JvonKorff on Education

Differentiated Instruction Supported by Technological Innovation

2012-02-19T07:56:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I wroteabout the emerging consensus that differentiation instruction canmaximize learning for more students. Skeptics point out thatdifferentiation is one of many movements that have run througheducation, and argue that eventually, the differentiation movement willsubside. I disagree. Differentiation is a belated response to thefact that people are different. They have different motivationallevels; different intellects; different interests; differing tolerancefor challenge; and different levels of persistence. They arrive inschool with vastly different levels of preparation. They graduate tojobs with different demands, jobs of which now require employees whocan learn new skills and master new tasks.

As I mentioned yesterday, differentiation of instruction placestremendous demands on teachers, parents and students. If more than onelevel of learning is going on in the classroom, it means that theteacher is spending less time "teaching" each of those learning levels. Without adequate support, the teacher may be expected to prepare morethan one "lesson" for each of her elementary subjects. Clearly, ifwe try to differentiate instruction by delivering instruction in thesame way as before, the differentiation movement is bound to fail.

Onecommenter has argued that differentiated instruction is the wrong wayto describe the goal, and that we should instead call it"differentiated learning." That phrase signifies the increased levelof responsibility that differentiation places on students to becomemanagers of their own learning process. If differentiation is going towork, it stands to reason, that in the earliest grades, we shoulddevelop students ability to learn how to learn. Some people willidentify strands of this idea in the Montissori movement-- the idea that in the earliest grades students should develop a senseof responsibility to participate as a partner in the learning process.

Theother fundamental change that is likely to support differentiation isthe explosion of new technology that can support differentiatedlearning. Some of this new technology comes out of the Home-Schoolmovement, which has had to find ways to support parents who areattempting to teach subjects that they may not know. Much of thistechnology is springing out of a recognition by text-book publisherswho have just begun to scratch the surface of accommodating textbooksto computers and the internet. Universities are now developing internet based high level courses thatallow distance learning for persons not enrolled at the university. Acompany known as Khan Academy has created a powerful resource for the support of mathematics learning. Khan academy boasts a library of over 2,600 videos covering everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and 303 practice exercises, to help students learn what they want to learn, at their own pace. A website called Purple Math provides a vast collection of resources that can help students who arestruggling with algebra, or students who want to accept the challengeof learning algebra, before it is offered in school. A company called Thinkwell producesan array of college level courses, many of which provide a series oflectures delivered by outstanding university teachers. All of theseresources, if properly integrated into the classroom can make thedifferentiation process more palatable for teachers.

Differentiated Instruction...Differentiated Learning

2012-02-18T07:26:00.000-08:00

I'vetaken a few months' vacation from blog-posting because I was preparingfor a trial in January. Preparing for a trial isanall-consuming effort that occupies your workday, evenings and weekends. It doesn't leave you with time and energy to engage infrivolous enterprises like blogging.

Now that I've recovered from the trial, I can get back toblogging now and again. I decided to write a bit about theimportance of differentiated instruction in today's public education.An article on the Wisconsin teachers association (WEAC)website explains theimportance of differentiated instruction.

A seventh grade boy spends his time in English classstruggling to readat a beginner’s level. A girl at a nearby desk with her nose in thebook could probably tackle a Harvard literature class. Seated inbetween is a youngster who’s a whiz at math but takes a whole period towrite three English sentences because he’s much more comfortable in hisnative Spanish.

As the author explains:

Teachers have faced this dilemma since the days of the one-roomschoolhouse, which mixed 6- to 16-year-olds in the same space. Asolution then and now, say Tomlinson and many educators, isdifferentiation. It’s a buzzword that’s seen a thousand iterations,from SRA reading kits to placing kids in the bluebird or buzzardreading group. It’s also a philosophy that sends shudders down thespines of some parents and others who doubt children can reach theirhighest potential in heterogeneous classrooms.

