FOCUS DC News Wire 7/22/13

 

 

House Republicans passed a bill Friday to reduce the federal role in public education and cede back to states decisions about how to deal with failing schools, how and whether to evaluate teachers, and how to spend much of the money sent by Washington to educate poor, disabled and non-English-speaking students.

 

The bill marks a significant departure from No Child Left Behind, the 2002 law that set federal goals for academic achievement, penalties for schools that fell short of those goals, and prescriptions for steps states must take to improve failing schools. No Democrats supported the bill, which passed by a 221 to 207 margin, with 12 Republicans voting with the Democrats. It marked the first time in a dozen years that either chamber of Congress approved a comprehensive bill to update federal education law.

 

Republicans argued that states and local school districts are in the best position to decide how to educate children and that federal control has hamstrung teachers and school leaders. “States and school districts have been clamoring, clamoring for less federal mandates,” said Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), the lead sponsor of the bill. But Democrats said that without federal oversight, some states will return to a time when they failed to do much to educate poor, disabled and non-English-speaking students.

 

The bill would freeze education spending at sequester rates instead of restoring federal dollars to previous levels, which means schools nationwide would receive $1 billion less next year. Although its passage marked a victory for Republican leaders, the bill’s future is cloudy. President Obama has threatened to veto it, and Senate Democrats have crafted their ownversion that retains much of the current federal oversight of K-12 public education. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), the sponsor of the Senate bill, said that the House version “falls short” and that “significant differences” remain between the two visions.

 

In a raucous, lectern-pounding speech, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who led opposition to the GOP bill, argued that it would devastate the country’s most vulnerable children. When Miller was advised “the gentleman’s time has run out,” he shouted back, “No! You know who’s running out of time? Children are running out of time in this nation,” which sparked a slow clap in the chamber. The GOP bill would update the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which Congress created in 1965 to distribute federal money primarily to help children who are poor, disabled or English-language learners. That money represents about 10 percent of funding for the nation’s public schools; localities and states provide the rest. The current version of the law, No Child Left Behind, expired in 2007, but Congress has been unable to agree on an update.

 

No Child Left Behind sets conditions and requirements for every public school receiving federal funds to educate poor students and those with special needs. The law defines academic progress and sets sanctions for schools that don’t measure up. It also dictates specific improvement strategies that districts must adopt for their weakest schools. The GOP bill takes a different tack, returning power to the states. It would retain the No Child Left Behind requirements that schools test students annually in math and reading from grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. But states would set their own academic standards, decide whether schools are meeting them and determine what — if anything — to do about underperforming schools.

 

An unusual coalition of business groups, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, have joined teachers unions, civil rights groups and advocates for the disabled to oppose the GOP bill.

Republican lawmakers railed against waivers that the Obama administration issued to 39 states and the District of Columbia that exempt them from some of the most punitive aspects of No Child Left Behind. The administration began issuing the waivers in 2011, after mounting complaints from governors and school districts that No Child Left Behind was unrealistic and too punitive. In the absence of an updated law, Education Secretary Arne Duncan began giving states waivers in exchange for their agreement to embrace certain education policy changes favored by Obama, including new academic standards known as the Common Core. The GOP bill expressly forbids the Education Department from using waivers or grants to influence state education policy.

 

 

The U.S. House of Representatives today passed its version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, including an amendment that will allow Title I funds to flow to charter schools, after two days of debate.

The bill passed 221-207 with no Democratic support and 12 Republicans crossing party lines to vote against it. The bill, dubbed the "Student Success Act," gives states and school districts more control and flexibility for spending federal funds and improving low-performing schools, and it strips the No Child Left Behind provision that requires states to set specific goals for student achievement for the general population of students as well as certain groups of students, such as English-language learners and special education students.

 

The Title I portability amendment was introduced by the House Majority Leader, Rep. Eric Cantor, a Republican, and drummed up a debate between him and Rep. George Miller, a top Democrat on the House education committee, in the final hours before the vote, with Miller calling the amendment "imitation vouchers."

 

The portability amendment allows parents to take Title I dollars to any public school of their choice, including charters. This would be a departure from how those dollars are typically distributed, tying the funds to individual students rather than steering the dollars to schools with high numbers of low-income students. Although the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools did not take an official stance for or against the House bill, it does support the Title I provision, said Nina Rees, the organization's president and chief executive officer, in an interview today.

 

"By and large, we feel that when the dollars follow children to the school that they select, you create a better marketplace for reform," she said. "Attaching [Title I] dollars directly to those students who are eligible will make it easier to implement from an accounting standpoint," and makes the process more transparent, she said.

 

Currently, some charter schools do receive Title I dollars, Rees said, but the provision could expand the number of charters that receive Title I funds because of the change to the distribution model.

Both the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) and the National School Boards Association (NSBA) supported the bill but came out in opposition to the Cantor amendment. After the passage of the amendment, the groups continued endorsing the legislation while making their stance on Title I portability known.

