NEWS
- Friday was DC Public Education Announcement Day
- D.C. tax revenue rises, but mayor keeps spending expectations low
- No Child Left Behind debate in the House suspended
- Contentious teacher-related policies moving from legislatures to the courts
Friday was DC Public Education Announcement Day
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
March 2, 2015
Last Friday Mayor Bowser's Administration made several moves on the public education front. First, Steve Bumbaugh was nominated for a seat on the DC Public Charter School Board. He would take Herb Tillery's vacated slot. Mr. Bumbaugh is manager of Breakthrough Schools: D.C. at the CityBridge Foundation. In this role he is assisting with the organization's goal of creating redesigned whole schools serving low income children through a $2 million grant competition. I covered the application process for these schools at the 2013 Education Innovation Summit.
Mr. Bumbaugh's fascinating background includes a stint working for businessman Stuart Bainum, Sr. as one of two mentors hired in 1990 to assist the 67 Kramer Jr. High School students Mr. Bainum recruited as part of his participation in the I Have a Dream Program. A documentary entitled Southeast 67 recently captured the 20th anniversary of the program in which Mr. Bumbaugh appears. I had the extremely fortunate opportunity to get to know the unbelievably kind Mr. Bainum through his involvement in the medical field as an owner of a chain of nursing homes.
Also on this day Ms. Bowser, along with Deputy Mayor for Education Jennie Niles, announced that Hanseul Kang would be appointed as the next State Superintendent for Education. Many people involved in public education in the nation's capital already know Ms. Kang as she had worked here as a managing director for Teach for America. Most recently she served since 2011 as the chief of staff for Tennessee’s Department of Education.
Finally, Ms. Bowser revealed some "tweaks" to the school boundary feeder pattern plan that former Mayor Gray implemented shortly before he left office. The changes, according to the Washington Post's Michael Alison Chandler and Aaron Davis, would allow for the next seven years some students in Ward 4 to continue to be able to attend Alice Deal Middle School and Wilson High School. It would also permit a limited number of Ward 7 students to attend Capitol Hill's Eastern High School. As a candidate for Mayor Ms. Bowser had said the boundary plan needed to be redone.
D.C. tax revenue rises, but mayor keeps spending expectations low
The Washington Post
By Aaron C. Davis
February 28, 2015
The District’s budget gap is not as dire as originally expected. Nearly half of the current shortfall was wiped away by a rise in tax revenue from year-end holiday sales and bonuses handed out by employers, the District’s independent financial officer reported late Friday.
Projected revenue in the coming budget year also rose, lowering an expected shortfall next year to $190 million.
Despite the city’s improving fiscal picture, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) on Saturday sought to tamp down expectations that her first budget could fulfill all of her campaign promises.
“I inherited the success of my predecessors; I also inherited ‘dues’ . . . the past dues,” Bowser told hundreds who gathered in Anacostia for the last stop on a promised listening tour before releasing her first budget this month. “There is a deficit in the current year, and a deficit in the upcoming year . . . and the gap is not insignificant,” Bowser said.
Bowser’s budget chief went on to describe the upcoming gap — about 1.5 percent of the District’s $12.6 billion budget — as double the amount the city allocates annually for all snow removal, garbage pickup and other public works, or nearly four times as much as all yearly spending on city libraries.
Bowser has made a number of financial commitments in the next fiscal year, including a promise to direct $100 million annually to affordable housing and additional money to other social services designed to aid the city’s working class.
But her forecast drew criticism Saturday from D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D), who said he met with Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey S. DeWitt on Friday and heard “no concern whatsoever” about the current budget year. The gap for next year, Mendelson said, looked increasingly manageable.
“I’m surprised by that reaction” from the mayor, Mendelson said. “Yes, the [chief financial officer’s] report presents a problem, but it is a problem that is manageable . . . not only comparable to previous years, but less than what other jurisdictions are now grappling with.”
As a candidate, Bowser promised more community outreach on the city’s spending plan. She said she would include residents in crafting it, instead of seeking to correct problems that residents found after a final product was released.
Over the month of February, the call for input was met with enthusiasm. Several hundred residents turned out, twice on frigid nights, and again on Saturday for three budget forums.
The talk of having to pick and choose priorities led several residents in the city’s working-class neighborhood of Anacostia on Saturday to call for tax increases on the wealthy.
“The city has people who can afford a tax increase,” said Kendall Bryan, of Ward 7.
At each of the three forums, Bowser asked participants to vote with applause for the city’s most important priority. Applause rang out for public safety, the environment, infrastructure, economic opportunity and, most loudly, for education.