Thisissue, students at very different points of readiness, has beenaddressed in several ways over the years. Some schools anddistricts have grouped children for instruction exclusively by age,called heterogeneous classrooms and then have delivered the sameinstruction to everyone in the classroom, ready or not. If youare in third grade, you're doing "third grade arithmetic" darn it. If you are ahead of that, then you are going to be boredmost of the time, or maybe doing so-called "enrichments," designed tokeep you busy until the class is learning something that you don'tknow. The problem with that approach is that some children areway ahead of the average, and other children are way behind. Inthe last several decades, this gap seems to have grown substantially,so that a typical teacher may have a classroom, if it is grouped by ageonly, with a reading level gap of from two or three grade levels belowand two or three grade levels above.

Oneway of addressing this problem would be to group by academic level. But in today's education, more and more, schools areattacking this gap by attempting to differentiate instruction. The goal of differentiation is to challenge all students in theclassroom. If a 3d grade student is reading at a kindergartenlevel, teaching reading to that student with 3d grade instructionalmaterial is going to frustrate the student and lead the student tobelieve that she is not capable of reading. If a 3d gradestudent is reading at a 7th grade level, giving that student a 3d gradereader is not only a waste of time, but it will lead that student tothink of school as a boring waste of time where nothing interestinghappens. And worse, it causes the student to develop bad workhabits, because it creates the impression that you can get by in lifewithout hard work.

How in the world can one teacherdifferentiate in multiple subjects for all those kids? The shortanswer is that it is difficult, and it is especially difficult inclassrooms as the number of students increases. There is a widevariety of literature written for teachers on various tactics to implement differentiation. The tactics include:

Tiered assignments.
Grouping students within the classroom
Grouping students for a particular subject and trading groups with other teachers
Using multiple textbooks or instructional resources
Using a "begin and branch" approach to lessons
Contract grading, in which students undertake different learning objectives
Use of modern digital instructional materials that automatically differentiate based on student performance
Acceleration of advanced students for math or reading into another classroom delivering higher level material
Teachingstudents to take responsibility for learning. Its not reallydifferentiated instruction, its "differentiated learning."

Resources:

Is differentated Instruction Effective.
Differentiated Instruction Strategies

2012-01-12T05:28:00.000-08:00

Our four year integration plan is up for renewal this year. Theplan must be submitted by the end of the year. At the same time, thestate has the entire integration revenue program under review. I havebeen advocating, for four years now, that integration above all shouldbe about assuring that students attain high levels of achievement, andthat means working as hard and long as it takes to catch up and thenexcel.   The most effective route tointegration is for students to be able to master English, science,math, and social studies at high levels.   If we have a milliondollars to spend, the very most effective thing we can do to achievetrue integration is to use that million dollars to assure that minoritystudents master literacy goals and then develop the problem solving andanalytical skills to succeed in post-secondary learning and employment.

I’ve been interested and involved in integration issues sincemy college days, when I worked in Mississippi at a time when schoolswere completely segregated. Since that time, I believe thateducators have lost sight of the original reason that civil rightsactivists risked their lives and livelihoods to make school integrationa reality. The primary goal of school integration has been to make sure that minority students participate in demanding courses of rigor. Those of us who were integration activists back in the 1960's were notthinking that putting black kids in the same classes as white kidswould have any benefit, unless the minority students were given theopportunity to have the same challenge as all other students, so thatthey could work just as hard as majority children, or harder, torealize their dreams. We knew that because of 400 years of oppression,that meant that likely those students would have to work harder, domore homework, not less, and spend more time learning to catch up. Toooften, integration programs instead seem to proceed on the theory thatif we put kids in the same classroom, somehow magically the kids whoare behind are going to jump ahead, and that is not the case.  Learning requires time, effort, persistence, in an atmosphere of highexpectations. Catching up requires working harder and longer.

Andso, I have been advocating, for four years now, that integration aboveall should be about assuring that students attain high levels ofachievement, and that means working as hard and long as it takes tocatch up and then excel. The most effective route to integration isfor students to be able to master English, science, math, and socialstudies at high levels.   If we have a million dollars to spend, thevery most effective thing we can do to achieve true integration is touse that million dollars to assure that minority students masterliteracy goals and then develop the problem solving and analyticalskills to succeed in post-secondary learning and employment.

I’vesupported past integration budgets reluctantly, because I felt that theapproach developed by our leadership deserved a chance to work.    ButI cannot support a new integration plan this time, unless there is adifferent approach to developing the plan and a different set ofgoverning principles.

