6 June 2016 Reader: Mythbuster Edition – the becoming radical

6 June 2016 Reader: Mythbuster Edition – the becoming radical:

6 June 2016 Reader: Mythbuster Edition

In the spirit that feels appropriate in the wake of the death of Muhammad Ali—and the concurrent failure of mainstream reflections ignoring or whitewashing the real history of his life—I offer below a collection of education-related links that can serve as powerful mythbusters for the ongoing false claims common in the mainstream media and among political leaders as well as edureformers.

Charter Schools

Failing The Test Series

Regardless of motives, the charter initiatives in Oakland and Los Angeles together signal a significant watershed in the growth of a statewide movement that was birthed by California’s Charter Schools Act of 1992 to create classroom laboratories that might develop the dynamic new curricula and teaching methods needed to reinvigorate schools that were failing the state’s most underserved and disadvantaged children.

How that modest experiment in fixing neighborhood public schools could morph in less than 25 years into the replacement of public schools with an unproven parallel system of privately run, taxpayer-funded academies is only half the story of California’s education wars that will be examined in this series, much of which is based on conversations with both sides of the charter school debate. Over the next few days Capital & Main will also look at:

• The influence wielded by libertarian philanthropists who bankroll the 50-50 takeovers.
• How charter schools spend less time and money on students with learning disabilities.
• The lack of charter school transparency and accountability.
• How charter expansion is pushing Oakland’s public school district toward a fateful tipping point.
• The success of less radical yet more effective reforms that get scant media coverage.
• Nine solution takeaways for struggling schools.

(from Failing the Test: A New Series Examines Charter Schools, Bill Raden)

Charters and Access: Here is Evidence, Julian Vasquez Helig

No, Eva, You Can’t Do Whatever You Want, Jersey Jazzman

Teacher Effectiveness/Experience

Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness?: A Review of the Research, Tara Kini and Anne Podolsky

Based on our review of 30 studies published within the last 15 years that analyze the effect of teaching experience on student outcomes in the United States and met our methodological criteria, we find that:

1. Teaching experience is positively associated with student achievement gains throughout a teacher’s career. Gains in teacher effectiveness associated with 6 June 2016 Reader: Mythbuster Edition – the becoming radical:

CURMUDGUCATION: System

CURMUDGUCATION: System:

System

One of the dreams of ed reform has been to come up with a system that is teacher-proof, a program or script or curriculum that works exactly the same way no matter what carbon-based life form you have propped up in front of the classroom.

Systems are particularly appealing as a method of controlling "bad" actors, with "bad" defined as "does not do what I want them to do." This is a false hope, a snare and a delusion. Systems rarely fix bad actors, and frequently hamstring your best people.

You have a troupe of dancers, some of leap and soar and move with grace and beauty, and a few of whom dart around the stage like spastic rhinos. So to get the rhinos slowed down and under control, you put everyone in the company in forty-pound cement shoes. The rhinos are now chastened and restrained, but your best dancers can no longer leap and soar and move with grace and beauty.

You worry that the cooks in your restaurant have too much variety, some producing genius blends of flavor and texture and culinary awesomeness, while others can barely make meatloaf. So you create a menu system with easy instructions that anybody can follow that will always result in a predictably consistent product. Congratulations. You are now McDonalds, and nobody is ever going to go to your restaurant because they are in the mood for excellence.

You want your students to write with structure and organization, so you teach the five paragraph format. In fact, you strictly enforce the five paragraph system so that nobody wanders off the farm CURMUDGUCATION: System:

CURMUDGUCATION: Remedial Baloney http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2016/06/remedial-baloney.html

Big Education Ape: CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: June Is Busting Out http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2016/06/curmudgucation-icymi-june-is-busting-out.html

 

Who Uses Educational Research? And How? - Living in Dialogue

Who Uses Educational Research? And How? - Living in Dialogue:

Who Uses Educational Research? And How?

By John Thompson.

My first response to “The Push and Pull of Research: Lessons from a Multi-site Study of Research Use in Education Policy,” by Christopher Lubienski, Elizabeth Debray, Janelle Scott, was clichéd. Being an optimist, I’ve kept asking why education research is misused so badly, and when smart and sincere scholars will revise their methodologies to something more reality-based than the regression studies used to justify corporate school reform. So, my response to the reality-slap in the face that is “The Push and Pull of Research” was “thanks, I needed that.”

