Stephanie Saul's long exploration of tax-credit scholarship programs today in The New York Times has generated the amount of reaction you would expect in the education community, and you should check out my colleague Sean Cavanagh's blog post on it for more details.

Meanwhile, another scholarship program has made headlines, although it appears to be moving in reverse gear. The Illinois House voted on May 21 to ban tuition-waiver scholarships and sent the measure to Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, for his signature. These "legislative scholarships" allowed each member of the state's General Assembly to nominate up to four students in his or her district to receive scholarships of varying length to 10 state-supported public universities, including the University of Illinois.

But as the Chicago Tribune details, critics said the scholarships were ways for elected officials to award scholarships to convenient individuals, such as the children of relatives or campaign contributors. Strangely, the scholarships remained in place, until the House took action by approving the ban in legislation from Rep. Fred Crespo, in a 79-32 vote.

The Better Government Association has devoted a web page to the corrupt use of the scholarships, using examples from other news organizations to argue that they should be axed. Recent beneficiaries of the scholarships, as identified by the association, included the children of an alderman and a lobbyist.

Quinn announced with apparent relish that he would sign the legislation, saying it was a "good day" when lawmakers passed the ban, and that such scholarships should only go to worthy students in financial need. Rep. Ken Dunkin argued a point that in strictly factual terms appeared accurate: Many students would lose scholarship opportunities if the program disappeared. But Quinn appears to put more stock in the ways these scholarships were actually used in several cases, instead of how they might have been used more fairly.

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If you thought that Education Week reporters Stephen Sawchuk and Sean Cavanagh did a great job in their first installment last week on new education advocacy groups, check out "The Changing Face of Education Advocacy" again this week to read more about the way these groups are operating in local school board races and their relationship with teachers' unions. In Colorado, for example, Stand for Children and the Colorado Education Association have a more interesting relationship than you might think. It's very important reading.

In fact, mentioning Stand for Children is a perfect segue into a piece of news from last Friday: Stand for Children's Washington state chapter, which in 2008 endorsed outgoing Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire and largely backed Democrats in the 2010 state legislative races, announced it had decided to endorse GOP gubernatorial nominee Rob McKenna, over Democrat and former congressman Jay Inslee.

In a May 18 statement accompanying the endorsement announcement, Jennifer Vranek, a board member of the group's political action committee, stressed that as a lifelong Democrat she "struggled" with the decision. But the key language in the statement from the group's executive director, Shannon Campion, does not sound particularly conflicted: "McKenna is incredibly aligned with our policy goals for kids, has the track record of entrepreneurial leadership, and will make improving outcomes for students and closing the achievement gap a top priority for his administration. ... Our kids need and deserve a governor who will put them first."

Stand for Children in Washington said it conducted a "blind taste test" among its members by showing them answers to its questionnaire from Candidate A and Candidate B and having them pick their preferred candidate before they knew their names. McKenna turned out to be the candidate with the best flavor, winning 50 percent of respondents, compared to only 38 percent for Inslee. Logic tells us that in the advocacy group's view, Inslee would put children somewhere other than first, although perhaps that's an unfair linguistic quibble.

Savvy readers of Education Week will remember that I touched on the Evergreen State's gubernatorial race in an April article. The piece mentioned that on some education issues it was hard to tell Inslee and McKenna apart, and McKenna even went so far as to accuse Inslee of pinching his ideas. How much Stand for Children's endorsement will mean is up for debate, but it shouldn't come as a shock to any student of these advocacy-related battles.

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One cliché has consistently influenced the debate over the role of states in making policy: They are "laboratories of democracy" where governments closer to the people than Uncle Sam come up with the best solutions. This view is not necessarily split along neat political lines—and doesn't enjoy universal popularity.

In an upcoming story for the print edition of Education Week, I touch on a few states where high-profile policy initiatives like 3rd grade retention are facing some resistance from lawmakers. But I also wanted to let one or two people sound off on how legislators' roles may or may not have shifted.