 

"Under the portability program, if children leave a Title I school to go to another school [such as a charter school], the result is a voucher program that leaves the Title I school with fewer funds to serve its students," said Michael Resnick, NSBA's associate executive director for federal advocacy and public policy. In essence, the provision would siphon funds from the neediest schools, said Resnick, to go toward schools that may not be serving the highest-need student populations without reducing the cost of operation for schools with high concentrations of students in poverty.

 

The Democratic-controlled Senate education committee passed its own (very different) version of the ESEA in June that does not include Title I portability, so the House and Senate versions of the bill would have to be hammered out in committee—if that ever happens, as Education Weekreporter Alyson Klein explains. So far, the Senate has not voted on a final version of its bill and such a vote has not been scheduled.

In addition, the Obama Administration has threatened to veto the House bill in its current form.

 

 

Most parents with children in public schools do not support recent changes in education policy, from closing low-performing schools to shifting public dollars to charter schools to private school vouchers, according to a new poll to be released Monday by the American Federation of Teachers.

 

The poll, conducted by Democratic polling firm Hart Research Associates, surveyed 1,000 parents this month and found that most would rather see their neighborhood schools strengthened and given more resources than have options to enroll their children elsewhere. AFT President Randi Weingarten is expected to highlight the poll’s findings during a speech Monday at the union’s annual meeting in Washington. The AFT is the nation’s second-largest teachers union and represents school employees in most of the major urban school districts.

 

In the speech, Weingarten will call for a reinvestment in public schools and say that education reform hasn’t worked and isn’t what parents want. “Decades of top-down edicts, mass school closures, privatization and test fixation with sanctions, instead of support, haven’t moved the needle — not in the right direction, at least,” Weingarten says in remarks from the speech provided to The Washington Post. “You’ve heard their refrain: competition, closings, choice. Underlying that is a belief that disruption is good and stability is bad.”

 

The union is fighting plans by school systems to shutter schools in strugglingChicago, Philadelphia and D.C. neighborhoods. Union officials say the poll results counter the argument made by those pushing policy changes that parents want more choice in deciding where to send their children and a market-based approach to education. Sixty-one percent of parents polled said they were opposed to closing low-performing schools and reassigning students to a different school, while roughly one-third approved of the policy. The poll had a margin of error of 3.1 percent.

 

When it comes to traditional public schools, more than three out of every four parents surveyed said they were opposed to reducing compensation for teachers or cutting resources for the classroom while increasing spending on charter schools. More than half the parents polled, or 58 percent, said they did not approve of officialslengthening the school day, but more than one-third thought it was a good idea. While 56 percent are opposed to giving tax dollars to families to pay for private school tuition, 41 percent approved.

 

On the issue of standardized tests, a majority of parents surveyed said that too much learning in the classroom has been sacrificed in order to accommodate state tests during the school year. A majority of parents reported that their children have been anxious about those tests. Pockets of resistance to standardized testing have been popping up across the country, with students in Seattle, Pittsburgh and elsewhere opting out of tests this spring in protest.

 

Among respondents, 38 percent identified as Democrats, 33 percent considered themselves independents and 29 percent were Republicans. Roughly two out of every three parents polled said public schools were more important than religious institutions, businesses and the military in terms of providing important skills for their children. Most parents felt strongly that layoffs and a high turnover of teachers; closing schools in major cities; reducing art and music instruction to focus on math and reading; increasing class sizes; and cutting school budgets have had a negative effect on public schools.

 

Nearly two-thirds of parents were satisfied with their children’s public schools, while 31 percent were not. Seven in 10 parents said they were satisfied with the quality of their children’s teachers.

Most — 92 percent — had students in traditional public schools, while 8 percent had children enrolled in charter schools. Charter schools are publicly funded but privately operated and independent from many of the regulations of the school system. Most charter schools are not unionized.

 

 

In today’s global economy the old rules don’t apply. Students in Maryland no longer compete only with students in Virginia; now they compete with students in Helsinki, Toronto and Seoul — and they’re losing. U.S. students are falling behind their international peers in reading, math and science. But there’s hope — the state and local adoption of the Common Core State Standards provide the best opportunity in a generation for understanding the gap, reversing this decline and putting all students on the right path. The Common Core State Standards have the support of America’s business leaders, and these standards should have the support of any American who wants to ensure our country and our children are ready to compete in the 21st century global marketplace.

 

Despite the fact that these standards are voluntary and were developed by America’s governors and state school superintendents, they have recently come under attack by parties who claim they are a federal government takeover of kindergarten through Grade 12 schools. These fears are not only misplaced, they threaten the strength of our economy. To remain competitive in the global marketplace, American companies need employees who can read, write, use mathematics and make well-reasoned decisions. Ideally, we would educate all of our students to succeed in innovative 21st century jobs that will require greater skills. Unfortunately, at present, we are not.

 

Today, U.S. students rank 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math when compared to their global peers on the most recent Program for International Student Assessment. The recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study data show that only 29 percent of U.S. eighth graders can correctly solve a basic fraction equation that 86 percent of students in South Korea can solve. I think U.S. eighth graders can match the performance of South Korean students if they know what is expected of them. The goal of the Common Core State Standards is to be very clear about those expectations.

 

Some parents think poor student performance in reading, science and math is only an urban problem or a low-income issue. But a new, first-of-its-kind school-by-school comparison has demonstrated that the performance gap between American and foreign students is not isolated to low-income communities. The report, released by the education group America Achieves, shatters the myth that middle-class students in the United States are somehow better than other countries.

 

The Common Core State Standards can help our students catch up to the rest of the world. The standards set more rigorous academic requirements in English language arts and mathematics. They were voluntarily adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia, and they would largely replace a patchwork of inconsistent, often weak or sometimes non-existent academic standards in America’s 7,000 local school districts. They build on the work of other states, such as Massachusetts and Minnesota, and top-performing countries that perform well on international tests.

 

If our students are unable to keep up with their global peers, institutions — from our military to our manufacturing sector — will erode. Without a thriving economy and high-paying jobs, American families will struggle to make ends meet and provide the future security for successive generations that we have come to take for granted.

 

It is for these reasons that Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs of leading U.S. companies, is committed to the Common Core State Standards and their implementation. Our members’ companies operate in an increasingly interconnected global economy where competitors transcend international borders, not merely neighboring state lines. It’s not good enough if only 29 percent of our students can correctly solve a basic math equation. We need to do better to ensure our students are prepared to succeed in college or the workplace.

 

From the establishment of a public education system to the creation of the first GI bill, the United States has long recognized the benefits a well-educated work force confers on our society. The Common Core State Standards extend that commitment and inform America’s students, teachers and parents about what we need to know and when. I am confident when we know what is required, we will meet that challenge and secure our future.

 

 

Some education issues never appear in political debates, op-ed pages or blue-ribbon commission reports. That doesn’t make them any less irritating. Take, for instance, the widespread reluctance to let students take exams home after they are marked and graded. My recent column about a Montgomery County father who was denied a chance to see his son’s tests so he could help the boy improve brought a surge of e-mails and blog comments, as happens every time I mention this mostly ignored but frequent parental complaint.

 

“Any test deserves a critique, otherwise how is the student to learn from his or her mistakes or, even better, build on their strengths,” said Terry Davies, a father and grandfather in Leesburg. “How many times have I heard a teacher say that the biggest problem in education today is not the quality of the teaching but the quality of the parenting? Now here a quality parent is stonewalled in an attempt to aid his struggling students.”

 

One mother said a well-regarded D.C. charter school returned only the multiple-choice answer sheets, not the corresponding questions, because it wanted to recycle them on future exams. “That made no sense to us,” she said. An elementary school father said he was mystified for more than a year because his son seemed to understand his lessons but did so poorly on standardized tests. Only when a test came home by mistake did he discover his son’s obsessive-compulsive disorder was causing him to avoid marking any B or C answers.

An Urbana father said that when he protested a school’s refusal to let him see the graded exams of his autistic son, an administrator said it would be unfair “to let those students with involved parents get the extra help.”

 

Not seeing state standardized final exams does not bother parents so much. The results come too late to help their children prepare. But barring them from seeing monthly and midterm exams makes little sense to them or me. Looking at last year’s tests is considered cheating by today’s schools. In my day, it was called review. Today’s schools appear to have no data justifying their position. Howard Kaplan, a retired biology teacher, said he always returned exams because “that was the summation of that section.” He said other teachers “didn’t return exams because it meant that they would have to construct new exams every time. However, being a good teacher means you work hard.”

 

Montgomery County schools spokesman Brian Edwards said schools don’t send tests home but will let parents see all but semester and final exams if they come to school, an inconvenience that cuts off parents who have to be at work and frustrates others. Sharon Karayianis said only after many e-mails to staff did she get permission to see her daughter’s exams at Churchill High School. “The meeting had to be during normal staff hours so that it did require my child to miss class instructional time,” Karayianis said. “It also required me to miss more than a half a day of work.” After reviewing the exams for four hours, “I realized how important it was to do so,” she said. “I was greatly impressed with the constructive comments given by teachers. They took a lot of effort grading the exams, and their comments would have fallen on deaf ears if we had not made the appointment to see the exams.”

 

Why do schools want to keep such helpful teaching a secret? Some educators and parents see school as a competition. Nobody should get an advantage in the race for top grades. Cheating, not learning, seems to be their greatest concern. Other educators and parents see school as a place where everyone gets a chance to improve their skills and thinking, with as much support as possible. What better way to improve than to have the ability to learn from your own mistakes?