[Ohiogift] Public Education NewsBlast — February 3, 2015
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Wed Feb 4 15:08:33 EST 2015
? February 03, 2015 - In This Issue:
How to fix Title I
State and district spending, by the numbers
There is free lunch, but what does it signify?
Violence intervention from the very start
The increasingly less-common Core
Why grade-span testing won't work
Hands off the Carnegie Unit
Charters slightly better for special needs (in NYC, anyway)
BRIEFLY NOTED CALIFORNIA
BRIEFLY NOTED
GRANTS AND FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES
How to fix Title I
As Congress debates reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, it can revise Title I and improve outcomes for poor children, writes Robert Hanna of the Center for American Progress. Currently, Title I includes four different formula grants that determine how much districts receive from the federal government. Each of its present formulas suffers one or more weaknesses. First, the formulas don't focus on concentration of poverty, but rather consider both concentration of poverty and absolute numbers of students from poor families. This inadequately serves students in concentrated poverty and benefits large districts over smaller ones. Second, current formulas also benefit states with more children per household, whether or not these children are served in schools. Third, current formulas inadequately account for difference in education costs across districts or states, using state expenditures as a metric. States with more property wealth seem to face higher education costs just because they spend more per student. The article proposes a new formula that focuses only on concentrated poverty, measures states' fiscal effort (how much is spent on education, given resources) in total rather than per-capita dollars, and better accounts for differences in cost of living across districts. Sen. Lamar Alexander's recent proposal for a new framework for the ESEA would leave Title I formulas intact or potentially eliminate them entirely. More
State and district spending, by the numbers
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has released new data on how much each state invests in its public school students, reports Rebecca Klein for The Huffington Post. NCES, an arm of the Department of Education, examined states' revenues and expenditures per pupil in public elementary and secondary schools during 2011-2012. The agency also looked at data on spending and revenues at the level of individual districts. School revenue is defined as funds from "local, intermediate, state, and federal sources," while school expenditure refers to "all amounts of money paid out by a school system." The District of Columbia and New York state spend most, over $19,000 per student. Utah and Idaho spend least, around $6,500. The data also show that between fiscal years 2011 and 2012, most states' spending on education decreased. Districts in the South and West tend to spend less than counterparts in the Northeast, which corresponds with state-level findings. New York City spends the most on students -- $20,226 per pupil -- while Alpine School District in Utah spends a low of $5,412 per pupil. The data were compiled based on responses to the School District Finance Survey, which collected information from individual districts, and the National Public Education Finance Survey, which gathered information from state education agencies. More
There is free lunch, but what does it signify?
"Free and reduced-price lunch" is generally used to indicate concentrations of poverty and how these affect learning, but is it the best yardstick? asks Will Huntsberry for NPR. Does qualifying for the program necessarily indicate risk of falling through the cracks of American education? To qualify for the federal lunch program, families must be at or below 185 percent of the federal poverty level -- about $44,000 for a family of four -- which, depending on location, is not always impoverished. The U.S. Census Bureau measures actual poverty, but for the purposes of education research, census tracts don't align with district boundaries or attendance zones for individual schools. Yet poverty is not the only relevant factor for how children will fare in school. Other key factors: education level of parents, parental occupations, and immigration status. Still, absent reliable, easily obtained data on these alternatives, "F&R" serves as the de facto determination of which students are at risk. Finer-grained data are harder to obtain, since parents may not want to offer it; districts also need new systems for collecting and maintaining information. In the meantime, one way to slightly improve analysis would be separating program participants into two categories: those receiving free lunch, and those receiving reduced-price. The threshold for free lunch is 130 percent of the federal poverty level.?More
Violence intervention from the very start
A large and complex issue is present in many early childhood centers that serve children impacted by violence and poverty, writes Margaret Ramirez for The Hechinger Report. According to a nationally representative survey, 13 percent of infants a year old and younger, and 44 percent of all two-to-five-year-olds, were assault victims in the prior year. Eight percent of infants and 14 percent of two-to-five-year-olds had also witnessed violence. Other studies confirm these findings; still, few preschools have mental health professionals on staff, though early investment would save both expense and heartache later on: "If we put money at the front end, we will spend less on special education classes for behavior disorder, we will spend less on adolescent substance abuse, we will spend less on gang violence, we will spend less on the juvenile criminal justice system," said Margret Nickels of Chicago's Erikson Institute. Nickels still encounters ignorance from childcare workers, preschool teachers, and even principals who wrongly believe that young children don't understand what's happening when violence occurs?and are unaffected. One model that could work elsewhere is that of the Erie Community Center in Chicago, whose preschool spends $160,000 annually for a full-time psychologist and a social worker, and heavily supplements support through unpaid graduate students. More
The increasingly less-common Core
