New evidence that small schools work?
You might have forgotten about the small schools movement amid all the recent hubbub about overhauling teacher evaluations. But a study released on January 25th reminds us that only a few years ago, reducing the number of total students in a school was seen as a key weapon in the arsenal of urban school reform, and suggests that perhaps small schools shouldn’t have been so quickly abandoned as a reform strategy. 
In 2010, MDRC, a nonpartisan, New York-based research group, found that New York City students who attended small high schools were more likely to graduate than their counterparts who applied to but didn’t ultimately attend small schools. A new study confirms the previous findings. A second group of students who cycled through the city’s small schools also had a greater likelihood of graduating than students at other, comparable schools.
New York City’s small schools aren’t selective, but they do have lotteries because of space constraints. The latest MDRC study followed cohorts of students who either won or lost the lottery to ensure the two groups were comparable.
There are more than 100 small schools in the city, many of which opened in the last decade under the Bloomberg administration. And other cities also embraced downsized schools as a way to improve student achievement. But the concept seems to have fallen out of favor, in part because the billions of U.S. dollars that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was giving to the movement dried up due to “disappointing” results. (Disclosure: The Gates Foundation is among the funders of The Hechinger Report.)
Also, there was—and continues to be—quite a lot of conflict over the other side of the small schools movement: the closure of big schools. One report about New York City’s small schools said they had a domino effect on larger schools: As big schools were shut down to make way for smaller ones, many students—often those with lower test-scores and less wherewithal to find their way to small schools—were funneled into the remaining large schools, which struggled and were then also slated for closure and replacement by new small schools.
And while small schools, on average, appear to be doing better with the students they receive, quite a few have done badly enough to meet the same fate as many of their bigger counterparts.
Nevertheless, the study’s authors say their evidence suggests that small schools remain a good idea: The graduation rate for students in the study’s small schools was nearly 69 percent, compared to 62 percent of students in the study’s other schools. The overall graduation rate in New York City’s public high schools is 70 percent.
The battle over treating teachers as professionals
Should teachers be treated as professionals? The question may seem easy enough to answer—most people in education, whether they are union representatives or reformers advocating for more charter schools, say “yes.” Yet the question is in many ways at the heart of the raging debate–currently boiling over in New York–over how to improve struggling schools. How should the education field give power, respect and autonomy to teachers while also ensuring they are accountable for results?
Education reformers argue that teachers have not been seen as professionals in the past, pointing to union rules that limit how many hours a day they can work and other restrictions. The reformers have pushed against the work rules while advocating for a more rigorous evaluation process and tougher consequences for teachers.
Here’s U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan speaking on the topic last year: “Teachers today need to be treated more as professionals and knowledge workers, and less as interchangeable cogs in an educational factory line out of the last century.”
For the most part, teachers unions have supported reforms advocated by Duncan and others, but worry that taken too far, more intensive classroom evaluations based on detailed rubrics and the use of student test-scores to rate teachers may undermine the very efforts to increase professionalism by reducing educator autonomy and power. In New York City, for example, unions have refused to go along with a new teacher evaluation system that the state is advocating.
“Our schools and our kids deserve a highly trained and professional workforce. But rather than seeing the new system as a tool for professional growth, the city and Department of Education have insisted that it be used as a threat mechanism for both teachers and principals,” Michael Mulgrew, president of the New York City teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, said in a press release last week.
Increasingly, the question of professionalism is also being raised in the early education field, where educators have often complained about a lack of respect for the work they do, but where quality has varied as much or more than in K-12 schools.
I recently discussed the implications of the professionalism debate for teachers of younger students in a conversation with Dr. Stephanie Feeney, Dr. Sue Martin, and Rae Pica of BAM! Radio. Will the field of early education experience the same rifts that have cut through K-12? Are autonomy and respect compatible with intense, top-down accountability? Does including teachers as decision-makers in evaluation systems undermine efforts to create tough consequences for poor performance? Click here to listen.
Report cards for teachers: Are they fair?
A new study underwritten by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (which is among the funders of The Hechinger Report) tackles the question of whether the new teacher evaluation systems going into effect in school districts across the country are accurate and reliable in identifying which teachers are good and which are not. The researchers found that the new evaluation systems are likely to be more reliable than the methods used in the past. But they are not perfect.