One could compare recent developments in the policy-making world to "waves" in corporate merger activity. Today, an amalgamation of advocates, think tanks, and other political operatives can deliver variety packs of legislation, talking points, and "ideas" to lawmakers for easy transport back to their offices. Of course the influence industry has been around for some time, but its depth, breadth and speed all seem to have increased.

Do model bills, for example, mean lawmakers can't or won't consistently engage in the innovation others are often pressing them to embrace? Does changing a state law or policy using ideas that are new to the state, but not original, equal creativity? Does it matter? Is it unfair to ask whether state lawmakers are increasingly serving as lab rats instead of lab scientists?

For Sherman Dorn, a professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, the answer is clear. States have increasingly ceded their roles as laboratories of democracy, and have turned over policymaking and ideological energy to the U.S. government or other advocates.

Dorn, who is a skeptic of policies being pushed by conservative-leaning education groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, says there are two possible explanations for situations where legislators reassert themselves in some areas.

"To the extent that legislators are pushing back a little bit, some of it may be from a sense of, 'Hey, we shouldn't be taking orders from people in other states.' But some of it may reflect citizen activism in the last year or so," he said, citing the backlash from the public that led to the repeal of Ohio's Senate Bill 5 (which would have curtailed union rights) last year.

Approaching the questions in a somewhat different way, Marcus Winters, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, argued there is simply an increasing amount of data on education policy issues that didn't exist three decades ago that "not all policymakers are really prepared to grapple with on their own."

But Winters, who favors the use of test scores to evaluate teachers and says recent data on 3rd grade retention shows it can work well, said this also means that legislators can feel more comfortable taking action once they have more and better numbers. The broader question, he said, is whether this development means the education policy debate is beginning to resemble other policy debates.

"The shift towards quantitative research makes it both more and less difficult for policymakers," Winters said.

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When it came to getting their proposed budgets approved by voters, district school boards across New York State didn't quite bat a thousand, but batting .964 is pretty close.

What's notable about this year is that school boards had to contend with a property tax cap for the first time that limits total revenues a district can collect annually. As The New York Times points out, those caps varied by district, but averaged at 2.3 percent (the maximum allowable percentage a district could increase local property tax increases).

Budgets that went above those tax caps required the approval of 60 percent of voters, instead of the simple majority for budgets that stayed at or beneath the caps. (New York State school districts must be their budget proposals to the public for a vote on the third Tuesday in May of each year.)

Overall, 96.4 percent of proposed budgets from school boards were approved by voters, slightly higher than the 93 percent that were approved last year, according to information released by the New York State School Boards Association (since 1969, the average passage rate is 84 percent). For those 623 districts that did not go above their local property tax caps, the success rate was 99.2 percent. The school boards association said 48 districts chose to bust through their tax caps in the budgets they put to voters, but only 29 of them were approved by at least 60 percent and passed.

"The voting public has once again shown its strong support for education. Voters recognized that school leaders did everything they could to comply with the spirit and intent of the property tax levy cap," said the association's executive director, Timothy G. Kremer, in a statement accompanying those numbers. "They were responsive to their communities."

Kremer took the time to add that abiding by the caps was not a pleasure cruise for districts: 99 percent of districts had to dip into reserve funds to make their budgets work.

The association also takes advantage of the attention to argue that the state's Triborough Amendment is a pain in the neck. This amendment to the state's Taylor Law (which governs public employee labor relations) prohibits public employers from altering any provisions in an expired collective bargaining agreement until a new agreement is reached.

The New York State Conference of Mayors and Municipal Officials (in its "Stop the Tax Shift" website) argues this can mean automatic pay increases "even when labor negotiations have reached an impasse." The school boards association brings it up to say that the amendment makes it hard for districts to get long-term "concessions" from unions. But New York State Unified Teachers, the state teachers' union, argues that the Triborough Amendment stops governments from slashing employee benefits while a new contract is being negotiated. Take your pick.

Neighboring New Jersey also has a 2-percent cap on property tax hikes. Tom Barrett, the Democratic gubernatorial primary winner, has argued against Wisconsin's property tax cap enacted under GOP Gov. Scott Walker. Walker, in turn, has pointed to the benefits of that cap.

