News Briefs | FYI
March 9, 2020
Mao Vang appointed director of assessment and administration
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond has appointed Mao Vang as the new Director for the Assessment Development and Administration Division at the California Department of Education. The division manages the development and administration for all statewide assessments. “Mao brings a wealth of experience, knowledge, and passion to the CDE’s leadership team,” said Thurmond, in a news release. “After more than 20 years of serving in various roles in education, she knows the important role of curriculum, instruction, assessment, and data in providing high-quality educational experiences to all our students.” Vang spent the last two-and-a-half years as an Education Administrator at the CDE. Before that she served as Director of Assessment, Research and Evaluation in both San Ramon Valley Unified School District and Sacramento City Unified School District. She also spent time working for Educational Testing Services, where she directed and managed the development of the California High School Exit Exam program as the contractor working with the CDE. Vang earned her doctorate in educational leadership from UC Davis and Sonoma State University. She also received a Master of Education from Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota in the area of brain development research and family literacy, as well as a B.A. in social studies from the University of Saint Thomas. She replaces Michelle Center, who now works at California’s Department of Consumer Affairs.
Crowdfunding site reveals needs, inequities in schools
A new analysis of teacher requests on the crowdfunding website DonorsChoose illustrates growing inequities in America’s schools.  Education philanthropy group Grantmakers for Education analyzed the 1.8 million teacher requests on the popular crowdfunding site from 2009 to 2019 to look for patterns. The analysis found that while the majority of donations go to high-poverty schools, requests from low-poverty schools are more likely to get funded, a trend that has emerged in the last two years. Moreover, the funding requests from high-poverty schools illustrate a need to fulfill basic human needs like warmth and hunger, whereas low-poverty schools are more likely to request funding for academic enrichment. “This massive database provides an unprecedented window into teachers’ perceptions of the needs of schools, and how those have changed over the last decade,” said Celine Coggins, executive director of Grantmakers for Education. “It tells a story of deep resource equity gaps. Teachers in high-poverty schools are playing a growing role in ensuring students basic needs are met, while they also seek additional resources for their academic needs.”  The data make clear that teachers, especially those in high-poverty schools, are primarily seeking academic materials their schools do not provide. This pattern is true regardless of a state’s per-pupil spending, student performance or economic region. The fastest-growing categories of requests are nonacademic, underscoring the expanded role of schools in preparing students for life and meeting needs like health and hunger that enable students to learn. Teacher requests in the category of “Warmth, Care & Hunger,” just added by DonorsChoose in 2016, has grown 187 percent in less than three years.  The full report, “A View from the Classroom: What Teachers Can Tell Philanthropy About the Needs of Schools,” can be viewed online at
bit.ly/ViewFromTheClassroom
.
PACE releases research on students with disabilities
To better guide special education policy and practice, PACE has released 13 research publications on serving students with disabilities in California schools.  “More than 725,000 of California’s K-12 students qualified for special education services in 2018-19, but they entered a system that is often ill-equipped to serve them,” according to a summary of findings, which were released in February. In August 2019, PACE put together a policy research panel that assembled leading researchers, policymakers and practitioners to co-develop a research agenda of questions. PACE then commissioned 13 projects from researchers across the state to build and consolidate knowledge on how best to serve students with disabilities and make this knowledge more useful for system improvement.  “While discussions of special education in California often focus on issues of special education finance, the emphasis of the PACE Policy Research Panel on Special Education was to clarify the type of system we seek to build to serve all students –– including students with disabilities,” according to a summary  The policy research panel identified several recommendations, including the need to establish positive expectations around inclusion of students with disabilities in general education classrooms. The publications can be viewed at
http://bit.ly/2T0Pg7j

Foundation commits $1.75M annually to scholar program
Simon Foundations, the nonprofit organizations that support the Simon Scholars Program, and the Sun Family Foundation, a private charitable foundation whose mission is to advance educational opportunities and the well-being of the underserved, have announced a new partnership that will expand the Simon Scholars Program in Southern California. The Sun Family Foundation will commit $1.75 million annually, allowing the Simon Scholars Program to reach eight new high schools and 65 additional students. This brings the total number of Simon Scholars in Southern California to more than 190 students each year across 22 high schools.  Simon Scholars is a six-year scholarship program sponsoring underserved, mostly first-generation students from the end of their sophomore year of high school through college graduation.  