The study argues that current teacher evaluation systems are broken, suggesting, as many critics have in the past, that the problem with the old approach was its failure to distinguish among the great, the mediocre and the bad: More than 90 percent of teachers were labeled as satisfactory, even in school districts where student achievement and graduation rates were abysmal. Under the old system, principals usually conducted one classroom observation per teacher every few years, marking off things on a checklist, like whether students were behaving and goals were displayed on the chalkboard.
Advocates for a new system of measuring teachers—with usually more than one classroom observation a year, plus standardized test scores that measure how much a teacher’s students improve academically, plus other measures like student survey results—say it is more consistent and precise. This new system is being promoted as more dependable in telling districts which teachers are great, which need help to get better, and, most controversially, which need to be let go.
The new method of grading teachers is still nascent, but it’s spreading rapidly, and the Gates study adds to a growing collection of data (in addition to anecdotal evidence we’ve been amassing during an ongoing reporting project here at Hechinger—stay tuned this month for the latest installment from Memphis, Tenn.) hinting at whether it will live up to its billing as a better way of measuring a teacher’s effectiveness.
That is, can we know for sure that a teacher who receives a top grade on one of the more rigorous and frequent classroom observations is also going to have a classroom of students who get top grades on achievement tests at the end of the year and on other important measures, like interest and happiness in school? (In response to criticisms of previous studies, the researchers expanded their study to look at indicators of success beyond test scores.) And are the evaluation measures, whether they are qualitative observations or quantitative test scores, accurate in labeling teachers great, ordinary, or bad?
In short, the researchers found that scores on observations did indeed tend to correlate with results on a variety of achievement tests. The correlations weren’t perfect, but researchers and proponents of the new evaluation systems say that’s because the two are not measuring the same thing: “There may be some teaching competencies that affect students in ways we are not measuring,” the study’s authors wrote.
In math, the correlation between what teachers did in their classrooms and how students performed at the end of the year on state tests was twice as strong as it was in reading, which researchers said could be a result of the tests, not the teachers. (And which could raise questions about the appropriateness of certain tests as tools to rate teachers, something critics of the new methods are already concerned about.)
The question of reliability, or whether we can count on ratings by different observers to be similar, is also central in the Gates report—part of an ongoing series looking at how new evaluation systems are working in a large sample of schools around the country.
“Reliability is important because without it classroom observations will paint an inaccurate portrait of teachers’ practice,” the report’s authors say. And an inaccurate portrait could lead to firing above-average teachers (or keeping on underperformers).
The study’s authors trained hundreds of evaluators to score videos of teachers teaching, and then compared them to see if the scores were consistent among the different raters. Here’s what they found:
“Even with systematic training and certification of observers, the MET project needed to combine scores from multiple raters and multiple lessons to achieve high levels of reliability. A teacher’s score varied considerably from lesson to lesson, as well as from observer to observer.”
In particular, a single observation by a single observer was more volatile and less reliable than multiple observations by different people.
Statistical measures using student test-score growth tend to be more reliable than observations, but the study and other research suggest that they are still wrong about a quarter of the time.
The good news is that the test-score measures and the observation scores seem to be more accurate and reliable when added together.
What does this mean for the real world?
Many teachers will be rated by one person, their principal. Some will receive classroom visits by two people, a principal and an assistant principal. In a few places, like D.C., the district has brought in outside evaluators to increase reliability. The new evaluations tend to include several observations over the course of a year, especially for new teachers. But in Tennessee, which is at the forefront of the new evaluation push, the number of times evaluators must be in classrooms each year has been reduced in response to complaints from districts and principals.
In most places that are adopting new evaluation systems, test scores, observations, survey results and other measures are all being combined, which the Gates study suggests will make the systems more trustworthy. Yet the vast majority of teachers do not teach in subjects or grades that are tested, meaning they will not receive value-added scores on their students’ growth.
So are the new evaluations likely to be ironclad? The report’s findings suggest not. Are they better than what existed before? The authors say yes: “Combining new approaches to measuring effective teaching—while not perfect—significantly outperforms traditional measures.”
For more reporting on the study, see Education Week’s take here, and the Los Angeles Times story here. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten also commented on the results. She was pleased that the report validated the union’s position that multiple measures should be used to evaluate teachers, but disappointed “that after all of the Gates Foundation’s research, the focus is still on measuring performance, not about improving performance.”
Oklahoma considers dropping high-school exit exams
Oklahoma’s landmark 2005 legislation, which mandated that all high-school students pass exams to be eligible for graduation, may be killed off before it even takes effect. The law, Achieving Classroom Excellence, requires seniors to pass sophomore-level tests in English, algebra and two other subjects—biology, algebra II, geometry, U.S. history or junior-level English—starting with the Class of 2012.
Legislators are now backtracking because of the high number of students the law would likely leave without a diploma—some 6,000 in the Tulsa area alone. Even the co-author of the original legislation, Representative Jeannie McDaniel (D-Tulsa), has withdrawn her support for it.
“I think when it was originally passed, we anticipated some remedial work, maybe mentoring,” she told Tulsa World last week, noting that budget cuts may have prevented schools from providing enough of this remedial support. “If we’ve fallen short in that area, then I think we need to stand behind the kids and do what’s right.”
New legislation, introduced by Representative Jerry McPeak (D-Warner), would eliminate the testing requirement. “If it hits the floor, I bet this bill will pass by 80 percent,” he said. “This isn’t Democrat or Republican; it’s about just treating people right.”
School districts and states across the country have been under pressure in recent years to increase the number of high-school graduates. Nationally, somewhere between 25 and 30 percent of high-school students fail to graduate.
Oklahoma wouldn’t be the first state to shelve graduation tests in hopes of boosting graduation rates. In April 2011, Georgia eased its requirements by cutting the number of exams from four to just one.
At the same time, however, other states are increasing standards and creating more challenging standardized tests.
New York has vowed to make its high-school graduation exams tougher after a study last year showed that even students who pass the math test may be placed in remedial math classes in college. Florida recently raised its cut-off scores on all standardized exams, including those in high school, and is developing additional end-of-course assessments.
Statistics showing that large numbers of high-school graduates are unprepared for college coursework have fueled the push to make tests more difficult. Right now, many of those who do earn a diploma must enroll in at least one remedial course in college.
McPeak defended his proposal to Tulsa World as a necessity for students who want to go into the military, which requires a high-school diploma. “If this kid doesn’t get his diploma and can’t get into the military, what do you think he’s going to do?” he said.
But a high-school diploma does not guarantee entry into the military. The military has its own entrance exam, which tests nine subjects, such as word knowledge, paragraph comprehension, arithmetic reasoning and general science. Nearly a quarter of those who take the test don’t pass it, according to a 2010 study.
Winners of the Early Learning Race to the Top competition
—UPDATED—
The announcement of nine winners in the Obama administration’s latest version of its “Race to the Top” education competition will push forward reforms that early learning advocates have lobbied heavily for over the past several years.
Children read at a preschool in Carpinteria, Calif. (Photo by Sarah Garland)
The winners of the “Early Learning Challenge,” as the grant competition was called, are California, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington state. To win, they promised to increase accountability, raise the quality of preschool teachers and improve coordination between the various private and public agencies that provide early education.
“We are so incredibly excited,” Deborah Gist, the Rhode Island education commissioner, said during a conference at the White House this morning. “This acknowledgement by the administration to the importance of early education is encouraging.”
The announcement foiled predictions: The New America Foundation guessed only three of the eventual nine winners, based on how states have done so far in terms of coordinating and improving their preschool systems. Instead of Pennsylvania, which has been recognized as an early education leader, “the winners included North Carolina, a state suffering big cuts in early childhood funding this year,” Lisa Guernsey, director of the organization’s early childhood initiative, wrote in a blog post.
In a call with reporters, Obama administrations officials said some winning states were “well on their way,” while others are just beginning to develop their early learning systems.
“Many states we would have loved to have funded, but we didn’t have enough resources,” said U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. “We took them in rank order.”
There was some overlap between this round of the competition, which was funded with money from the 2009 economic stimulus act, and the first Race to the Top grant competition, which called for reforms in K-12 education. Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ohio and Rhode Island also won in the earlier “race,” which had two rounds and a total of 12 winners.