Lubienski, Debray, and Scott “conducted scores of interviews with individuals from organizations that play a brokering role between research producers and users (policymakers), including advocacy organizations, think tanks, and media outlets.” They were particularly interested in how advocacy groups and think tanks, known as intermediary organizations, “conveyed research evidence that would illuminate policy discussions.” It is bad enough that these powerful people seem to merely assume that policy must be based on incentives and disincentives, as opposed to more comprehensive and coordinated, holistic policies. I was still dismayed to read, however, that they found philanthropies to be “largely inert ‘consumers’ of research,” while intermediary organizations (IOs) were very active in “brokering or selling particular versions of research evidence to them.”

Lubienski, Debray, and Scott asked whether these IOs gained influence because of “pull factors,” or the desire of big philanthropists to make evidence-based decisions in regard to social policy and solutions. Or, did the IOs get access through “push factors,” such as their abilities in self-promotion and the cultivating institutional “brand?”

Sadly, Lubienski, Debray, and Scott discovered that “research played virtually no part in decision making for policymakers, despite their frequent rhetorical embrace of the value of research.” Instead, they documented “a remarkable amount of ‘pushing’ of research to policymakers by IOs.” They then asked “an interesting question as to why so much in the way of time and resources would be devoted to getting evidence to Who Uses Educational Research? And How? - Living in Dialogue:

Jersey Jazzman: No, Eva, You Can't Do Whatever You Want

Jersey Jazzman: No, Eva, You Can't Do Whatever You Want:

No, Eva, You Can't Do Whatever You Want

When Eva Moskowitz doesn't get exactly what she wants she stomps her feet, takes her ball and goes home:

Success Academy Charter Schools won’t offer pre-kindergarten classes next year after losing a high-profile fight with city and state officials.

The charter network has refused to sign the city’s pre-K contract, arguing that it includes inappropriate regulations about how charter schools manage their time and design their curriculum. But neither Mayor Bill de Blasio nor State Commissioner MaryEllen Elia has allowed Success to bend the rules, and both have insisted that Success sign the contract or lose funding. 

In recent months, Success officials have continued their fight in court. But with no resolution in sight, the city’s largest charter-school network will close its three existing pre-K programs and will not open two more planned for next school year, CEO Eva Moskowitz announced Wednesday.

“It is unbelievably sad to tell parents and teachers that the courts won’t rescue our pre-K program from the mayor’s war on Success in time to open next year,” Moskowitz said.

There are two issues here: first, does the city have the right to demand that Success sign a contract before it gets funding for its Pre-K program? Reading Elia's decision in the matter - See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2016/06/no-eva-you-cant-do-whatever-you-want.html

Atlanta Charter Fraudster Chris Clemons was an MIT Featured Attraction in 2007 | deutsch29

Atlanta Charter Fraudster Chris Clemons was an MIT Featured Attraction in 2007 | deutsch29:

Atlanta Charter Fraudster Chris Clemons was an MIT Featured Attraction in 2007

In the summer of 2015, the board of the Latin Academy Charter School (Atlanta)reported that over $600,000 was missing from school accounts.

In April 2016, the school’s founder and leader, Chris Clemons, was arrested in his hometown of Denver and sent back to Atlanta to face charges not only related to the missing $600,000+ from Latin Academy Charter, but also for $350,000+ missing from two other Fulton County (Ga.) schools formerly overseen by Clemons.

Clemons apparently ripped off his own schools to the tune of roughly one million dollars.

However, in September 2007, when Clemons was enrolled at MIT for his MBA and featured in this News@MITSloan article, entitled, “Back to School for Schools,” no one would have guessed that less than a decade later, the same guy would be facing charges for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money entrusted to him for the education of hundreds of Georgia students.

Below are excerpts that read ironic in 2016 from the 2007 MIT feature on Clemons:

Chris Clemons was stunned when he learned that authorities often plan prison space based on how well kids read in the fourth grade. The 28-year-old earned a political science degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and had aspirations of law school, until he discovered that his real calling in life was advocating for impoverished children in urban areas. “I knew I was going to go into education. I wanted to have an impact,” he says.

To boost his teaching experience and see how the other half lived, he took as a job as a middle school teacher at the Germantown Friends School, a posh 

Atlanta Charter Fraudster Chris Clemons was an MIT Featured Attraction in 2007 | deutsch29:

What Teachers Think About All the Standardized Testing - The Atlantic

What Teachers Think About All the Standardized Testing - The Atlantic:

How Much Testing Is Too Much?
Eight in 10 teachers think their students spend too much time taking government-mandated tests.