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cross-posted from the Curriculum Matters blog, by Erik Robelen

UPDATED

The fast-growing International Baccalaureate program has come under fire in New Hampshire from critics who suggest it indoctrinates students. The state House of Representatives recently passed a bill that appears designed to block schools from using the program. Today, the full Senate is expected to debate the measure, though early signs suggest it won't get the same welcome reception as in the House.

(Hat tip to a reporter at the Bedford-Katonah Patch newspaper for giving me the latest on the bill.)

So, what's all the fuss about? It seems that a group of freshman Republicans in the state House believe the IB program, founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in the late 1960s, would violate the "sovereignty" of U.S. schools.

The bill, approved 209-102, says a school's curriculum and instruction must promote "state and national sovereignty and is not subject to the governance of a foreign body or organization." One way to demonstrate this infringement would be for a participating school to be called a "world school," which just so happens to be a phrase used for schools that participate in the IB program.

For background on the rapid rise of the International Baccalaureate in recent years, check out this EdWeek story on the program, which includes courses of study at not only the high school level, but also middle and even elementary schools. Currently, more than 1,300 U.S. schools offer the IB program.

Supporters of the bill say the IB program promotes an international ideology that they find distasteful, according to a recent story in the Union Leader newspaper.

"Do you want your children to be indoctrinated to be world citizens or do you want them to be residents of this state and this country?" said Rep. Ralph Boehm, a sponsor of the bill, according to the newspaper. (You can watch a video of Boehm speaking in favor of the measure here.)

Supporters of the bill also raise concerns about the IB program's connection to the United Nations. (The Union Leader story notes that according to the IB website, the program has been recognized as a nongovernmental organization of UNESCO since 1970.)

The New Hampshire Tea Party has been a strong backer of the measure. In a recent blog post, it said the bill "will bring back local control. There is no excuse for a foreign political group to be directing education in New Hampshire's schools."

But the IB program, currently used in just two New Hampshire schools, one public and one private, appears to have a lot of supporters, including many students, parents, and educators in the state.

Those backers not only dismiss claims of global indoctrination, but are making the issue one of local sovereignty, an argument that is likely to be especially appealing in New Hampshire, the Union Leader story notes.

"If you would want to strip and usurp the authority of a local school board, ... then we need to come up with a new motto for our license plates [other] than 'Live Free Or Die,' said Bedford High School junior Michael Courtney, at a hearing.

In fact, Courtney, one of the main organizers of a campaign to defeat the bill, has posted a video on Youtube called Save IB in NH.

"This is much bigger than saving the IB ... curricula," he says in the video. "This is about local control. This is about Bedford deciding what is best for Bedford's citizens, not the state."

John R. White, a New Hampshire resident who testified at the May 1 education committee hearing (and whose daughter previously studied in an IB program), offered an impassioned speech defending the program. You can watch it here.

"The opposition to IB would be hilarious were it a skit on 'Saturday Night Live' or a Stephen Colbert comic rant," he said. "But coming as it does from people elected to do the public business in the hallowed halls of Concord, it is frightening. The assertion that the IB is somehow an international plot fomented by the United Nations to undermine national loyalty and cause the disintegration of liberty in the United States is a preposterous notion."

He added: "IB emphasizes critical thinking and writing skills. It insists on scholarship. It offers vibrant programs in language, history, and mathematics, hardly the stuff of subversion."

UPDATE

As my colleague Erik Robelen reported, on May 16 the New Hampshire Senate rejected the bill from the House that would have barred districts from using IB. But will lawmakers in other states pick up the anti-IB banner next year with legislation in their own states? Stay tuned.

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The Florida State Board of Education voted unanimously on May 15 to reduce the passing score on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) in writing from a 4.0 to a 3.0, after a huge plunge in the percentage of passing scores on the FCAT reading tests this year triggered a round of recriminations in the state's education community. But this phenomenon is not unique to the Sunshine State.