California, which has not been as enthusiastic about embracing the K-12 reforms favored by the Obama administration, has been more active in pushing early learning reforms. It has increased spending on preschool access in recent years, and the state is launching a quality rating scale for preschools based on a program run by Los Angeles Universal Preschool. But Jon Schnur, co-founder of the advocacy group New Leaders for New Schools and current chairman of America Achieves, said that he was “personally surprised to see California as a winner.”
The state of Washington has also been lauded for its work linking preschool with older grades to prevent learning loss as children move from preschool to the elementary grades. (Seven of the winners included plans to improve alignment between preschool and the early grades in their applications.)
Some advocates were excited about the results, saying it was a watershed moment that would bring together what has been a scattered field.
“It’s been the most exciting time in the past four decades for young children in our country,” said Sharon Lynn Kagan, co-director of the National Center for Children and Families at Teachers College, Columbia University, in a call with reporters hosted by the Education Writers Association. “It has both symbolic and substantive value … It says to America that early learning matters.”
There’s less money to go around this time: $500 million, compared to about $4 billion for the K-12 grants. But the requirements are not as controversial as the requirements for K-12 schools. In the earlier competition, many states set out to create systems that evaluate teachers using test-scores and to open more privately-run public charter schools—reforms that have met with opposition from teachers unions and others.
In the early learning competition, states were encouraged to create kindergarten readiness tests, however, which has raised concerns about standardized testing of young children. But Dana Goldstein, an education writer and fellow at the New America Foundation, has written that “the model the administration has in mind for pre-school assessment is low-stakes for individual teachers and students and measures not only academic performance but also children’s social, emotional, physical and artistic readiness for kindergarten.”
“This is partly about academic outcomes, but it’s partly about other outcomes … that make a difference” like self-control, persistence and social skills, said Schnur. Kagan said that while there have been concerns about an increasing of testing that could be “injurious to young children,” she was “very enthusiastic” about the sorts of tests being planned by the winning states.
For a breakdown of what the winning states will likely be doing, see this post at the New America Foundation’s Early Ed Watch. For individual state applications, see here.
California ballot initiative seeks to expand access to online education
By Joanna Lin, California Watch
For public school students in California, where you live usually determines where you can learn. To David Haglund, that’s not right.
This month, Haglund, principal of the Riverside Virtual School, an online independent study program run by the Riverside Unified School District, introduced a statewide ballot initiative [PDF] that would give students unrestricted access to publicly funded courses – wherever they are.
The California Student Bill of Rights Initiative is “designed to eliminate control by ZIP code,” Haglund said.
Under the proposal, schools, districts and county education offices would be required to make available to all students the courses needed for admission to the state’s universities. Those courses, known as A-G requirements at the University of California and California State University, could be offered at a student’s school or district of residence or any other publicly funded school, and they could be classroom-based, online or a blended model of the two.
Nearly 27 percent of California public high schools in 2007-08 offered too few A-G courses for all students to take them, according to an analysis [PDF] by UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access.
“We in our public school system in California say, ‘If you don’t live within so many square miles of a building, you can’t play,’ and that’s not fair,” Haglund said. “And it’s particularly unfair when the infrastructure and technology exists to resolve those issues.”
Skeptics of the initiative say that while the proposal attempts to address real problems in education access and equity, it’s not the right mechanism to do so. If passed, the initiative could send more public money to private companies, they say.
The initiative calls on the state to modify its school financing system so that average daily attendance is apportioned to the courses students complete, allowing multiple institutions to split funding for the same student. Currently, online education in California operates as independent study programs, or charter or private schools – models that initiative supporters say limit access to virtual learning.
“The idea is if the funding is attached to courses, the schools might be more willing to investigate how to make those courses available,” Haglund said.
John Rogers, director of UCLA IDEA, sees a different outcome: ”Splitting up a student’s ADA (average daily attendance) potentially can weaken the home institutions,” he said. “When there are efforts to supplant aspects of the existing public education system with a cheaper online alternative, you’re going to diminish the overall quality of public education, and you’re going to exacerbate, not remedy, inequalities.”
The initiative “could wreak havoc on the delivery of public education in the state,” said John Affeldt, managing attorney for Public Advocates, which is representing organizations and families challenging the constitutionality of California’s school funding system.