It’s not hard to find a teacher willing to bend your ear about the volume of standardized testing in schools today, and the pressure for “test prep.” But how widespread are such concerns among educators? And what’s the on-the-ground reality they experience?

New survey data suggest these impressions about over-testing and test prep are more than just anecdotal: They are the norm for the majority of public-school teachers.

Eighty-one percent believe their students spend too much time taking tests mandated by their state or district, according to the study by the Center on Education Policy, based at George Washington University.

How much time is too much? On average, students spend 10 days taking district-mandated tests during the school year and nine days taking state-mandated tests, the teachers estimate. But underneath these averages are wide variations, from less than a week (the most popular response in both cases) to more than a month, the survey finds.

When it comes to test prep, 62 percent of teachers say they spend too much time readying students for state-mandated exams. And 51 percent feel that way about district-mandated tests, according to the nationally representative survey conducted in late 2015.

On average, teachers estimate spending 14 days preparing students for state-mandated exams, and 12 days for district-mandated exams.

Of course, not all test prep is created equal. It can mean many things, some good, some not so good. The CEP report defines it as “drilling students on specific content and skills covered on the tests, using practice tests, and/or teaching test-taking skills like time-management and pacing.”

Test prep is especially prevalent in high-poverty and medium-poverty schools, according to the survey. Thirty-six percent of teachers spend at least a month on test prep for state-mandated exams, for example. By contrast, the figure is 23 percent in low-poverty schools.

* * *

These are just a few of the findings from the Center on Education Policy report, conducted with financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It’s based on a survey of more than 3,000 teachers. The data, issued last month, offer fresh insights into the views of classroom educators on testing, standards, Common Core implementation and more.

Others have reported on important findings regarding declining teacher morale, including USA Today and Education Week. The short version is that many teachers are losing a commitment to their field amid multiple frustrations, including pressures around testing.

“While the teaching profession in the U.S. may not be in full blown crisis, … forces outside of teachers’ control may be taxing their good will and dedication,” the report says. “The most notable stressors revealed by the survey are the time What Teachers Think About All the Standardized Testing - The Atlantic:

The Color of School Reform: New Orleans needs more black teachers and knows it.

New Orleans needs more black teachers and knows it. Why is progress so slow?:

The Color of School Reform
After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans fired its mostly black teacher corps. Now its charter schools are trying to convince black educators that there’s a place for them.

 NEW ORLEANS—Throughout her first year at KIPP Central City Academy, Raven Foster heard the kind of compliment every educator loves to receive from students: that she was their favorite teacher. The reason, however, wasn’t because her kids loved her science class, or because they liked her sarcastic sense of humor, or because they appreciated her no-nonsense attitude. One after another, they told her they liked her because she’s black.

Foster knew she’d be one of just a few black teachers when she started working at this New Orleans charter school in 2012. While the overwhelming majority of the student body is black, nearly two-thirds of the teachers were white when she took the job. But her first year of teaching was hectic, filled with home visits, grueling lesson planning, and a schoolwide move to a brand new building. The racial makeup of the staff wasn’t a concern she had time for—until she realized that her kids were noticing it.

“I heard a student say, ‘Ms. Foster, I can’t get away with stuff with you because you’re black, but I can with this teacher because she’s white,’ ” she says.

Even innocuous interactions, like taking students to lunch or giving them rides home, came to be characterized by students racially. If a white teacher did something nice for a student, the student might muse, “Why isn’t the person that looks like me nice to me?” Foster says. “To me, that was them telling me, ‘I wish I had more.’ ”

Efforts in New Orleans suggest that charter leaders are still struggling to hire more black and local teachers.

What the students wanted more of was teachers who looked like them and came from a similar background, teachers who understood how they talked, behaved, and lived. And increasingly, Foster agreed: More teachers like her—black and from New Orleans—was exactly what schools like KIPP Central City Academy needed.

That realization has spread among charter school and school reform leaders nationwide in recent years as they have increasingly recognized that neglecting the racial composition of their ranks could stunt their attempt to reach and serve students of color. Charter school teachers, like the teaching profession nationally, are predominately white. And in post-Katrina New Orleans, they are more likely to be white than traditional schoolteachers are.