One hope of the Common Core was that states would discard the national patchwork of 50 sets of standards measured by 50 different tests, writes Emma Brown in The Washington Post. For the first time, parents and policymakers would directly compare student performance in one state to the rest of the nation, making it harder for lagging states to hide weak performance. The goal seemed easily within reach in 2011, as 45 states and the District of Columbia adopted the standards. The Obama administration spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help states develop two online tests, PARCC and Smarter Balanced, that would measure student progress on the Common Core; most states signed on to administer them. But as some states head into their first round of testing, the picture has fragmented. Indiana and Oklahoma have dropped the Common Core, and four other states are moving to review and potentially replace them. Even broader resistance has arisen to the common standardized tests, with many states backing out of testing consortia. Still, large swaths of the country will, for the first time, take the same test this year. Advocates also think the number of states administering consortia tests will grow when states see these are cheaper and of better quality than tests they develop independently. More
Why grade-span testing won't work
Despite a real possibility that, going forward, states will have to test students only once in each grade span (once in elementary, middle, and high school), a new paper from the Brookings Institution argues that annual testing is critical to judging school quality. Using a decade of data, the paper projects how schools would rate based only on average test scores in a solitary grade -- the situation under a grade-span testing regime -- compared with using measures based on growth in student scores from year to year, as with annual testing. As the paper points out, any given average score can reflect a wide range of performances in terms of growth. One proposed alternative to growth-based measures would use a single year of test data, as under a grade-span testing regime, but adjust it based on demographics, so schools serving students that tend to score lower, such as low-income and minority students, would only be compared to schools serving similar students. Yet in addition to providing less accurate information about the causal impact of schools on student learning, demographic adjustments implicitly set lower expectations for some groups of students. The paper concludes that using average test scores from a single year to judge school quality is unacceptable from a fairness and equity perspective. More
Hands off the Carnegie Unit
A new report from the Carnegie Foundation for Teaching looks at the Carnegie Unit -- or credit hour -- which it established over a century ago as a rough gauge of student readiness for college-level academics, standardizing student exposure to subject material by ensuring consistent amounts of instructional time. Reformers now argue that reliance on the Carnegie Unit has in fact slowed progress toward diplomas and degrees. Critics say that by stressing amount of time students spend in the classroom rather than mastery of subjects, the Carnegie Unit masks the quality of student learning. By promoting standardized instructional systems based on consistent amounts of student-teacher contact, it discourages more flexible educational designs. The report asserts that the Carnegie Unit was never intended to function as a measure of what students learned. It does, however, play a vital administrative function in education, organizing the work of students and faculty in a vast array of schools and colleges. It provides a common currency that makes possible exchanges and interconnections among institutions, and continues to provide an opportunity-to-learn standard for students in both higher and K-12 education, where inequitable resources and variable quality are the rule rather than the exception. More
Charters slightly better for special needs (in NYC, anyway)
New York City's Independent Budget Office has released a report finding children with disabilities stayed at charters at a slightly higher rate than at traditional public schools, contrary to the prevailing narrative, writes Elizabeth Harris for The New York Times. The report examined 3,000 students at charters and 7,200 students at nearby traditional public schools who started kindergarten in 2008. It found that 53 percent of the charter kindergartners with disabilities were in the same schools four years later, compared with 49 percent in traditional schools. The results were similar for the overall student population, with 64 percent at the same charter and 56 percent remaining in the same traditional schools in the same time frame. The findings are in striking contrast to last year's report from the city budget office, which indicated that special-education students left charters at a much higher rate than from traditional district schools: Only 20 percent remained at their charter, while 50 percent remained at their public school. A budget office spokesman said the divergent results stem from using different metrics. Last year's report studied only children in full-time special-education programs, whereas this year's report looked at all children identified as having a disability, regardless of classes attended. More
BRIEFLY NOTED CALIFORNIA
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With prosperity come restrictions
Higher-than-expected state revenues could in 2015-16 trigger a series of new legal benchmarks that restrict the size of district budget reserves for the following year. More
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A return to par
With the state economy improving, districts have ramped up hiring, and California is poised for a turnabout in teacher credentialing. More
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Real challenges for rural programming
Officials in California's rural districts say the shortage of after-school programs in their communities stem from struggles to provide transportation, find qualified staff, and enroll enough students to generate funding. More
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Less for less
Los Angeles Unified has reported that 3.6 percent fewer students attended class during the first semester -- a drop that could cost the district more than $100 million. More
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A pox on...