“It seems at first blush to be more about an online provider’s bill of rights to get public money to provide online courses than an initiative to make sure we have equitable access to education for all kids,” he said.
Haglund said, “The initiative is not designed to destroy public education.”
“California as a state has pushed educational innovation into the private and charter school space. If that’s where we want to go, then keep it up,” he said. “But if we want our kids in public schools to have access to the same type of high-quality education they can have elsewhere, we need to switch it up.”
‘The Old West’
Haglund’s proposal comes at a time when more students are going to school by logging on to their computers. At least 15,000 students in California are enrolled in full-time online charter schools, and more than 3,600 were enrolled at Riverside Virtual School, the largest district-run program in the state in 2009-10, according to a review by the Evergreen Education Group.
But unlike many states that have embraced – or at least accepted – online education, California has stayed on the sidelines.
“There is no statewide provision for online learning in California. It’s all facilitated through individual districts who make up their own thing as they go along; consequently, it’s like the Old West,” Haglund said. “You’ve got everybody and their grandmother out there doing something, but nobody knows what that something is.”
Lawmakers – including state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson when he was a state assemblyman – have tried repeatedly to expand access to online education through changes to ADA guidelines.
Torlakson is currently assembling an advisory board to rethink technology in the classroom and is looking to raise $250,000 to fund its work. His long-term goal is to provide every student with a digital learning device, said Jason Spencer, a legislative representative for the superintendent. Although funding online education is a piece of the puzzle, it’s an issue for the Legislature to decide, he said.
Haglund and his colleagues at Education Forward, a nonprofit formed to sponsor the initiative, said they are tired of waiting.
“Is it possible for the Legislature in Sacramento to deal with this much more quickly and efficiently than this process? Yeah, absolutely,” said Rick Miller, superintendent of Riverside Unified and a director at Education Forward. “But they haven’t done it. It doesn’t mean they can’t and they won’t – they just haven’t. How long should we wait?”
Miller and Haglund said they are sponsoring the initiative as individuals, not on behalf of their district. But their experience in Riverside has helped them craft some guidelines for online education.
Under the initiative, only online courses approved by UC and schools accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges would be eligible for public funds. Student participation in virtual learning would be voluntary.
After it’s cleared by the state for circulation – a target date is set for next month – the initiative will need 504,760 signatures to qualify for the November 2012 ballot. More than likely, it won’t be the only online education proposal Californians see next year.
Language in the initiative could end up in legislation next year, said Jeff Frost, a lobbyist for several education organizations and school districts, including Riverside Unified. Along with other school district lobbyists, Frost has developed seven principles for online learning that he hopes will lay a foundation for state policy.
“The Department of Education, Department of Finance and key legislative staffers are skeptical that if the kid’s not in a room with a teacher, they’re not sure what level of learning is actually going on,” Frost said. ”We’re working on language … to reach some kind of harmony in the issue.”
That language, Frost said, will support the notion that ADA can be calculated based on student work.
“Whether they’re in the virtual school’s learning center or whether they’re at home with their mom looking over their shoulder or whether they’re in the public library – if they’re there working, that’s the same as a kid who showed up in school,” Frost said.
Assemblyman Bob Blumenfield, D-Van Nuys, said technology provides tools to verify that students are learning outside the classroom.
“In the traditional classroom, you can’t verify if that student is looking out the window and daydreaming about something else, whereas an online class, you can. You can make sure that person’s butt is in the seat when they say it’s supposed to be. … The technology is out there and improving every day as we speak.”
Blumenfield wrote bills this year and last to expand online education. Those efforts will be reincarnated in January as a state Senate bill, he said. Like previous legislation, it will call for proctored, in-person exams.
As for how online education should be funded, Blumenfield said he’s “somewhat agnostic.”
“My goal is I want to get it done,” he said.
This piece originally appeared in California Watch, the state’s largest investigative reporting team and a project of the independent, nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting. Contact the reporter at jlin@cironline.org.
