Friday Report Round-Up

Here is this week's report round-up:

• School Districts’ Perspectives on the Economic Stimulus Package: School Improvement Grants Present Uncertainty and Opportunity by the Center on Education Policy. This report highlights the extent to which school districts have experience with implementing the four federally-mandated school reform models intended to improve the nation’s lowest performing 5% of schools.
• Problems with the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers by the Economic Policy Institute. This briefing paper finds that although standardized test scores of students are one piece of information for school leaders to use to make judgments about teacher effectiveness, such scores should be only a part of an overall comprehensive evaluation.
• America’s Best (and Worst) Cities for School Reform: Attracting Entrepreneurs and Change Agents from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. This study finds that New Orleans, Washington, D.C. and New York are among the top cities that have cultivated a healthy environment for school reform to flourish.
• Stuck in the Middle by Education Next. According to this study of New York City students, kids who move from elementary school to middle school experience a bigger dip in math and language arts achievement than their K-8 counterparts do, and they tend to be absent more often.
• Next Generation Charter Schools: Meeting the Needs of Latino and English Language Learners from the Center for American Progress and the National Council of La Raza. According to this report, successful charter school practices for serving Latino and ELL students can serve as object lessons for school districts to improve academic achievement.
• Back to School Statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics. This fact sheet provides a quick snapshot of 2010 back to school statistics such as public school enrollment numbers, expenditures, employment figures, etc.
• State Tax Revenues Are Slowly Rebounding from The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government at the University at Albany. According to this report, state tax revenues across the country are starting to rebound, with April-June of this year bringing a second consecutive quarter of growth.
• College Admission Tests as Measures of High School Accountability from the Indiana University Center for Evaluation and Education Policy. This study cautions that the growing trend of using college admission and placement exams in measuring high school student achievement may in some cases produce misleading and inappropriate results.
  
  
  

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.