ESSA negotiations continue, ED announces next steps
The negotiated rulemaking committee continued its work this week evaluating assessment and "supplement not supplant" issues in the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) after the Department of Education (ED) released several specific proposals for committee consideration. Concurrently, ED announced the agency's next areas of regulatory focus beyond the negotiated rulemaking. In a statement quoted in an EdWeek story, ED said:
[W]e will begin shortly the regulatory process on state accountability systems and reporting, submission of state plans, and the Title I, Part B innovative assessment demonstration authority. While we will continue to seek input on other areas where guidance and technical assistance would be helpful, the Department does not plan to propose regulations on any other areas of the new law this year.
ED added that it would be seeking public comment on these new issues, which are certain to garner a great deal of stakeholder interest, "later this year."
ED releases free, online platform to measure school climate
ED released a comprehensive suite of tools to measure and improve school climate. The tools include adaptable school climate surveys, a free downloadable Web platform that can be used by districts and schools to monitor school climate data in real time, and a quick guide to improving school climate. The surveys measure three domains: engagement, safety, and environment. ED provided separate surveys for students, instructional staff, noninstructional staff, and parents.
Congress recently emphasized school climate in the provisions of ESSA, including a reference to school climate as a possible school quality indicator, a requirement to include school climate data in report cards, and funding for programs that would improve school climate, such as Title IV funding for safe and healthy students.
Portfolio districts: thin evidence base, reduced community accountability
A March 2016 National Education Policy Center policy brief, The Portfolio Approach to School District Governance, finds that the latest in a string of urban school governance structural reforms, the "portfolio district" approach, rests on a summarized "very limited body of generally accepted research" beneath often misleading advocacy claims by its supporters, noting that "all the evidence suggests that no governance approach will come close to mitigating the harms caused by policies generating concentrated poverty in our urban communities".
According to its leading advocate, the Center for Reinventing Public Education, the portfolio approach is currently used in 39 districts, including New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, Memphis, Nashville, St. Louis, Cleveland, and Denver, with other states considering portfolio districts legislation. In common with mayoral and "recovery" (also referred to as "takeover" or "achievement") districts, portfolio districts, whose creation is authorized by state legislation, envision the replacement of many neighborhood schools with charter schools, which are privately managed, frequently nonunionized, taxpayer-funded schools. School accountability is implemented by a district central-office manager, often appointed by a governor or a mayor, based on performance standards or market forces, and often bypass local school boards and other democratic accountability. Similar to a portfolio manager selling poorly performing stocks, the district portfolio manager monitors performance and typically closes or turns over to private management schools which are then usually reconstituted, often leading to the circumvention of state laws and union contracts.
Authors William Mathis and Kevin Welner identify key features aimed at addressing liabilities of existing portfolio district practices and proposals, and recommend supplementing them with more impactful components that are also applicable to traditional districts. The recommendations include: adequate funding; highly qualified teachers; personalized instruction realistically requiring small class sizes; on-site wraparound services; high standards for program quality, fiscal accountability and checks and balances; where expanded school choice policies are a component of the approach, true integration and equitable student access to each school and each course within a school; and transparency and strict auditing procedures wherever public funds are used. The brief's principle conclusions are that "the main lesson of the portfolio model experiment is that policymakers should not be distracted by quick fixes promising cheap shortcuts....In the end, student outcomes in under-resourced urban districts will continue to be driven by larger societal inequities."
ED asks for input on use of SIG funds for socioeconomic diversity
ED published a blog post asking for public input on the use of SIG funds to promote voluntary, community-backed socioeconomic diversity strategies aimed at improving academic achievement. "Socioeconomically diverse schools are especially powerful for students from low-income families, who historically have not had equal access to the resources they need to succeed," ED noted. Comments are requested until April 12.
Fair education funding systems continue to elude most states
Low rankings on school funding fairness correlate to poor state performance on key resource indicators, including less access to early childhood education, noncompetitive wages for teachers, and higher teacher-to-pupil ratios. So concludes The Education Law Center and Rutgers Graduate School of Education, coauthors of the fifth edition of the national report card,Is School Funding Fair? The report card is the gold standard in state comparisons. It takes a sophisticated statistical approach that recognizes the complex differences among states and adjusts for those differences to provide meaningful comparisons. Equally important, the national report card provides useful data to states in their ongoing efforts to achieve fairness in their education finance systems by incorporating the resource needs of all students, particularly low-income students.
States are graded or ranked on four fairness measures:
- Funding level, or the overall level of state and local revenue provided to school districts. The measure compares each state's average per-pupil revenue with that of other states.
Major finding: similar to previous years, wide disparities exist in education funding levels among states. Using the latest data (2013), funding levels ranged from a high of $17,331 in Alaska to a low of $5,746 in Idaho, which means that, on average, students in Idaho have available to them only one-third of the funding available to students in Alaska with similar needs and circumstances.
- Funding distribution, or the funding across districts within a state relative to student poverty. The measure answers the question: Does the state provide more or less funding to schools based on their poverty concentration?
Major finding: in 2013, 16 states had progressive funding distributions (i.e., the state's highest poverty districts receive more funding per student than the state's lowest poverty districts); 18 states had no substantial variation in funding between high poverty and low poverty districts; and, 14 states had regressive funding distributions (i.e., the state provides less funding to school districts with higher concentrations of low-income students). Minnesota provides its highest poverty districts with 33 percent more funding per student, on average, than its lowest poverty districts. In Illinois, by contrast, high poverty districts receive only 82 cents for every dollar received by low poverty districts.
- Effort, or state spending for education relative to state fiscal capacity. The measure indicates the value placed on education in the state budget.
Major finding: many of the lowest funded states, such as Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, North Carolina, and Texas, allocate a very low percentage of their states' economic capacity to fund public education. (Any changes to state education finance systems during or since 2013, such as those made in California, should be reflected in future reports.)
- Coverage, or the proportion of school-aged children attending the state's public schools compared to those that do not, and the median household income of both groups of students. The measure captures the support for and the political will to fund public education in the state.
Major finding: the percentage of school-aged children enrolled in public schools ranges from 81 percent in Louisiana to 93 percent in Utah and Nevada. Louisiana and Delaware have a large percentage of students living in wealthier families that do not attend public schools.
States vary in their performance among the four measures. For instance, Utah provides its highest poverty districts with 27 percent more funding per student, on average, than its lowest poverty districts, which earns the state a grade of A under the funding distribution measure. Utah's funding level, however, is the second lowest among states and it receives a grade of D for effort. So, even a progressive distribution of funds does little to ensure fairness when funding levels remain low and with little effort to invest.
The correlation between funding fairness and resource availability is "clear and compelling," according to the researchers. Many of the low performing states on the four fairness measures also perform poorly on the essential resource allocation indicators cited in the opening sentence of this article.
ED seeks peer reviewers for magnet assistance competition
ED is seeking peer reviewers for the FY 2016 Magnet Schools Assistance Program (MSAP) competition. Interested individuals should review the "Call for Peer Reviewers" and submit the "Peer Reviewer Information Checklist"along with résumé or curriculum vitae to msap.team@ed.gov. ED urges applicants to apply by Friday, April 15.
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