July 2010 Archives

Sorry for the delay in bringing you more detail on that new, national database on schools identified as eligible for a piece of the $3.5 billion in Title I School Improvement Grants.

Here is an analysis that Annenberg researchers and a new coalition called the Communities for Excellent Public Schools put together based on the more than 2,100 schools that states have slated for possible turnaround. The analysis also includes the entire lineup of the Tier I and Tier II low-performing schools that states have identified.

A few key findings, most of which won't surprise anyone: Nationally, 81 percent of students in SIG-eligible schools are minority students—black students represent 44 percent and Hispanic students represent 32 percent. The analysis says that 69 percent of students in SIG-eligible schools are poor (defined by eligibility for free-and reduced-price lunch) compared with 43 percent of students attending the rest of the schools in the nation. And more than 60 percent of the students attending these schools are concentrated in nine states: California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

The analysis includes several short case studies of schools too.

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Michele McNeil has the news over at Politics K-12. We managed to be pretty darn accurate on our picks, getting 17 of them right.

Surprises? Arizona and Hawaii, though Patrick Riccards, aka eduflack, predicted Arizona might make the cut because it got help from the Gates Foundation to prepare its Round Two application.

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Across the 50 states and the District of Columbia, 2,136 schools have been identified as the most "persistently low-performing" and the first in line to receive a share of the $3.5 billion in stimulus-funded Title I School Improvement Grants.

That number—compiled by researchers at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University—is the first that I've seen that represents a total count for the Tier I and Tier II schools that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is targeting for turnaround over the next three years with the help of the supercharged pot of school improvement money. Keep in mind that not all of these eligible schools will actually receive a grant.

Tomorrow, there will be much more detail about what, exactly, those schools look like, thanks to the folks at Annenberg, who have built the first-ever national database on the schools targeted for turnaround. While many of you may still be basking in the afterglow (or weeping in disappointment) of the Race to the Top finalists' announcement, you shouldn't overlook the event related to the big debate over school turnarounds that will happen on Capitol Hill. This is where the database will be released.

A new coalition of local parent organizations from around the country called the Communities for Excellent Public Schools has organized a "Congressional briefing" to unveil a plan that its leaders say is a much better approach to bringing improvement to struggling schools than the four prescribed models that are outlined in the Obama administration's blueprint for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Those same methods of intervention are also required under the rules for the school improvement grants.

The coalition will also outline what it says are the shortcomings of the school turnaround policies of Sec. Duncan. Among the speakers tomorrow: Linda Darling-Hammond and Congresswoman Judy Chu, the California Democrat who has been one of the chief critics of the school turnaround models.

Also in the line-up is Warren Simmons, the director of the Annenberg Institute of School Reform, who will presumably talk about the new database. The folks at Annenberg combed through every state's SIG application to put the database together, and used federal demographic and economic data from the 2007-08 school year that will help all of us better understand some of the conditions at each of these identified schools.

This is going to be a tremendously useful source of information for all of who are following the turnaround debate. We'll bring you more detail following tomorrow's event.

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Twenty-four hours from now, we'll at last know which states survived the first round of elimination to be finalists for Round Two of the Race to the Top sweepstakes. There's $3.4 billion still in the bank for the winning states.

Michele McNeil, blogger over at Politics K-12, and I put our heads together to come up with a list of 20 states that we think will end up on the list of finalists. Much of our rundown looks like the one we predicted for Round One (minus the fun, NCAA-inspired brackets), although this time we allowed for more finalists since there's going to be at least 10 winners, and maybe as many as 15.

You'll notice that some of the new states we've added to our list from last time include Oklahoma, which Michele likes as a dark horse for the aggressive package of legislation it passed in the last few months. California was on the list before as a wild card, but it was really, really a stretch. It ended up ranking 27th out of 41 applications.

I think the state has a more legitimate shot this time, if for nothing else than going with an entirely different tack in Round Two. Rather than mustering as many districts and local teachers' unions to buy in to the state's plan, as many states seemed to do in their second try at this, California opted to limit its application only to those districts that signed on fully to its menu of reform proposals.