As I consider whether I will support the new budget, these are the things that I will be looking at:

(1) Coordination of Compensatory revenues,special education, integration revenue, access grant funds, Title andother funds in a unified coordinated comprehensive education andlearning focused effort.    To the maximum extent, these revenuesshould work together. The central focus on learning should drive theuse of our revenues, rather than the desire to run multiple programsand program bureaucracies.

(2) Genuine Central Focus on Direct Instruction and Literacy:    We should look with great skepticism at any line items of the budgetthat are not focused on direct instruction: classroom teachers, actualmentoring, teaching, etc. Other expenditures, in my view, must carry aheavy burden of proof that there is an absolute necessity. We need toemphasize literacy and learning. I do not accept the claim that theState Department of Education will force us to use money for nonlearning purposes. Minnesota plainly allows the use of integrationrevenues for closing the achievement gap.

(3) Extending Learning Time.  There should be a significant increase in learning time for studentswho are not making adequate progress.   This should involve increasesin the amount of learning time for these students during regular schoolhours, an increase in the length of the school day, and wherenecessary, after school learning.   We should be examining theapproaches that other school districts are taking across the country inthis regard.   Where State regulations and law create impediments, weshould be asking for waivers or law changes.   The integration budget,working together with all other funding sources, should be leveraged toincrease learning time.

(4) Parent and Students Supporting Learning.  Families served by compensatory, Title, integration revenue, all daykindergarten, and other programs serving students not making adequateprogress should be required to enter into (a) a parent/guardian schooland study support agreement. (b) students should enter into learningcommitment contracts similar to the KIPP agreements. After a review ofTitle and other program requirements, I no longer accept the claim thatonly charter schools can insist on parental support requirements.

(5) College Access Integrated into Everything We Do.    College access and opportunity should be systemically integrated into our curriculum and all aspects of what we do.

(6) Implementation of Special Education Study Recommendations–Topto Bottom Review. The special education study recommends that were-examine how we are using our resources.    We should engage in a topto bottom review of how we are using resources with a focus onmaximizing learning.   Integration revenue should be coordinated withthe reforms that are developed in response to the special educationstudy.

(7) Students Speak Fluent English   We should accelerate our efforts to assure that all our students speak English fluently.

(8) Regular Reporting on Academic Progress Engendered with Integration and other Revenue

District Fund Balance Restored to Minimum Target

2011-11-03T19:40:00.000-07:00

Today's St. Cloud Daily Times carries a story that the St. Cloud School District's fund balance has finally been restored to about $5.4 million, whichtakes it for the first time to the minimum level recommended byfinancial experts. As the Times article explains "St. Cloud schooldistrict’s fund balance first approached zero in 2001 when boardmembers voted to spend about $4 million from the reserves to pay foremployee contract’s. The next year, the fund balance was down to$34,033." That explanation is partly true, but it omits the othermajor critical event that occurred in 2001 -- the state legislature'smassive transfer of levy money out of school districts like St. Cloud,to "equalize" school funding in Minnesota.

Ifigured that it would be really hard for people to place a negativespin on this fabulous news, but I was wrong. One person posted to thecomment line that we should be thankful to teachers for sacrificing payincreases to make financial progress possible. Actually, therestoration of the fund balance resulted from passage of our operatingreferendum, and specifically the allocation of about 10% of referendumdollars to that purpose...a commitment made during the referendumcampaigns. If we hadn't made the promise, we wouldn't have the money in the first place. If the District had diverted that funding to increase pay,we would have been breaking a campaign promise. The Board of Educationhas felt that the integrity of past and future levy campaigns requireus to keep those commitments scrupulously.

Another commentersaid that when a school district has reserves, that proves that it hastoo much funding. No, that is not true either. Reserves are required ingovernment and in business, because you pay people for producing yourproduct (or your services) before you get reimbursed or paid for thoseservices. And, in Minnesota, the Governor and Legislature have bothused school districts as a State ATM machine when times get rough,shifting the school aid payments into the next year and forcing schooldistricts to dip into their reserves, or to borrow money, to makepayroll.