Noting the applause for everything, Bowser drew laughter by asking: “Now do you see why my job is difficult? We’re going to work hard to draft a budget that reflects all of your priorities.”
No Child Left Behind debate in the House suspended
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
February 27, 2015
The House suspended floor debate on a Republican bill to rewrite No Child Left Behind on Friday afternoon, with party leaders saying they had to shift the chamber’s focus to debate funding the Department of Homeland Security.
Earlier in the day, the chances for the education bill’s passage appeared uncertain, thanks to GOP defections among the party’s conservatives who said the plan did not go far enough to shrink the federal influence on K-12 education.
“This proposal spends nearly as much as No Child Left Behind, is nearly as long in page length and fails to give states an option to opt out of the law,” said Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that urged Republicans to vote against the bill. “As it stands, it’s a huge missed opportunity to restore state and local control of education.”
Democrats also opposed the bill, saying that it goes too far in transferring power from the federal government to states and local districts. They are joined by major civil rights groups, teachers unions and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
This week, President Obama threatened to veto the House bill, arguing that it “abdicates the historic federal role in elementary and secondary education of ensuring the educational progress of all of America’s students, including students from low-income families, students with disabilities, English learners, and students of color.”
A nearly identical bill was passed by the House in 2013 under a similar veto threat, but it was never taken up by the Senate.
The bill would strip the federal government of much of its authority to oversee how states and local school districts spend federal dollars designated to help educate poor and disabled students. Republicans say they want to return power to states. Democrats argue that the federal government must exercise some oversight over local schools, otherwise some will ignore the needs of poor and disabled students as well as English learners.
The Republican bill would largely let states determine how to spend federal dollars. States would not be required to meet federal benchmarks of academic progress. States would have to intervene in high-poverty schools that are not improving by their measures. But the type of intervention and the number of schools would be up to the states, which would also not be required to evaluate teachers.
The most debated element of the bill is a proposal to change the way federal funds are allocated to help educate poor students.
Currently, public schools receive those federal funds according to a formula based on the number of disadvantaged students enrolled. Under the Republican plan, known as “Title 1 portability,” the money would “follow the child” so that if a poor student transferred from a high-poverty school to a wealthier one, the federal money would follow the student to the new school. The provision would apply only to public schools.
The Obama administration said that proposal would devastate schools that serve the neediest students.
The bill passed out of the House Education Committee on a strict party-line vote, with no Democrats in support, and debate on the House floor began Wednesday.
An aide to the bill’s main sponsor, Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), said the lawmaker was hopeful that action on the bill would resume later Friday.
In what some observers say was an attempt to attract conservative votes, Republicans attached last-minute language to the bill that would withhold federal funding from districts with school-based health centers that provide information about abortion, including the location of the nearest abortion provider.
No Child Left Behind was the most recent version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which Congress passed after it recognized that some states were not meeting the needs of students who were poor or had a disability. No Child Left Behind, bipartisan legislation signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002, greatly expanded the federal role in education, requiring states for the first time to annually test students in math and reading in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school and to report those scores publicly by subgroups based on race, income, disability, gender and whether students were English learners.
The law also required schools to demonstrate academic progress among each subgroup or face increasingly stiffer penalties. Congress was due to reauthorize No Child Left Behind in 2007 but has not been able to find consensus about the proper role of the federal government.
Contentious teacher-related policies moving from legislatures to the courts
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
February 28, 2015
Opponents of the nation’s teacher unions won a landmark victory last year in a California lawsuit that challenged tenure protections, a case that became the beginning of a national effort to roll back teacher tenure laws in state courts.
Now the largest unions in the country are using a similar tactic, as teachers turn to the courts to fight for one of their most pressing interests: An end to test-based evaluations they say are arbitrary and unfair.
The lawsuits show that two of the nation’s most contentious battles over the teaching profession are shifting from legislative arenas to the courts, giving judges the chance to make decisions that could shape the way teachers are hired, fired and paid. Union critics and wealthy advocates have hired lawyers to take on the teachers; the teachers, through their unions, have gone before the bench to go after state officials and their policies.
The latest foray into the courtroom began Feb. 13, when New Mexico teachers sued state officials over an evaluation system that relies heavily on student test scores. Tennessee teachers also sued their state officials this month, arguing that most teachers’ evaluations are based on the test scores of students they don’t actually teach. Florida teachers brought a similar lawsuit last year; it is now in federal appeals court, while other complaints are pending in Texas and New York.
Union officials say they expect to see more lawsuits in the future, especially over evaluations that use complex and controversial algorithms — called “value-added models” — to figure out how much of a student’s learning can be attributed to their teacher.
