test all of their students, just like under No Child Left Behind, the law ESSA replaced. Under NCLB, though, schools that didn’t meet the 95 percent participation requirement—both for the student population as a whole and subgroups of students, such as English-language learners—were considered automatic failures.
Now, under ESSA, states must figure low testing participation into school ratings, but just how to do that is totally up to them. And states can continue to have laws affirming parents’ right to opt their students out of tests (as Oregon does). ESSA also requires states to mark non-test-takers as not proficient.
State plans—44 of which have been approved by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her team—are all over the map when it comes to dealing with this requirement…
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A new study investigates inequity beyond college doors, showing that even Black and Hispanic students who earn tertiary degrees face disparities.
The report, The Neglected College Race Gap: Racial Disparities Among College Completers, which was authored by the Center for American Progress, went beyond the usual examination of education disparities in graduation rates and college access rates. And, in focusing on college graduates, the report found what it called “serious inequities” in areas such as the type of degrees and quality of education.
Among the major findings:
Compared with White students, Black and Hispanic graduates are far more likely to have attended for-profit colleges and less likely to have attended four-year public or nonprofit institutions.
Black and Hispanic graduates are more likely to attend institutions that have less money to spend on quality education.
Black and Hispanic students are less likely to hold degrees in critical fields such as engineering and education, mathematics and statistics, and the physical sciences.
Recommendations from the report include investigating means by which students of color may be discouraged from pursuing certain degrees, such as by higher tuition pricing and poor or biased student advisement.
The authors concluded by saying, “Finding a path to equity in the types of credentials students get is not only a moral imperative for this country but is also crucial to its future success.”
The United States has a math problem, and, like most middle school students sitting down with their homework, we are not finding any easy solutions. Young people in this country are struggling to attain the proficiency necessary to pursue the careers our economy desperately needs. Universities bemoan students’ inability to complete college-level math. Each year thousands of newly admitted college students are placed in non-credit-bearing remedial courses in math, a path that immediately puts them at higher risk of not completing a degree.
Maybe it’s the classics professor in me talking, but I approach this math problem from an unorthodox angle: Latin. In a 2011 article, “An Apology for Latin and Math,” high school Latin teacher Cheryl Lowe made a compelling comparison between the study of Latin and the study of math. Much like Latin, she observed, “math is hard because it builds so relentlessly year after year. Any skill not mastered one year will make work difficult the next.”
High school teachers have discovered that the unrelentingly cumulative nature of the study of Latin and the study of mathematics explains why students struggle to excel in either discipline.
A favorite lament of college and university faculty in quantitative fields is that students cannot perform college-level math. But what is college-level math?
In the world of classics, there is no such thing as college-level Latin. My daughter’s high school Latin teacher uses the same textbook for her class that I have used to teach Latin at Duke University, Whitman College in Washington state, and the University of Southern Maine. It turns out that there are only two differences between high school Latin and college Latin. The first is pace. I tell students that one year of college Latin is the approximate equivalent of three years of high school Latin…
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Representatives of President Donald Trump’s school safety commission, which is charged with making recommendations to combat school violence in the wake of February’s massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and other tragedies, spent the morning at Hebron Harman Elementary School here learning about positive behavioral supports and interventions, a widely-used system to help improve school climate and student behavior.
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who chairs the commission, and others heard plenty of discussion of restorative behavior practices in which students resolve conflicts through conversation, common expectations for behavior, and community building circles.
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Editor’s note: This story on school counselors is part of Map to the Middle Class, a Hechinger Report series exploring how schools can prepare young people for the good middle-class jobs of the future.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Mariano Almanza was overwhelmed. With an English paper due at the end of the week, an anatomy packet to complete, and an ever-growing pile of math assignments, the 18-year-old was at a breaking point.
“It was just an insane amount of work; I couldn’t handle it and the stress level was beyond anything I’ve ever experienced,” Almanza said. “I left class and came straight to Miss Mack and just burst out crying,” he added.
Miss Mack, as she is known to students at Coronado High School, is Colleen McElvogue, one of the school’s six counselors and the chairperson of its counseling department.
“Miss Mack looked at me and said: ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to get through this.’ I stayed in her office for a whole class hour and we just talked through everything,” Almanza recalled. “Since my parents didn’t get much education, it’s hard to talk to them about my schoolwork and applying to college, or how to plan my time and get everything done. But Miss Mack, I can come to her for just about anything…”
With more than 2 billion monthly active users worldwide, Facebook has an effective monopoly on digital news and information distribution. Any troubling behavior on the site has the power to affect many lives. The recent case of Cambridge Analytica’s mining of Facebook data for political means is an invasion of personal privacy on a whole new level. But Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s seemingly helpful support of technology-driven personalized education represents a different kind of monopolizing threat that we shouldn’t overlook.
Personalized learning, or tailoring curricula and instruction to students’ academic needs and personal interests, seems to mean a lot to Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan—at least according to their investment moves. More than two years ago, they announced plans to invest hundreds of millions annually in whole-child personalized learning through their limited-liability company, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Just this month, they gave $14 million to support schools in Chicago, both public and private. And they recently teamed up with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund and develop a host of “state of the art” education initiatives, including personalizing math instruction.
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Do districts need state permission to take advantage of new ESSA flexibility to substitute a nationally recognized, college-entrance exam (like the SAT or ACT) instead of the state test for high-school accountability purposes?
The short answer: Yup.
The longer answer: ESSA does indeed allow districts to use a college-entrance test instead of the state test for high school accountability. But the state has to be OK with it. Districts can’t just do this on their own, without the state’s approval.
This guidance, from the U.S. Department of Education, makes that crystal clear: “A state has discretion as to whether it will offer its [local education agencies] this flexibility.”
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ team is working on guidance to help districts and states puzzle through changes to a key spending rule—known as “supplement-not-supplant”—in the Every Student Succeeds Act, multiple education advocates say.