When a school district increases pay by dippinginto its reserves, the consequences are graver than merely putting theschool district at risk of being forced to borrow. When the board ofeducation back in 2001 spent $4 million out of reserves to pay laborcontracts, it did more than eliminate its reserves. It also agreed topermanent ongoing expenses that were $4 million greater than revenues. Dipping into reserves for a one time only expense doesn't have thisimpact, but agreeing to ongoing payroll expenses, or any other ongoingexpenses, out of reserves, places the district into permanent deficit,unless compensating cuts are made.

When a school districtdips into its reserves by say $4 million, it actually requires $8million in cuts to restore the reserves. The first four million incuts are required to stop running a deficit, but another $4 million incuts (or additional revenues) are required to restore reserves.   That's why it has taken so long to bring the reserves back to theirformer level.

What are the consequences of restoring ourfund balance? What are the consequences of hitting our minimum fundbalance target?    One consequence is that as long as we keep our fundbalance at that level, we eliminate $5 million on borrowing to cashflow operations. The interest that we save frees up money to funddaily operations. Another consequence is that we don't have to divertmoney from operations to restore the fund balance. So, it places theDistrict in a better position financially, and that is a good thingtoo.

It took us about 7 years to restore the fund balance tothe minimum level recommended by conservative financial planners. Careless management could wipe out that fund balance in a single year,again. If we remember how difficult it was to restore our fundbalance, perhaps we'll be wise enough to avoid repeating history.

Standards Based Grading Comes to St. Cloud

2011-10-29T19:59:00.000-07:00

Our school district is introducing standards based grading in grades K-8. We've been using a form of standards based grading in elementary schools in the past several years, and this year, we begin the experiment in grades 7-8. Let me begin by stating that I tend to approach sweeping innovations in education with a healthy dose of skepticism. Not because I'm against change, per se. No, its because we are dealing with so many changes in education these days, and because implementing reforms requires so much extra work, that I feel that new innovations must be justified by proof that they will lead to significant concrete improvements. At times, public education is prone to adopting the latest fad proposed by one or more education gurus who travel the country claiming to have discovered a philosopher's stone which will revolutionize education. So, when our leadership announces breathlessly that "the research says" that we simply must adopt an innovation, I feel its generally time to take a few steps back and ask searching questions.

Standards-based grading involves measuring students' proficiency on well-defined course objectives. Many districts adopt standards-based grading in addition to traditional grades, but manhy proponents insist that standards-based grading can and should replace traditional point-based grades.

Introducing standards based grading is easier said than done. Guskey and Young explain:

With their curriculum standards articulated and assessment procedures to measure those standards in place, many elementary educators today are developing standards-based report cards. However, shortly after beginning the process most find themselves embroiled in controversy, particularly when parents see a standards-based report card for the first time. Discussions about the report card turn into heated debates and unexpected problems thwart their progress. Developing a report card that satisfies the diverse needs of parents and the school often seems impossible.

The idea of standards based grading seems sensible enough. Instead of summarizing a student's performance with letter-grades A-F, why not provide the student and parents a disaggregated list of the student's mastery of the particularized course objectives? One is left, in theory, with a permanent record of whether the student mastered fractions, or decimals, or percentages, and so on. Consequently, proponents argue, grading becomes more intentional, more objective, and much more complex. This accounts for resistance from many parents, who feel that they inherently understand what an A is, but really would prefer not to try to figure out what it means that their student got 4's in three objectives, and 3's in two others.

Some arguments for standards based grading include the following:

That they provide more coherent and precise information as to what the student has learned.
That they force the teaching staff to focus evaluation on the key objectives of state adopted learning standards
That they convert grades into formative assessments that focus the learner on what they still need to learn in order to be successful
That it is possible to report more complex learning objectives

Some arguments against standards based grading include the following:

That it requires a tremendous amount of effort by teachers and curriculum staff without a proven payoff..
That students who are far behind (or who have disabilities that prevent achieving standards) can work very very hard to achieve, yet receive grades that may suggest failure, no matter how hard they work.
That some parents simply don't like them and that they engender significant controversy
That some implementations of standards based grading do not appropriately reward attendance, effort, and completion of homework
That not all students in any class are at the same level, and so evaluating students at grade level tends to focus assessment on what the kids in the middle are ready to learn