This new focus on recruiting minority teachers hasn’t met immediate success. Teach for America has signed up significantly more teachers of color, and charter networks around the country have kicked off similar recruiting campaigns. But the New Orleans experience shows how challenging the work can be: Charter leaders there still struggle to hire more black and local teachers—and to convince veteran teachers that they, too, are needed in the school-reform movement.

Before Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans school system boasted a significantly higher share of black teachers than most urban districts. In 2003, just 15 percent of teachers in large cities across the country were black. In New Orleans, where nearly all students are black, that figure was 72 percent.

In the aftermath of Katrina, the school board fired the district’s thousands of teachers en masse as it reconstituted the system as one largely composed of charter schools. Many educators weren’t rehired; some left teaching, or the city, for goodNew Orleans needs more black teachers and knows it. Why is progress so slow?:

A MUST READ: Living in a poor neighborhood changes everything about your life - Vox

Living in a poor neighborhood changes everything about your life - Vox:

Living in a poor neighborhood changes everything about your life

In 1940, a white developer wanted to build a neighborhood in Detroit.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. What racist policies caused
2. Nothing has changed
3. Is it that bad?
4. Brain, health, and happiness
5. Experiment: Let them move
6. Solutions

So he asked the US Federal Housing Administration to back a loan. The FHA, which was created just six years earlier to help middle-class families buy homes, said no because the development was too close to an "inharmonious" racial group.

Meaning black people.

Living in a poor neighborhood changes everything about your life - Vox:

Living in a poor neighborhood changes everything about your life - Vox:

Lots of black students, few special ed students at Washington's first charter schools | KUOW News and Information

Lots of black students, few special ed students at Washington's first charter schools | KUOW News and Information:

Lots of black students, few special ed students at Washington's first charter schools

The state’s eight charter schools are not technically charters right now. The state Supreme Court invalidated the original charter law last year.

Since then the schools have either operated independently or as part of a district near Spokane – even if they’re located across the state.

Thanks to a new law, the schools will be charters again this fall and can still call themselves charters in the meantime.

These publicly-funded, privately-run schools were promised to Washington voters as a way to serve at-risk students who struggle in traditional public schools.

As they wrap up their first year, KUOW Education Reporter Ann Dornfeld is taking a look at who enrolled in charters and how that compares to those promises.

TRANSCRIPT

Walking through the halls of Excel Public Charter School, you’ll see that most of the students are children of color.

Founder Adel Sefrioui says that’s no accident. When he scouted sites for the school, he looked for a location in the south end of Kent – a diverse part of town and home to many low-income families.

Adel Sefrioui: “We really wanted to serve a population of students that was representative of the Kent community. We set out from the very get-go to serve students who were historically underserved.”

Excel has a lot more black students than the surrounding school district. That’s true for most of the state’s charter schools. According to enrollment data the schools gave KUOW, some average two or three times as many black students compared to the districts in which they’re based.

That’s significant because black students tend to lag behind white and Asian students academically.

Sefrioui attributes much of the black enrollment at his school to the fact that the charter is based at a largely African-American church.

Adel Sefrioui: “Although we are not affiliated with the church as a public school, I think the members of the congregation saw a lot of value in signing their kid up in a public school that happens to be in their building.”

Poor students also tend to struggle in school, so the state’s charters promised to target kids from low-income families. For the most part, they also met that goal.

Bob Bifulco: “That general pattern seems consistent with what’s seen in a lot of other places – often low-income and students of color compared to the districts they’re serving in.”

Bob Bifulco is a professor of public administration at Syracuse University. He’s studied the demographics of charter schools in other states. Bifulco says there are a lot of ways that charters end up with a particular student population.

The schools often appeal to families who don’t feel the nearby public schools serve them well. Charters might also do as Excel did: Locate in a neighborhood that’s home to their target demographic and market to those families.

But there are also areas in which Washington’s first charter schools appear to be falling short. 

Two major groups of students who often struggle in traditional public schools are kids who need special education services and English Language-Learners students. State law lists kids who need ELL and special ed services as particular focus areas for charters. Most of the state’s charter schools enrolled fewer special education and ELL students than the district average.

Bifulco says that’s a trend he’s seen nationwide.

