Category: News

According to the U.S. Department of Education, enrollment of English learners in K-12 has increased by more than 1 million, representing 5.3 million students in U.S. public schools. Historically, this population has experienced inequities in educational outcomes due to factors including poverty, discrimination, poor instruction, exposure to crime and lack of health care and mental health services.

Lillian Durán, PhD, authored the article.

In this High School Spotlight, FOX 12 meets an incoming freshman who is ranked number two in the world for wheelchair tennis.

Phelps’ coach, John Devorss, knows a star when he sees one.

“She just absorbs, you tell her something and it just takes a few times and she’s correcting it herself, which is a great characteristic of any athlete is just be really coachable,” Devorss said.

John Devorss is an alumnus of the COE.

On the first few days of class, Adriana Alvarez stands in front of her sixth- to eighth-grade English as a Second Language class and asks them to try an exercise with her.

She tells the students, many of whom have recently immigrated to the United States, that she wants to understand who they are. Alvarez wants to know what their pronouns are. What is the name they like to be called? What is the correct way to pronounce their name?

Alvarez uses herself as an example first. After introducing her name, she tells them that she is Mexican. She is a short person. She is a person with brown skin and brown eyes. She tells them that she is a person who loves to talk and dance. And she tells her students that she is someone who will be there for them.

Alvarez is a spring 2022 graduate of the UO College of Education’s Curriculum and Teacher Education master’s program and now teaches English classes in the Bethel School District, the same district she attended in high school. The support and encouragement she found from UO faculty members, Alvarez said, were essential for her academic success and her ability to share her background as a means of connecting with students.

Principals are believed to have great influence on school climate, instructional practices, and student outcomes, but legitimate questions remain about how to measure their effectiveness.

In a new working paper from the Annenberg Institute, researchers analyze data from Tennessee, New York, and Oregon to understand if recent studies are accurately quantifying the impact of school leadership on student outcomes.

The authors–Brendan Bartanen of the University of Virginia, Aliza N. Husain of Pivot Learning, and David D. Liebowitz of the University of Oregon–found that such value-added models, a common method of analyzing principal performance, often attribute effectiveness to factors outside a principal’s control. After explicitly accounting for these dynamic factors, this paper shows that little to none of the variation in student performance is explained by differences between principals. 

Salem-Keizer Public Schools is welcoming more than 30 principals, assistant principals and leaders into new roles for the 2022-23 school year.

Cherice Cochrane is he new principal at Keizer Elementary School.

Cherice Cochrane has been the principal at Lamb Elementary School for the past five years. Before becoming a principal, Cochrane taught at Myers Elementary in the dual-language program. She is currently pursuing her doctorate in education through the University of Oregon. Cochrane is thrilled to join the Keizer team and is excited to begin building relationships throughout the community.