As a Board member, I approach implementation of standards based grading with significant trepidation. One of my concerns is that reforms like this seem to gather momentum in a way that makes it difficult for the proponents to hear warning signs from dissenting teachers and parents. As more and more effort is expended on these reforms, the proponents increasingly develop emotional attachment to successful completion of the innovation. People who raise concerns may be perceived as obstructionists, instead of supplying warning signals of defects in the implementation strategy. Proponents of reform are typically armed with "the research", often a monograph written by the reform's resident guru. There is a tendancy when these reforms are brought to the board for discussion to present to us three or four of the most dedicated proponents of the reform, instead of providing us with a coherent summary of the arguments both for and against the reform. Seldom are we presented with a clear understanding of the issues that are being raised by opponents.

Most board members want to support reforms when the administration recommends them, because we feel that education needs to be run by educators. In this case, it is my view that the change is big enough and difficult enough, that we would be well to keep the existing letter grade system along with the new standards based grading, until teachers and parents have enough experience with the new system to accept elimination of the old.

Why is Minnesota's School Finance Dysfunctional

2011-10-28T19:19:00.000-07:00

Why is Minnesota Public School Dysfunctional

A few days ago, I was privileged to meet with a group of school finance experts to discuss why Minnesota's school finance system is broken. Everybody knows that school leaders complain that school funding is not adequate, and that is certainly true. But the problem is much more complicated than that. Here is my own list of school finance dysfunctionalities:

School Districts are increasingly relying on voter property tax referendums to balance their budgets. Over 130 school districts have referendums up this year, and many of them are seeking to renew their referendums. Since 1986, the percentage of school districts with referenda has risen from 47% to over 90 percent. The average referendum dollars collected per student has risen significantly as well, with more and more districts collecting in the $700 to $1000 per student range. Because referendum revenue has become so important to school districts, the failure of a referendum can have catastrophic impact on a particular district.
State funding formulas are not evidence based. The legislature does not utilize evidence to determine how much money should be provided to accomplish a designated mission. Formulas are based on politics and necessity. We lawyers would describe this state of affairs by stating that the funding formulas lack a rational basis. Nobody makes even a half-hearted attempt to connect the formula to data. Funding for schools serving large numbers of students in poverty is not based on research or data showing the amount of money that can provide adquate resources to make up for the additional actual cost of educating those students. Funding for students who don't speak English is not based on research or data showing the additional cost of educating those students. Funding for students with disabilities is intentionally and knowingly set at rates substantially less than required to accomplish state mandated objectives.
The special education funding shortfall -- the difference between state-mandated spending and total revenues provided has grown to a projected $700 million per year.
The state's labor laws and bargaining system inherently produce labor cost increases at a rate faster than funding increases. As a result, school districts are driven systemically to fund labor cost increases by making crippling cuts in programs, unless they can make up the difference in increased referendum levies. The cost of these settlements is inadequately monitored and often reported in misleading ways so that policy makers don't focus on their true costs.
Many school districts have continuing contract obligations that force up labor costs beyond the revenues provided by the State even without bargaining Steps, lanes, longevity pay, insurance costs have been driving labor costs up faster than state funding increases.
Fundamental changes in state mandates have drastically increased the cost of what school districts are required to do, without proportionate increases in revenue. Since 1990, Minnesota has transformed its education system so that all school districts must educate all students to high levels of proficiency. This has dramatically increased the cost of educating disadvantaged students, but funding for education has not recognized this fundamental change in mission.
Open Enrollment Has Destabilized School Finance in Challenged Systems. Different students cost fundamentally different amounts to educate. At the top of the cost scale are students with disabilities. At the bottom of the cost scale are advantaged students who receive strong educational support at home. The cost structure allows school districts to make a profit on the cheaper students and requires them to cross subsidize the more expensive students. Open enrollment allows and encourages the cheaper students to migrate into the school districts where low cost students predominant, causing an ever worsening financial situation in the districts where high cost students are concentrated.
The special education funding formula also destablizes school finance in challenged Systems. Migration of non-disabled students to charter schools and open enrollment into traditional publics create a situation where urban core districts have high proportions of high cost students.
Different school districts have significantly different tax bases. As a result some districts can raise significantly more revenue with a low mil rate than others which require a much higher mil rate. Different school districts have very different population demographics and consequently in some districts it is very easy to pass a referendum while in others it is virtually impossible.
Funding Pressures are bleeding down critical capital and capital-like assets. School districts are increasingly cannibalizing their textbook resources, school libraries, staff development in order to make ends meet. The State's system of assuring that these necessary components of education are provided is abysmal.
The State has mismanaged the funding of pension systems and forced school districts to increase contributions without compensating revenue increases