Bob Bifulco: “Charter schools are often set up for a specific mission and serving Lots of black students, few special ed students at Washington's first charter schools | KUOW News and Information:

A Lost Generation of North Carolina Children Due to Greed and Privatization of Public Schools

Public schools feel threat from push for vouchers and for-profit charter schools | News & Observer:
A Lost Generation of North Carolina Children Due to Greed and  Privatization of Public Schools

BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD News & Observer

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Opportunity Scholarships, the Republican program pushed through the General Assembly by conservatives, provide up to $4,200 in annual scholarships for lower-income families who want to attend private schools.

That might pay a healthy part of the way to a private church school or a smaller neighborhood school, where those schools are free of many regulations designed to ensure quality in public schools, but $4,200 is just a fraction of what it costs to send a kid to a high-quality private school.

Nearly $25 million will be designated for the scholarships in 2016-17. And there will be more to come. Although the program was touted as something to help lower-income families have “school choice,” Republicans fully intend to expand it to include all families, a maneuver that would change the face of public education in North Carolina forever.

But Republicans aren’t stopping their changes there. Now comes a proposal in the General Assembly for “Achievement School Districts,” wherein poorly performing public schools might be taken over by for-profit charters in an attempt to turn them around. The problem is, there’s no guarantee a charter company could do that, and establishing such districts would put a stigma on these schools and the children in them that wouldn’t go away.

Critics rightly fear that setting up such a district or districts would create another school system in North Carolina, a cockeyed hybrid, public and private, and might spread before the performance under a new setup could be properly evaluated. What happens to those children serving as human guinea pigs in these hybrid schools if the great “solution” doesn’t work? Their educations would be, for several years, simply lost on the wind.

The state would do much better to not give some of its schools over to risky experimentation but instead to invest in troubleshooting teachers and administrators to go to a troubled school or schools and implement long-term solutions, along with gaining the money to do so. Copping out with a decidedly risky experiment is not the way.Public schools feel threat from push for vouchers and for-profit charter schools | News & Observer:

Q&A With Education Secretary John B. King Jr.: ESSA and More ESSA - Politics K-12 - Education Week

Q&A With Education Secretary John B. King Jr.: ESSA and More ESSA - Politics K-12 - Education Week:

Q&A With Education Secretary John B. King Jr.: ESSA and More ESSA

U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. sat down with Politics K-12's Alyson Klein in his office late Friday afternoon to talk about the many twists and turns in implementation of the new Every Student Succeeds Act, as well as a few broader issues. King's reputation as a policy nerd is earned. He dives pretty deep into the weeds here. Some broader questions come toward the end of the interview—we've marked the turning point if you want to skim. 

Here's an abridged transcript of our chat. For clarity's sake, we've paraphrased the discussion that followed some questions; in those cases we've set off portions of King's responses in direct quotes. 

You've made it clear since Day One that equity is going to be your number one priority as secretary. Can you talk to me a little bit about how the Every Student Succeeds Act and its regulations further that goal? 

The Every Student Succeeds Act is reauthorization of the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and has to be viewed in the context of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That civil rights legacy was very important to the president an important part of why the president felt it was a good law. One, by committing states to high standards for all students to make sure that all students graduate ready for college and careers, and two, ensuring trong state systems of accountability with meaningful flexibility, but clear civil rights guardrails. Three, maintaining the commitment that Title I resources [for disadvantaged students] will go to the highest-needs students and help the highest-needs students to be successful. And four, the commitment to preschool and the commitment to innovation, which have both been priorities for the administration from the start.

In-the-Policy-Weeds

You are calling for states to come up with one summative rating for their schools. But some states like California and Kentucky are already considering crafting systems that look at a broader range of indicators. Some are concerned that the one summative rating is too limiting. Why did you require it, and is there any flexibility there?

There is flexibility for how states implement that summative rating, and so states could use the A through F approach that some states have used. States could use categories of schools similar to the approach that is in place today in many states. So there's room for states to take different approaches to get to that summative rating. ... But we think there's real value in parents, educators, policymakers having a clear sense of which schools are struggling and need the most support and which schools are excelling, and there's evidence from many areas around the country that that clarity is helpful for directing resources and ensuring improvement in schools that need help.

So you think having just a few ratings for each school, say one on growth, one on proficiency, one on another indicator, wouldn't provide the kind of clarity that a single summative score would provide?

It's more a summative rating that identifies those schools that most need help and those schools that are excelling. The benefit of a summative rating is clarity, which those schools are [underperforming] so that you can provide the supports that are needed.  [A senior department aide chimed in here to note that any other indicators or data that states use in developing a school's rating also must be made public, so parents and communities will get both the overall score and what went into it. King also added here that the summative rating can be a category, it doesn't necessarily have to be a number or a letter.]