The FCAT writing test is scored on a 6-point scale, but in May 2011 the state board approved tougher scoring guidelines for the test. This year, the percentage of Florida 4th-graders who earned a passing score on the FCAT writing test plummeted by two-thirds, from 81 percent in 2011 to a mere 27 percent this year (the scores were filed with the state May 10). For 8th-graders, that nosedive was from 82 percent to 33 percent, and for 10th-graders, the tumble was from 75 percent to 38 percent.

Looking more closely at the score breakdowns provided by the state, what's interesting is that most of the passing students did just enough to hit the minimum passing score—but no more. Among passing 10th-graders, for example, about two-thirds scored the minimum passing 4.

Every year under the A-F school grading system, the pass rates play a significant part in a school's grade. But as Leslie Postal highlighted for the Orlando Sentinel, the schools' grades this year will now be judged based on 3 being a passing score, not a 4, following the state board's change.

Jeff Solochek reported for the Tampa Bay Times that the FCAT evaluators also paid more attention this year to the quality of the language and the level of detail in students' writing responses. By way of illustration, a sample response that scored a 2 this year was marked off for being repetitive, list-like, and predictable, while one sample response scored as a 2 last year was noted for errors that, while hurting sentence structure and conventions, "do not impede communication." (The state changed its contract with NCS Pearson this year to ensure two evaluators of each test instead of one.)

In its materials for the May 15 vote, the state board noted that on Aug. 31 of last year the state education department posted the new scoring guidelines for school districts to use. But Postal notes that the state's education commissioner, Gerard Robinson, still said districts and teachers should have gotten more information about the change.

The issue of rising cut scores and subsequent problems that may trigger nasty headlines crosses state boundaries. As this official statement from the Michigan Department of Education last year shows, new passing numbers typically make students' scores from previous years (if not the students themselves) look pretty bad. Using the cut scores adopted by the Michigan board of education last September and applying them to 2010 math scores, for example, would have meant the share of proficient students plunge to 35 percent from 95 percent.

The Foundation for Florida's Future, led by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who oversaw the creation of the A-F school grading system, stressed that even with the latest FCAT results, the state should still receive plaudits for making sure students are truly prepared for post-school life.

"The State Board of Education's decision provides stability to Florida's school grading and accountability system, while upholding the higher standards they adopted last summer," said the group's executive director, Patricia Levesque, in a statement.

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The importance of a November ballot initiative to raise taxes in California and earmark much of that money for school funding grew dramatically after news this week that the state's budget deficit has grown to nearly $16 billion.

When Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, announced a dramatic spike in the budget deficit on May 14, he continued to press for protecting K-12 and higher education funding even in light of the much gloomier fiscal numbers.

But education advocacy groups still worry about education spending and expressed concern that even the high-stakes November initiative would not be enough to solve serious fiscal problems for schools.

Brown's revised budget actually includes a 16 percent hike in K-12 spending, on the assumption that the ballot initiative will pass.

In January, Brown had projected a $9.2 billion budget deficit for the rest of fiscal 2012 and fiscal 2013. However, lower-than-expected tax revenues so far this year for the state resulted in the budget shortfall growing by $6.5 billion to $15.7 billion.

In response, Brown announced in his revised budget that he would slash state spending by $8.3 billion to help close the new, larger deficit. However, Brown stressed in a May 14 statement that he would continue to push for protecting K-12 spending.

"We can't balance the budget with cuts alone; that would just further undermine our public schools," Brown said.

The ballot initiative pushed by Brown would raise the income tax by a quarter-cent, while taxes would increase on those earning $250,000 or more annually.

If the November ballot initiative does not pass, an automatic round of about $6 billion in cuts to public schools will go into effect at the start of next year.

But in a May 14 statement, California Federation of Teachers President Joshua Pechthalt, representing more than 100,000 teachers in the American Federation of Teachers affiliate, argued that even a successful ballot initiative in November should only be part of any solution to funding problems with education, as well as other government services.

"These cuts are disastrous for working families, and as important as it is to pass a revenue measure in the fall, it doesn't let the legislature off the hook to find more
revenue now," Pechthalt said.

Brown's proposed funding increase for schools, paid for by the November initiative, also doesn't help districts that have to set their budgets in June regardless of whether voters approve the tax increase, argued Education Trust—West, an education policy research group based in Oakland.