Michele and I also put Maryland on our list of finalists. Remember that Maryland sat on the sidelines for Round One, so we don't have an earlier application on which to judge the state. Overall, though, Maryland is a state that gets pretty high marks when it comes to its school improvement track record and student performance (albeit, not for its charter school policies).

Below is our slate in full. Let us know what you think—are we in the ballpark or completely off the mark? By the way, is it just me, or does this run up to Round Two feel, well, kinda anti-climatic compared to Round One back in March? Is there such a thing as RTT fatigue?

Arkansas
California
Colorado
District of Columbia
Florida
Georgia
Illinois
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
New Jersey
New York
North Carolina
Ohio
Oklahoma
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina

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Education issues haven't exactly risen to the top of the agenda in the battle to become California's next chief executive.

But Meg Whitman, the former eBay executive and billionaire who is the Republican candidate for governor, has launched an education-themed television ad on Spanish-language stations around the state.

The education content in the ad is pretty thin, and it's standard fare for campaign spots. It shows Whitman in a classroom as she utters platitudes about Latino youth being the state's future doctors, engineers, and entrepreneurs. She also offers a pledge to support "school reform" that will make California's education system No. 1 again.

Nothing too Earth-shattering, but the ad has provoked interesting reaction from some Latino officials. Mónica García, the president of the Los Angeles Unified school board, issued a blistering statement yesterday accusing Whitman of being disingenuous. García cites Whitman's close allegiance with former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson (he's her campaign chairman), who supported Proposition 187, the 1994 voter-backed initiative that sought to block undocumented immigrants from receiving state services, including public education. Wilson, out of office for 12 years, has remained a polarizing figure among many Latinos in the state.

The ad is one in a series that Whitman has been airing to court the state's coveted Latino vote. The candidate is also running ads that highlight her opposition to Arizona's controversial immigration law. According to Field Poll results released last month, Whitman's support among Latinos has picked up since she began her Spanish advertising blitz. It also has prompted her opponent, Democratic state Attorney General Jerry Brown, to start his own Latino outreach campaign. Some Democrats have been frustrated by Brown's slow start to courting Latino voters.

But Brown certainly has a history of bonafides he can draw on when it comes to his support for Latinos. As governor in the 1970s, Brown supported Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers' movement and signed the landmark Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which gave the state's farmworkers the right to organize.

For a more thorough look at Whitman's positions on education, look at her campaign website. Among the highlights: directing more money into classrooms, raising the cap on charter schools, and, borrowing an idea from former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, issuing annual report cards on schools.

Curiously, Brown, who started two charter schools during his years as mayor of the city of Oakland and at one time supported the idea of a school board comprised of mayoral appointees, doesn't appear to even have an education platform on his campaign website. Or if he does, it's sure not easy to find.

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News about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's proposal to cap the salaries of district superintendents spread like wildfire late last week. Christie, a Republican overseeing a recession-battered state, has aggressively gone after what he sees as excessive spending across the public sector, and schools have been among his targets.

His announcement last week to target highly-paid school administrators struck a chord in some corners and today Christie's proposal got a ringing endorsement from editorial writers at the Star-Ledger in Newark.

Christie makes $175,000, less than the salaries of 75 percent of New Jersey's local supes, according to the Star-Ledger. It seems that local boards in New Jersey have offered especially lucrative contracts to their honchos, regardless of district size or performance, according to the newspaper.

Intuitively, it seems completely out of whack for a district superintendent to make more than the CEO of an entire state. But some of this has to do with the fact that some salaries for governors were set eons ago and don't get tweaked much. No one has to use a compensation package to get the best "hire" for the governor's office; those folks self-select by running for the office. While governors and superintendents are public servants, they operate in entirely different markets.

Still, it's instructive to compare the salaries of the two positions.

In New York, Gov. David Paterson is pulling down $179,000 (last year, he took a 10 percent pay cut) as the state's chief executive, while Joel Klein, the chancellor of the New York City public schools makes $250,000.

In California, if Arnold Schwarzenegger were taking a salary (he has forgone accepting one since his net worth is valued at somewhere between $100-200 million), he'd make $175,000, while Ramon C. Cortines, the superintendent in Los Angeles Unified, pulls down $250,000 (Cortines voluntarily took a $50,000 pay cut from what his predecessor was earning in the job). In some states, you could certainly argue that being a school superintendent is a more difficult job worthy of more compensation, though I don't think that is the case currently in California and New York, where both governors have found it next to impossible to govern much of anything lately.

In a small state like Nebraska, Gov. David Heineman makes $105,000 a year. Steve Joel, the superintendent in Lincoln, one of the state's largest districts, makes $255,000 (that's his entire compensation package, not just base salary).

What do you think? Do school superintendents—who do very hard, politically bruising, often thankless work—deserve the sort of hefty, six-figure compensation deals that Christie is going after? How should we assign value to those gigs?

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Pundits are crediting the Alabama Education Association for helping propel Republican state Rep. Robert Bentley past a better-known, better-funded GOP candidate to clinch the nomination for governor earlier this week.

Bentley, a physician from Tuscaloosa, edged out former state Sen. Bradley Byrne, who had the GOP establishment backing him, including outgoing Gov. Bob Riley. Byrne had also been the top vote-getter in the state's earlier primary, while Bentley barely won enough votes to make the runoff.

So how does the AEA, a National Education Association affiliate—whose top leaders are high-profile Democrats—come to be a player in the Republican runoff? It starts with a history of bad blood between the AEA and Byrne, who got crossways with the association during his days in the state Senate and as the chancellor of the state's community college system. They sparred over tenure and charter schools.

Hostilities between Byrne and the AEA grew intense—and expensive—during the campaign. The union's executive secretary and political mastermind, Paul Hubbert, has been a high-ranking official in the state's Democratic party, though he just announced he'll give up his party leadership role to focus exclusively on AEA business.

The AEA—which functions purely as a political and lobbying operation, since there is no collective bargaining for teachers in Alabama—poured millions into negative television ads against Byrne, who ended up running a campaign largely against the teachers' association. The AEA's involvement in the GOP primary and runoff has drawn harsh criticism.

But with its nemesis out of the picture now, the AEA will no doubt go back to putting resources into the gubernatorial candidate who everyone would expect it to favor: Democratic nominee Ron Sparks, the state's commissioner of agriculture and industries.

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Education Secretary Arne Duncan is hoping it will, reports Michele McNeil over at Politics K-12. Duncan just announced his intentions to tweak the Obama administration's ESEA draft so that parental and community involvement would be a condition for districts to receive federal money for improving schools.

The nation's schools chief didn't dish any details on what the involvement of parents and community members would entail, though Michele reports that it certainly wouldn't include veto power over a district's specific plans to turn around a failing school.

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As Yogi Berra would say, it's deja-vu all over again in California, where, for the 19th time out of the last 25 years, the state has started a new fiscal year without an approved budget. And, as in the last several years, lawmakers are grappling with how to close an eye-popping deficit—a gap that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says has to be closed without raising taxes.

Last week, the governor (who has just got to be ecstatic that this is his final budget battle) took to the radio waves to call for ways to "streamline bureaucracy and to make government smaller." His first idea to do that?

Get rid of the elected statewide schools superintendent!

OK, so he doesn't outright say that California should dump the state supe's job. But here's what he does say:

"...In California, we elect the superintendent of public instructions. [sic] But why? We already have a secretary of education and a board of education. Why do we need a superintendent of education?"

There are a couple of reasons, says Hilary McLean, a spokeswoman for Jack O'Connell, the current elected state chief. She tells the folks at the online investigative news site California Watch that scrapping the job would save the state a whopping $151,427, the salary for that position. And still, as McLean points out, you'd have to hire someone to run the state education department.

And there's the matter of the state constitution. The state superintendent of public instruction is a constitutionally mandated position. The governor rightly asks why the state needs an education secretary, a state board, and an elected state supe. There's a good argument to be made that there are too many chefs in the kitchen.

But he fails to mention that the appointed education secretary's position was created less than 20 years ago when Pete Wilson was governor. Or that the current secretary, Bonnie Reiss, is pulling down $175,000 for a political appointment that carries little authority. The governor could save the state an extra $23,573 if he got rid of that job.

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California's school finance system came under a new legal challenge today, as advocates for low-income families and minority students filed a lawsuit in Alameda County that seeks to scrap the current method of funding public schools. The current system is unconstitutional, they argue, and inequitable.

This is the second suit brought against the state for its school funding system in as many months. In May, several school districts, along with parents, students, and education groups like the California School Boards Association, sued the state for much the same reason. That suit was also filed in Alameda County Superior Court and lawyers in both cases hope that the same judge will hear their cases.

Lawyers for the new lawsuit say they consider their case to be complementary to the Robles Wong v. California case filed in May, but they point to a couple of key differences. One is that the plaintiffs in their suit are poor families and their children, or community organizations that represent them. Another difference is that their suit focuses not only on funding equity in K-12, but in preschool as well.

Besides asking for a judge to scrap the current finance system and order state legislators and the governor to devise a new one, the lawsuit is also seeking other reforms that plaintiffs say are necessary to achieve equity. One is a more robust data system that helps the public track how dollars are spent on public education and the other is a system for ensuring that effective teachers are available to all students, especially those in the most disadvantaged schools.

"The California constitution very clearly places education as the first and most important duty of the government," said Rohit Singla, one of the plaintiffs' attorneys, in a conference call with reporters earlier today. "It's beyond a doubt that the state is not meeting its obligations."

The two school finance suits come in the midst of one of the most damaging recessions in California, which has forced state lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to make deep cuts to spending across all sectors of government. Public schools have taken a roughly $17 billion hit over the last two years. State spending on K-12 in fiscal 2010 still accounted for about 37 percent of California's $91.4 billion overall budget

California, with K-12 enrollment of 6 million public students, ranks near the bottom of the 50 states for its per-pupil funding, according to the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, which determined that the state spent $8,164 per pupil in 2007, more than $2,000 less than the national average of $10,557. That number, of course, doesn't reflect the impact that the recession has had on per-pupil spending in California.

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Schools receiving millions of dollars in federal money meant to reverse years of low achievement are overwhelmingly opting for "transformation," the least disruptive of four intervention methods endorsed by the U.S. Department of Education.

With all but 11 states now approved to receive their share of the $3.5 billion in Title I School Improvement Grants, many state departments of education have announced grant awards to those eligible schools that applied and were judged to have strong plans for improvement.

That means we can start to document the number of low-achieving schools that will be shut down, restarted as charters, turned around by replacing the principal and at least half the instructional staff, or, most popularly, transformed through changes such as a longer school day, a revamping of teacher evaluations, curricular and professional development changes, and, in most cases, a new principal.

You'll remember that when the feds originally designed the rules for how this supercharged pot of school improvement money could be used, Education Secretary Arne Duncan stressed his desire for "dramatic" actions that included converting these schools to charters and bringing in lots of fresh blood in the form of new principals and teachers. The transformation option was considered by Duncan to be the one of last resort for schools to choose, and the rules were written to limit the number of campuses that could elect for that method in districts where there are large numbers of low-performers.

Strong pushback from state and local education leaders prompted the feds to tweak the rules so that transformation was viewed as an equally viable option for school improvement as the other three, more aggressive models. (Of course, we all know that even the transformation option is not all that popular with educators, especially among rural school leaders who find the requirement to replace the principal especially challenging.)

Ok, so now that I've done all that throat-clearing, let's take a look at a sample of states and the frequency of schools using transformation as a first resort.