Why three categories on each of the indicators?

The goal is really differentiation, that's what the law requires, that you differentiate performance between schools. We want to understand, again, which schools are struggling and which are excelling so we can direct resources and support to those that are struggling and also learn from those schools that excelling. But states have flexibility; as long as they meet that minimum threshold, they could have many more levels if they so choose.

There's been some questions about some of the restrictions that you've put on the indicators of school quality or students' opportunity to learn. The indicator that states pick has to be somehow linked to student achievement. I've heard you talk recently about access to arts education and citizenship education. Do you think there's a clear link between those efforts and improving student achievement?

In a word, yes, King does: "I think the goal really of this requirement is that states are thoughtful as they engage with their stakeholders about how the indicators will help students be successful in the long run."

For example, he said, research shows that looking at chronic absenteeism is likely to help pinpoint schools that are struggling in a way that looking at average daily attendance—which isn't as differentiated—would not.

As for arts and citizenship education, "We know students who have a strong foundation in social studies and science do better as readers," he added pointing specifically to Dan Willingham's research at the University of Virginia. Access to the arts, he added, can also help students' academic progress. He pointed to "Turnaround Arts" schools.

There's been some early criticism of your requirements around consistently underperforming subgroups of students—some, including the Education Trust, worry that the requirements you put around this aren't strong enough and could allow states to set the bar too low. What's your response to that early criticism?

King noted that we are still in the public comment phase of the regulatory process—he encouraged feedback on this issue. And he added, "The law importantly says you have to focus on the performance of every subgroup. The regulations importantly propose flexibility for every state in setting goals and interim targets. We set a limit on the time period that can be used for defining consistently underperforming [subgroups] which we think will help to ensure that states and districts act meaningfully when they have subgroups that are underperforming."

What was your take on the Congressional Research Service report that found no statutory basis for the administration's interpretation of the supplement-not-supplant (SNS) provisions in the law? What your next steps on SNS?

King noted that this issue was discussed at length when a committee of educators and advocates tried to negotiate rules for ESSA, and that some adjustments were made during that process. King said the department is taking in all that feedback as it hashes out its next proposal on the rule. 

But it doesn't sound like that next proposal is likely to go in an entirely new direction from the department's controversial draft regulations, which Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., an author of ESSA, and others see as serious overreach.

"We remain committed to the principle that the dollars have to be supplemental and that the inequities that we see between schools within districts are inconsistent, not only with the words 'supplement-not-supplant,' but the history of that provision ... We still see today places where districts are spending 25 percent, 30 percent more on the education of affluent students than low-income students. You can't reconcile that with the words supplement-not-supplant."

King also noted that Democratic senators including Sens. Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and others have backed the department up on its approach. 

Are you concerned, though, that when you leave office that states will challenge your regulations in court? Does that worry you, keep you up at night?

What keeps me up at night is the inequity between schools. What keeps me up at night is that you can go ten blocks [within a district] and see many more resources in a school that serves affluent kids then a school that serves low-income kids.  ... We know what those resource inequities translate into for students. They translate into some students having access to college counselors, other students not, some students having access to Advanced Placement, other students not, some students having access to effective teachers ... other students not. It's the resource inequities that worry me.

But are you worried that if you push too far on regulations, your work will be undone by lawsuits?

I'm confident that the regulation that we ultimately put forward will be consistent with the law.

Out of the Weeds For a Bit

ESSA puts some restrictions on the education secretary. What do you see as the most important lever you have remaining? Regulations? Civil rights enforcement? The bully pulpit?

"I think it's a combination of all of those," King told Politics K-12. "Implementation of ESSA has the potential to be a tremendous lever  ... to get there we will need strong regulations. We will need to provide technical assistance and guidance for states" particularly on meeting the needs of student subgroups that are underattended to, "such as students in foster care, homeless students, students in special education." 

On the bully pulpit, he noted that there's a national conversation going on about diversity in schools. He mentioned that the administration has proposed a $120 million program to promote integration, Stronger Together. (King didn't say this, but Congress is really unlikely to kick in any funding for that initiative this year.)  

King added, "it's important that we are calling attention to the benefits of diversity in schools and looking at how we support states and districts in voluntary efforts to improve socioeconomic Q&A With Education Secretary John B. King Jr.: ESSA and More ESSA - Politics K-12 - Education Week: