Afternoon Announcements: May 25, 2011

Education Week reports, “Education Secretary Arne Duncan will divvy up the $700 million in additional Race to the Top money Congress gave him this year between a new contest focused on early education and the nine runners-up that lost in last year's high-profile state competition.”

Wondering how school districts used stabilization money? Check out this Education Week story and the graph to the left. 

Public schools across the country, struggling with cuts in state funding, rising personnel costs and lower tax revenues, are shifting costs to students and their parents by imposing or boosting fees for everything from enrolling in honors English to riding the bus, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Morning Announcements: May 2, 2011

The New York Times reports on Fern Creek Elementary School in Florida where more than 20% of students are homeless. According to the article, “There are 2,953 homeless students attending Orange County Public Schools, up from 1,463 in 2008.”

For one North Carolina school district, the stimulus money has run out and its affecting special education, Education Week reports.

The Los Angeles Times reports on two families in Los Angeles that have chosen very different paths for their children to achieve academic success.

Morning Announcements: February 14, 2011

Want to know what Obama's recently released budget means for education? Check out this great recap from Education Week blogger Alyson Klein.

The New York Times profiles Ronald Ferguson of Harvard and his efforts to close the achievement gap.

The Washington Post explains how school officials are using the District’s new teacher evaluation system to assess administrators and determine which universities produce the best- or least-prepared teachers.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the California Board of Education has moved to put the brakes on the parent trigger law, legislation that would have provided the parents the right to force major reforms at low-performing schools.

Schools’ Financial Prospects: Good News and Bad News

An event held January 11 to release the fifteenth annual edition of Education Week’s Quality Counts report provided some moderately good news and bad news about the financial picture in education. The moderately good news is that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—the $787 billion “stimulus package”—appears to have staved off drastic cuts in school budgets. According to the report, the stimulus saved or created 651,570 jobs, and more than half—52 percent—were linked to funds provided by the U.S. Education Department. Moreover, the Education funds were used more efficiently than those from other agencies; Education funds created or saved 4.2 jobs for every $1 million spent, compared with 2.7 overall.

That might be small comfort to the large majority of states and districts that have seen budgets cut and jobs shed over the past two years. According to the report, thirty-four states and the District of Columbia have made cuts in K-12 or early education spending since 2008. That’s why the news is only moderately good.

Report Round-Up

State High School Tests: Exit Exams and Other Assessments from the Center on Education Policy. This annual report on high school exit exams discusses new developments in state high school exit exam policies and how students enrolled in school in states with these policies are affected.

States’ Progress and Challenges in Implementing Common Core State Standards also from the Center on Education Policy. This survey found that states that have adopted the Common Core State Standards have plans for changing policies and programs, such as developing or adopting new assessments, modifying curriculum materials, and offering professional development for teachers, to ensure that the standards are fully implemented at the classroom level. However, many of these changes will not be fully in place until 2013 or later.

30 Large Urban School Districts Show Better Relative Academic Performance Than Their States for African-American, Hispanic, or Low-Income Students from the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. This study presents findings from data collected in the Broad Prize selection process on large urban districts with higher-than-state-average performance among African-American, Latino, and low-income students and the policies and practices behind their success.

Report Round-Up

A First Look at the Common Core and College and Career Readiness from ACT. This report concludes that most students have far to go before they master the skills and knowledge outlined in the new common standards.

The American School Superintendent: 2010 Decennial Study from the American Association of School Administrators. According to this study, despite the increasingly diverse set of superintendents' responsibilities and the student achievement pressures placed upon them, the job satisfaction of superintendents remains high.

Conflicting Missions and Unclear Results: Lessons from the Education Stimulus Funds from the Bellwether Education Partners. This report questions how much schools have improved as a result of the more-than $100 billion in funding provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Video Available: Looking Back at the Current Congress and Looking Ahead to the New Congress of 2011

On October 25, the Alliance for Excellent Education held an interactive webinar that looked back at what the current Congress accomplished on education reform while looking ahead to the prospects for additional reform in the new Congress, which begins in January. The webinar featured a roundtable discussion with Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor and congressional representative of West Virginia, and representatives from the Alliance’s federal advocacy team. The discussion was followed by a question and answer session driven by questions from webinar participants. Check out the full video below:

A federal focus on high schools is long overdue

In a recent blog post on the Washington Post’s The Answer Sheet, Sarah Garland, a staff writer for the Hechinger Report, discussed how high schools were receiving a disproportionate amount of funding in the Education Department's School Improvement Grants program. Phillip Lovell, AEE Vice President of Federal Advocacy, and Fred Jones, AEE Legislative Associate, respectfully disagreed and in their own blog post explained why a federal focus on high schools is long overdue:

A recent post on The Answer Sheet written by Sarah Garland lamented that a majority of schools included in the School Improvement Grants program, the federal government’s funding stream for turning around the nation’s lowest and most chronically failing schools, are high schools.

Unfortunately, the problem for years has been too little concentration on high schools, not too much.

Garland’s argument is that turning around high schools is difficult and expensive, so it would be better to focus efforts on early childhood, elementary, and middle schools. The problem is that this has been the basic strategy employed by the federal government, and it has failed.

One Way Schools Can Cross the “Funding Cliff”

School districts haven’t quite reached the “funding cliff” yet, but they can see it from here.

The funding cliff is the steep drop in revenue that states and school districts expect to face when funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—the federal “stimulus package”—expires at the end of September. School Districts’ Perspectives on the Economic Stimulus Package, a new report from the Center on Education Policy shows just how steep the plunge will be: 75 percent of districts expect to cut teachers’ jobs in the 2010-11 school year.

The report, based on a survey of district leaders, found that the stimulus did what it was expected to do. Less than half of districts reduced teaching jobs last year, because federal funds were able to make up some, though not all, of the shortfalls in state revenues. But the vast majority of districts have already spent their ARRA funds, and cuts in state funds are expected to continue.

A General Motors Moment

I recently spent two days in West Virginia making presentations for the statewide local education fund, the Education Alliance , about the economic return from boosting high school graduation rates and the necessity of having a college- and career-ready standard as the benchmark. To read more about my discussions there, read my guest post on the organization’s new blog .

The previous week, Governor Joe Manchin called the state legislature into special session to take up eight bills designed to strengthen West Virginia’s run at the second round of the Race to the Top (RTT) competition. After a week of legislative wrestling over the usual issues—charter schools, teacher evaluation, performance pay—everyone agreed to call time out, recess for two weeks, and a working group of the main stakeholders, including the unions, are meeting to see what can be resolved.