Charter-school enrollment: Two million students and counting
Students at Democracy Prep charter school in Harlem (Photo by Sarah Garland)
The charter-school movement reached a milestone this week: Charter schools, which are publicly funded but typically privately managed, now educate more than two million students, up from around 1.8 million last year. Despite the heated debate over charter schools, the number is still relatively small considering the size of the K-12 student population in U.S. schools: 55.4 million, according to the federal government’s most recent “Digest of Education Statistics.”
The announcement, made by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), comes as some states are lifting caps on the number of charter schools, and as major charter-management organizations (CMOs) like KIPP and Rocketship Education are receiving federal dollars to expand their programs.
“To some extent, there’s a muscling aside of the small mom-and-pop-type charters by the more networked charter-management-organization-run charters that depend on a larger scale,” said Jeffrey Henig, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, who has studied charters. “A lot of them started early on at lower grade levels with adding a grade a year, so this is a building-out that’s been reasonable to anticipate.”
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More than 500 charters opened for the first time in the 2011-12 school year, the greatest growth since the charter movement began in Minnesota in 1992. According to NAPCS, more than 200,000 students are attending a brand-new charter school this fall, and 400,000 more are on waiting lists. Nearly half of the country’s 5,600 charter schools are concentrated in just five states: Arizona, California (where 20 percent of them are located), Florida, Ohio and Texas.
While a record number of charter schools have opened this year, 150 were shuttered for either low enrollment, financial troubles or weak academic performance, according to NAPCS. Charter critics often point to data showing that only 17 percent of charters outperform nearby traditional public schools, but proponents say closures are evidence that charter-school laws are working.
Henig explains that while he thinks charters will continue to see their enrollments grow, “two million is still a drop in the bucket for the overall public-school population.” He says that successful CMOs are sometimes pressured by the U.S. Department of Education and philanthropic foundations into expanding more quickly than they’d like.
“It’s pretty clear charters are a reform that’s here to stay,” says Henig. “And all of that despite the fact that the evidence of their greater effectiveness is limited.”
Should schools alone be held accountable for student achievement?
What if schools didn’t have to work alone to improve student achievement? That was the question we asked in a recent article about the miserable state of public education in Camden, N.J., one of the poorest cities in the country. Now, a study out today by Education Sector, a Washington, D.C.-based education policy think tank, delves further into the question of whether public schools should share responsibility for improving the academic outcomes of impoverished children.
In Cincinnati, schools and other agencies are sharing responsibility for student results (Photo courtesy of Kevin Hartnell under a Creative Commons License)
The argument is that non-school agencies—after-school organizations, public housing departments, local colleges and universities—should also be held accountable for student success. The report’s authors—Kelly Bathgate, Richard Lee Colvin and Elena Silva—note that this is far from a simple idea to execute, however: “Some critics fear that broadening accountability for academic results beyond the schools will weaken promising school reforms. And they are right that if everyone is accountable for results, then, in fact, no one is.”
In Cincinnati, the focus of the report, a coalition of agencies tried to avoid this problem by making a list of goals for each organization involved that fit with its specific mission. In the case of a mentoring organization, the report says, goals might have included “improving the mentees’ attendance, reducing the number of times they get in trouble, and following them to track whether they are graduating from high school and enrolling in college.”
But the experiment’s outcomes so far are mixed.
“Over the past four years, the communities showed progress on 40 community indicators. More students are demonstrating proficiency in math and reading and enrolling in college. One particularly bright spot is that the percentage of children who come to kindergarten ready to learn has risen substantially,” the report’s authors write.
“But,” they go on to say, “there is a long way to go. The percentage of students graduating from Cincinnati Public Schools who enroll in college within two years of high school graduation was 65 percent in 2009, an increase since 2005, but a 4 percentage point drop from the previous year.”
The project in Cincinnati may have implications for the future of the Obama administration’s Promise Neighborhoods initiative, which was meant to replicate the Harlem Children Zone’s model around the country. For more details about the Cincinnati project and its results thus far, see the full Education Sector report, “Striving for Student Success: A Model of Shared Accountability.”
Kindergartners at the keyboard [podcast]
Photo by tcoffey
In October, Hechinger Report writer Jill Barshay reported on computer instruction in kindergarten classrooms in a story that ran in Education Week and newspapers across the country. Last week she was a guest on American RadioWorks, where she spoke with executive editor and host Stephen Smith about the story.