CALIFORNIA: 164 of 188 eligible schools applied to the state department of education to receive a school improvement grant. (113 of those, because of their concentrations of poverty and years-long low performance, will have priority for funding). San Jose-based blogger John Fensterwald at educatedguess.org has a lot of the details here, but the most interesting numbers to me are these: 72 schools will use transformation; two schools will shut down entirely. (Slight clarification on these numbers, courtesy Doug McRae out in Monterey: Not all of the 164 schools that applied for a grant fall into the state's bottom five percent, or those that are "persistently lowest achieving," which is the main target of the federal money. Fifty-one of them are part of the state's larger set of 3,500 schools that are technically eligible for the money, but because they don't sit in the bottom five percent, they aren't likely to receive funding.)

MINNESOTA: No awards have been decided yet, but of the 26 schools that applied in this state, 22 are opting for transformation, four for turnaround. It's interesting to me that in a state with the oldest charter school law on the books, no schools elected to use the restart method.

NEW JERSEY: The state department of education has awarded just over $45 million in school improvement grants to 12 schools. Seven of those have selected the transformation model for intervention, four opted for turnaround, and one school, an alternative high school in Newark, will be restarted. That school secured $4.6 million to spend over the next three years for its interventions that the state department called the "most comprehensive reform" of all the targeted schools. No schools opted to close themselves down.

NORTH CAROLINA: Here, the state awarded 25 schools with grants. Eighteen of them will use transformation, while six are opting for the turnaround method that requires replacement of at least half the teaching staff. One school will use the restart method and none will close.

OREGON: A dozen schools in this western state will receive grants to improve performance and all of them have elected to use the transformation option.

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Despite my repeated badgering last month, officials at the U.S. Department of Education wouldn't discuss anything about why it seems to be taking so long for some states to receive final approval on their applications for the $3.5 billion in Title I School Improvement Grants. (As of today, 14 states are still waiting for the green light from ED.)

This timing issue is crucial because states and districts were already going to be under tremendous pressure to plan and execute aggressive interventions in low-performing schools under the new rules for using the school improvement money. Many components of those interventions, such as replacing a principal or, in some cases, replacing half the teaching staff, must be done by the first day of school later this summer.

All ED officials would say about the applications is that they are getting very careful review.

But now I've got a little more insight into why this process might be dragging on for certain states, thanks to a 34-page document prepared for the next meeting of the California State Board of Education (scroll down the main agenda to Item #26) published online over the holiday weekend. (Big thanks to Doug McRae, a retired test publisher in Monterey who follows all of this stuff closely, for directing me here!) Indeed, judging from California's experience, ED officials are scrutinizing these applications very closely.

I knew California had to revise its application, but, as this agenda item makes clear, state education officials had to submit revisions, not once, not twice, not three times, but four times. California first filed its application on March 26. It made its last revision on June 16, eight days before ED gave the state final approval. The nature of the requested changes range from what circumstances would prompt the state to withdraw grant funding from a school to exactly how the state would score and rank the applications it receives from local districts.

Much of the revising that ED asked California to do was on the application state officials had drafted for school districts to use when they apply for grants on behalf of eligible schools. ED officials wanted more budget details from the targeted schools, as well as more specific information on how districts would use their small share of the grants to help schools execute their improvement plans.

One of the more eye-catching clarifications that ED asked California to address was language in its original application that seemed to indicate that low-performing charter schools would be expected to opt for the school closure model. (Remember that ED is requiring that schools targeted for turnaround select one of four methods of improvement, including shutting down the school and moving kids to a nearby, higher-performing one.)

In their response, California officials wrote that they had "modified" the wording to "reflect that persistently lowest-achieving charter schools that do not select the School Closure intervention model must clarify how the intervention selected will create a significantly different instructional model and school culture."

So does this mean that the nine charter schools in California that were identified as grant-eligible are considered to be un-fixable? Or is the theory that charters, by their very nature, are supposed to already be innovative and free of the bureaucratic and contractual constraints that hamper regular public schools, so if they aren't working in that context, they ought to just go away?

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Ye Olde Battle between states' rights and the federal government's big foot is heating up again in Texas.

This time, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives are playing hardball with Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, who they have accused of taking billions in federal stimulus dollars meant for public schools and refusing to spend it on hiring in school districts.