“There will be more challenges because things are not being seen as credible and fair,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which joined the New Mexico lawsuit. “What we’ve gotten to is this routinized, mechanized displacement of human judgment, and that’s what I think you’re seeing — that is the underlying issue that is the root of this agita about evaluations.”
“It’s ridiculous that we have to go to the courts,” Weingarten said. But she said that New Mexico education officials and other supporters of test-based evaluation are deaf to evidence that the evaluations aren’t working.
Critics say that the unions are exaggerating both the problems associated with value-added scores and the weight that they carry in evaluations. Value-added scores account for up to 50 percent of evaluations in some states, and a smaller portion in many others, with the remainder of teachers’ ratings comprised of classroom observations and other measures.
“Essentially teacher unions don’t want any evaluation,” said Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institute and a supporter of value-added measures. “That’s what they’re angling for.”
Until recently, teachers’ evaluations in many jurisdictions were based almost exclusively on principals’ observations, and the vast majority of teachers were rated satisfactory. But the Obama administration made test-based evaluations a requirement for any state that wanted to compete for Race to the Top grant money or win relief from the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Now 35 states require student achievement to be a significant factor in teacher evaluations, and many school districts are using those evaluations to make decisions about teacher bonuses and as a basis for firings.
Most states are using the value-added models to determine how much teachers contribute to their students’ achievement on standardized tests. But only a fraction of teachers teach subjects and grade levels that are tested.
Art and music teachers, for example, have no such tests. In some states, those teachers are assigned a score anyway, either based on how their students performed on tests in other subjects or based on the performance of all students in a school.
A plaintiff in the Florida case is a calculus and algebra II teacher whose students are mostly high school juniors and seniors. But her value-added score — which accounted for 50 percent of her evaluation — was based on the reading scores of 9th- and 10th-graders.
A federal district court judge opined last year that Florida’s evaluations were unfair, but also found that they are legal. The Florida teachers have appealed and the case is now before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Tennessee teachers filed a similar lawsuit in early February.
“We believe in teacher evaluation, when done right,” said Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, which has helped argue the cases in Florida and Tennessee. “No one who cares about our students and schools can explain why it is sensible to evaluate teachers, and make high-stakes employment decisions about them, based on a measure of student learning that is completely unrelated to what those teachers are trained, licensed and employed to teach.”
In other cases, including in Rochester, Syracuse, Houston and in Knox County, Tenn., teachers have taken a different legal approach, attacking the value-added models as arbitrary and unreliable.
A growing number of groups have voiced skepticism about the validity of value-added models. The National Research Council, the American Statistical Association and the Rand Corporation have all cautioned against using value-added scores to make personnel decisions.
Others believe that value-added scores offer valuable information and are no more flawed than other evaluation methods, such as classroom observations that can be skewed by a principal’s bias.
“My sense is that all of the measures are flawed, but they all also are useful. They’re all better than nothing but none of them is perfect,” said Morgan S. Polikoff, an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California who has researched evaluation methods.
The latest union complaint, in New Mexico, argues that the evaluations violate teachers’ due process rights because they are “based on flawed methodology, erroneous records, and inaccurate data.”
“This system doesn’t make sense,” said John Simms, an Albuquerque middle-school social studies teacher who was rated effective, but who said his value-added score tells him nothing useful about how to improve. “If we can’t make heads or tails of it as educators, how’s it supposed to help us help kids?”
The New Mexico lawsuit says that there were widespread errors in the new evaluations because of a rushed rollout and faulty data, including incomplete or wrong test scores. And it says that some teachers were docked for absences that should have been protected under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act. Attendance counts for up to 10 percent of evaluations in New Mexico, and teachers lose points for taking sick or personal days, even if such leave is allowed under their contracts.
Albuquerque teacher Pamela Crone said she missed four months of school last year after she fell on a wet floor in the school building and suffered a brain injury. She received zero out of 40 possible points for attendance, which pushed her into the “minimally effective” category.
“It was just so incredibly unfair,” said Crone, who resigned at the end of last year because of ongoing health problems. “I’ve got 36 years of really excellent evaluations and to have had that put down in writing about me, it just was not right.”
Ellen Hur, a spokeswoman for Skandera, said that New Mexico state officials have not been served with notice of the most recent complaint. “However, if there is yet another lawsuit from the AFT, this is getting ridiculous,” Hur said.
“It’s time for the union to stop obstructing and wasting taxpayer dollars so we can focus on serving our students and improving our education system, instead of wasting precious time and resources on yet another baseless lawsuit,” she said.
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