The program is designed for economically disadvantaged students who are determined to further their education and pursue meaningful careers. To date, the program has sponsored more than 1,400 students, awarding more than $45 million in financial aid and support. “We are very grateful for this unique partnership with the Sun Family Foundation,” said Ronald M. Simon, founder of the Simon Foundations. “Simon Scholars are recognized nationally for being successful and high-achieving, both in college and in their careers. Their contribution will increase the Simon Scholars Program’s footprint by nearly 100 percent in Orange County. Our foundations are unified in our commitment to helping underserved youth achieve the American dream through independence and self-sufficiency.”   Simon Scholars far outpace their counterparts, both in attending and graduating from college. While only 25 percent of first-generation, low-income students attend a four-year university or college, 95 percent of Simon Scholars will do so. And while only 11 percent of first-generation, low-income students will graduate within six years, 92 percent of Simon Scholars will graduate in that time. “We are honored to partner with the Simon Foundations in support of the Simon Scholars Program,” said David Sun, founder of the Sun Family Foundation. “We have been impressed by the successes of the program for mentoring, counseling, and providing scholarships to students. In running our own scholarship program, it became clear to us that students need services beyond financial aid to ensure their success in college and beyond. By supporting the Simon Scholars Program, we can leverage the great work and investments that they have made in their program. We are excited and proud that our future scholarship recipients will now be Simon Scholars.” Kathy Simon Abels, president of the Simon Family Foundation, praised the partnership as a monumental step forward, setting an example for other educational foundations to join forces with the Simon Foundations in support of deserving students, locally and across the nation. For more information about the Simon Scholars Program, visit
www.simonscholars.org
. For further information about the Sun Family Foundation, visit
www.sunfamilyfoundation.org
.   
GPA is a stronger predictor of college success, research says
Students’ high school grade point averages are five times stronger than their ACT scores at predicting college graduation, according to a new study published in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association. The authors also found that the predictive power of GPAs is consistent across high schools. The relationship between ACT scores and college graduation depends on which high school a student attends; at many high schools there is no connection between students’ ACT scores and eventual college graduation. “It was surprising not only to see that there was no relationship between ACT scores and college graduation at some high schools, but also to see that at many high schools the relationship was negative among students with the highest test scores,” said Elaine M. Allensworth, who is the director of the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research and co-authored the study. Across all high schools in the study, each incremental increase in GPA is associated with an increase in the odds of graduating college. The chance of graduating from college ranges from 20 percent for students with high school GPAs under 1.5 to about 80 percent for those with GPAs of 3.75 or higher, after controlling for student backgrounds and college characteristics. “While people often think the value of GPAs is inconsistent across high schools, and that standardized test scores, like the ACT, are neutral indicators of college readiness because they are taken by everyone under the same conditions, our findings indicate otherwise,” Allensworth said. “The bottom line is that high school grades are powerful tools for gauging students’ readiness for college, regardless of which high school a student attends, while ACT scores are not.” According to the authors, their study confirms prior research that finds high school GPAs are more predictive than SAT and ACT scores of college freshman GPA and college graduation. This study is the first to explicitly test whether standardized assessments are comparable across high schools as measures of college readiness. Read the free access online research at
http://bit.ly/2IiQ15v
.
FYI
Coronavirus resources for schools available on Hub
Many districts statewide are developing tools to inform and educate school communities about the coronavirus disease. ACSA has collected many of the tools and placed them in one location for educators to quickly access on ACSA’s Resource Hub (
content.acsa.org/coronaviruscaschools
). ACSA will continue to update this section as more tools are shared by districts. If you would like to share communications tools from your school district, e-mail ACSA Senior Director
Naj Alikhan
.
Assessment information meetings coming in August
The 2020 North South Assessment Information Meetings, hosted by the California Department of Education, will provide CAASPP and ELPAC coordinators with the latest information and updates on California’s assessment system. Save the date for one of the following meetings: North Meeting, Thursday, Aug. 19, in Sacramento; and South Meeting, Thursday, Aug. 26, in Ontario. Registration will open on April 15, 2020.
Districts should review their tobacco-free policies
With a new funding opportunity planned for release in early 2020, the California Department of Education is encouraging districts and charter schools to obtain a Tobacco-Free Campus Certification in the next few months. The CDE is encouraging all Local Educational Agencies to review current policies and regulations to ensure that use of all tobacco products, including electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes), are prohibited on all school property. Find more information at
https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/he/at/tobaccofreecert.asp
.
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