"This strategy will likely lead to additional staff layoffs and cuts in support services. It will also allow districts to slash a total of 15 additional school days, leaving California with the shortest school year in the nation," the group said in a statement.

Michelle Rhee, founder and chief executive officer of Sacramento-based StudentsFirst, praised Brown's efforts not to cut education spending further. But she also took the opportunity in a statement to argue that the state's seniority-based layoff system for teachers was hurting schools.

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For those of you who haven't seen it yet, please go read "The Changing Face of Education Advocacy" by my colleagues Stephen Sawchuk and former State EdWatch maestro Sean Cavanagh. They both put a huge amount of work into the articles, which are running in two parts, this week and next week. One of the articles focuses on the state-level influence of these advocacy groups, but every article in the series should be read to give you a complete picture of what's going on.

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I told you on May 11 that the American Legislative Exchange Council delayed its vote on a resolution opposing the Common Core State Standards. That marked the second time that ALEC's board of directors, which has final say on all resolutions and model bills that the conservative, pro-free-market group's various policy "task forces" approve, had an opportunity to deliver a final vote on the common core resolution, but did not.

In a subsequent email, the director of ALEC's Education Task Force, Adam Peshek, informed me that the board sent the resolution back to the task force to clarify some points in the resolution and to get others parts of it "tightened up" before the board considers the final resolution. He stated that the board does not want "federal intrusion" into standards, but at the same time wants to support "strong state standards."

Beyond the fact that the task force now has some work to do, it's difficult to reach any definitive conclusion based on what Peshek wrote. The real test will come when there's that final vote from the board of directors and all the influential players weigh in and lobby for their points of view. Remember, the task force already has adopted a version of the anti-common-core resolution once, last year.

ALEC's vote could influence how state legislators act on common core when they go back to their respective state capitols. But there are a lot of moving parts to the adoption and use of common core, so there isn't necessarily a straight line between a resolution and a seismic shift in the standards initiative's future.

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A politically-savvy observer of recent education politics might have expected Alabama and Mississippi to have overseen, in recent legislative action, at least some growth for both charter schools and the regulatory environment that encourages their expansion. Being savvy, however, is not a substitute for accurately predicting the future.

An Alabama House committee effectively killed the Education Options Act on May 10, legislation that would have paved the way for rapid charter-school expansion in the state, George Altman of the Mobile Press-Register reported.

The original charter school proposal, as Altman puts it, was a priority for GOP Gov. Robert Bentley this term. There was conflict between the competing House and Senate versions of the bill over whether up to 20 new charter schools would be placed "near" low-performing schools (as the House version had it) or replace them. Under the Senate version, which Williams opposed, local superintendents and every elected official representing the area in question would have been given final say-so over the new charters.

The Alabama Education Association, an affiliate of the National Education Association, wrote in a piece for its Alabama School Journal publication that the bill created a dual-track school system at a time when there isn't enough money to fund the schools the state has.

In an interview with Education Week, the AEA President Dot Strickland said the teachers' union's lobbying team did "an outstanding job," and that the union may have convinced several legislators initially favorable to more charters to change their minds.

Echoing the Alabama School Journal piece, Strickland said of state lawmakers, "They need to put money where their mouths are and fix whatever they think needs fixing."

Meanwhile, in Mississippi, there won't be any new charter school expansion bill this year, even though GOP Gov. Phil Bryant pledged a special session to revive one that a House committee killed. But a teachers' union isn't a prominent foe here.

Instead, fingers are being pointed at Republicans from wealthy DeSoto County, in the northern region of the state near Memphis, where the schools are high-performing. One of those finger-pointers is political analyst Brian Perry, in this column for the Madison County Journal. Perry argues that the GOP opposition from DeSoto was notable because, in his view, charters tend to seek out less-affluent areas to operate in. However, Perry doesn't exonerate Democrats, and argues that under different partisan circumstances, black legislators would have railed against white suburbanites blocking the introduction of charter schools to the Mississippi Delta.

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