In an amendment to the $10 billion edujobs bill that was approved by the House late last week, some Texas Democrats attached a measure that would single out the Lone Star State by requiring that the roughly $820 million that the state would be eligible for go directly to school districts. The effort is aimed at getting around Gov. Perry's office, though, in order for the districts to receive the money, the governor would have to "certify" that the federal funds would not supplant any state money. Texas' receipt of the money would also be conditional on the governor promising not to proportionally cut public schools more than any other sector in the next budget cycle.

Perry's office has been fuming and said any attempt by Washington to dictate how Texas devises a budget would be "unconstitutional." The U.S. Senate still must vote on the larger measure, which includes the Texas provision.

Remember that Perry, a staunch preacher of states' rights, has twice refused to participate in the Obama administration's $4 billion Race to the Top sweepstakes, saying it amounted to too much federal intrusion in a state matter.

This latest dust-up is playing out as Perry pursues re-election. His main challenger—former Houston Mayor Bill White, a Democrat—has been sharply critical of the governor's education policies, particularly Texas' high school dropout numbers.

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Charter schools are getting lots of media attention this week—from the appearance of Bill Gates at the National Charter Schools Conference in Chicago to the release of a new federal study that found charters have little edge over regular public schools. Then there was the bombshell that dropped late Tuesday night that some congressional Democrats want to shift $100 million in federal money meant for charters to the $10 billion bill aimed at staving off widespread layoffs in public schools.

So let me just add to this week's charter school overload.

Hearing Bill Gates call for the shuttering of bad charters—which is exactly what Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the national charter schools audience last year—made me think I should scour the states' applications for $3.5 billion in Title I School Improvement Grants to see how many "persistently lowest-achieving schools"—the campuses that are eligible for the money—are charters.

I naively thought I could look at the 32 state applications posted on the Education Department's website in half a day's time to compile my list. It was clear after combing through Arizona's list and confirming which schools were in fact charters that I would have to scale back my ambitions.

So I settled on a sample of five states to give a snapshot of how many charters are performing poorly enough to meet the federal government's rules that schools entitled to the money must be those that are "persistently lowest-achieving," or those that rank in the bottom 5 percent. There are wide variations, as you will see, but keep in mind that every state developed its own methodology—which Education Department honchos had to approve—for calculating which schools would be eligible.

Arizona: Out of 306 schools that the state calculated to be eligible for a slice of the grants, at least 59 are charters.

California: Education officials in the nation's largest state calculated that 188 schools were eligible; nine are charters. (thank you, dear California, for clearly labeling which schools were charters!)

Colorado: Of the 315 schools eligible, at least 33 are charters.

Missouri: There are 52 schools eligible, and at least eight of them are charters.

New York: Out of the 403 schools labeled as eligible, only one is a charter. (I'm double-checking this one since the number is so low, so if I hear something different from folks at the state department of education, I will update this post.)

There you have it. In a state like California, where there are more than 800 charter schools, only nine made the list by the state's calculations. That's a pretty incredible showing for the charter sector. Charter performance in Arizona doesn't look as good, but it's important to point out that the charter sector has roughly 500 schools. And New York's charter schools—which number about 145, with most of them in New York City—looks very strong if that number holds up.

We'll be curious now to see how many charters actually end up getting some of the money.

UPDATE: It is true that only one charter in New York is on the list of eligible schools, confirms Jane Briggs, a spokeswoman for the state department of education. She offers an illuminating explanation for why this may be the case. Below is an excerpt from an email she just sent to me.

"It is correct that at present John Lindsay is the only charter school on our list of Tier I, II, and III schools. There are many reasons why the number of identified charters is small:

1. Typically schools must be in operation for a minimum of three years before they would be identified. A lot of charter schools haven't been around long enough to be on our lists yet.

2. Most of our charters schools are elementary schools, which Statewide have been making AYP in recent years at a high rate.

3. Charter schools are often small, and small schools tend to have an easier time making AYP because they are typically accountable for fewer disaggregated groups than large schools.

4. The charter schools that are the weakest academic performers are not renewed and therefore would not be on the list of Tier I, II, or III schools.

5. We do have a lot of good charter schools that are performing well."

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