In some L.A. Unified schools, 60, 70, and even 80 percent of incoming kindergartners were enrolled conditionally because of under-vaccination in 2013-14, and the district is unable to report how many of?those ended up fully vaccinated by the end of?the school year. More
BRIEFLY NOTED?
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Sequester this
President Obama's budget proposal includes the reversal of large cuts to federal spending instituted in 2013 as a result of the sequester. More
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A mighty undertaking
More than a dozen education-school deans are banding together as Deans for Impact, aiming to design a coherent set of teacher-preparation experiences, validate them, and shore up support for them within their own colleges and the field at large. More
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Opt-out at your peril
Florida Education Commissioner Pam Stewart has warned that all students must take state tests and that teachers could face disciplinary action if they actively encourage skipping the exams. More
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Developing
The Texas Supreme Court will hear the state's appeal of a massive and long-running lawsuit challenging the way it funds public schools. More
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Signficant?
As part of a theoretical budgeting exercise this month, the Utah School Board's three-member leadership team recommended shifting funding from public schools to charters.
http://www.sltrib.com/news/2085640-155/state-school-board-signals-support-for
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Back on track
Somewhat hesitantly, the Oregon Board of Education has voted that districts should begin scheduling more of their students for a full school year. More
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Not having it
The judge overseeing a 20-year-old lawsuit in North Carolina demanded whether state officials were trying to define their way out of a duty to educate all the state's children. More
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Bad tidings
Alabama 10th graders fared poorly on math and science tests that measure readiness for college, according to new results from the Alabama Department of Education. More
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Choppy waters
Wisconsin's use of a student test linked to the Common Core State Standards has come under further question in the wake of a report on increased costs and stalled progress on revamping the state's school-accountability system. More
GRANTS AND FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES
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Yamaha: Young Performing Artists program
The Yamaha Young Performing Artists Program (YYPA) recognizes outstanding young musicians from the world of classical, jazz and contemporary music.? Each year, the YYPA Finalists are invited to perform at the Music for All Summer Symposium held in late June. Maximum award: $5,000 in retail credit towards a professional model Yamaha instrument, as well as a series of clinics and master classes with renowned artists, designed to help winners launch their music career. Finalists will also receive a professional recording of their performances and national press coverage. Eligibility: musicians ages 18-22. Deadline: February 28, 2015. More
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Mantis: Awards for Community and Youth Gardens
Each year, Mantis presents the Mantis Awards for Community and Youth Gardens to charitable and educational garden projects that enhance the quality of life in their host communities. Maximum award: a Mantis Tiller/Cultivator with border/edger and kickstand, and their choice of gas-powered 2-cycle engine or electric motor, valued at $349. Eligibility: Any nonprofit garden program may apply. In the past, winners have included schools, churches, correctional facilities, parks departments, youth camps, community gardens, and many others. Deadline: March 6, 2015. More
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Qatar Foundation: The WISE Prize for Education
The WISE Prize for Education recognizes an individual or a team of up to six people for an outstanding contribution to education. The achievements of the nominated individual or team should have had a significant and lasting impact upon education at any level and should demonstrate an inspiring and visionary approach. Maximum award: gold medal and US $500,000. Eligibility: individuals or institutions -- including schools, international organizations, and private companies -- from anywhere in the world. Deadline: March 31, 2015. More
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Quote of the Week:
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"I respect people's choices about what to do with their kids, but if someone's kid gets sick and gets my kid sick, too, that's a problem. What we need to do, for all our children, is increase the herd immunity." -- Carl Krawitt of Corte Madera, Calif., whose six-year-old son Rhett's leukemia is in remission but whose immunity remains compromised. Krawitt is seeking a vaccination requirement in California. More
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