District Settles Charges with Office of Civil Rights

2011-10-24T19:24:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, our Board of Education will be reviewing a proposed settlement agreement with the Department of Office of Civil Rights to resolve complaints filed by CAIR - Minneapolis about 18 months ago.

At the time that the complaints were initially filed, the District carefully reviewed each of the complaints and it was quite clear that the District had not violated federal civil rights laws. When we examined the facts, we found examples of Somali students with legitimate grievances against fellow students. We also found examples of non-Somali students with legitimate grievances against fellow students. And, we found many of the complaints were completely untrue. But the overwhelming sweep of the evidence was that teachers and administrators had promptly and properly addressed issues that came to them.

Representatives of the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) visited our district. If they had found examples of civil rights violations, we would have taken prompt remedial action, but they did not identify any. We instructed our attorney to bring us any evidence, any at all, identified by the Office of Civil Rights that suggested that the District violated civil rights laws. To be blunt, we feel very strongly that if we demanded that the Office of Civil Rights go ahead with its charging process, we are very confident that we would prevail. At the Board meeting on Thursday, members will most likely discuss why would then enter into an agreement, since the OCR has not provided us with any evidence that we have violated the law.

Part of the reason for entering into an agreement is that the agreement doesn't require us to do anything that is bad for students or bad for our school district. The concept of the agreement is this. Why would we spend more taxpayer money examining something that happened 18 months ago (or should I say, something that didn't happen) when we can resolve the matter by doing things that we want to do anyway.

The agreement doesn't give any special class of students special rights. The policies we have adopted will protect all students equally.
The agreement doesn't make us implement policies that we disagree with.
The agreement requires us to have policies in place that provide a remedy to any students (not just Somali students) who have harassment concerns. We have adopted theses policies already, and we firmly believe that the policies we have adopted are good for all students.
The agreement does not require us to treat any students better than any other students. If it did, we would not be signing it. (this is worth saying twice)
To implement the agreement, we have "agreed" to adopt a Code of Conduct. We were happy to offer to make that proposal, because we had already developed a Code of Conduct and had decided to adopt it anyway. After signing this agreement, we will have the same code of conduct in place that we adopted several months ago.
The agreement does not suggest that we have violated the law, does not require us to pay any money to anyone, nor does it require that we hire consultants to "fix" our school district.

The procedures we have adopted, and the few that we are about to adopt, create more consistent transparent procedures that give all students a venue to seek protection when they are being harassed by other students. That means that if a student of any background, White, Somali, African American, or whatever, or their parents, have concerns about student safety, they will know where those concerns can be addressed. By better documenting the resolution of concerns, we provide more protection for all our students. Moreover, by establishing a more consistent documentation of internal resolution of future incidents, we protect our staff against future bogus charges.

I want to emphasize that nobody in our school district is minimizing the issue of harassment in public schools. When I say that there was clearly no civil rights violation, I am not suggesting that students are never harassed in our school district. Of course that happens. Nor am I suggesting that we should tolerate harassment, ever. Our community has some work to do to assure that we provide a welcoming environment for immigrants. Some of our Somali students have some work to do, especially when they first come to our community, to understand what is expected of them in school. What we must do--what all schools must do-- is to constantly work to create a welcoming atmosphere, protective of the rights of all students while maintaining high standards of student conduct. The agreement we proposed to the OCR supports those things because doing that is good for students and teachers, and because it puts this episode behind us.

How is Integration Revenue Used in Minnesota?

2011-10-17T19:36:00.000-07:00

A while back, the St. Cloud School District announced the replacement of its Director of Equity Services. Since that announcement, I've noticed a bunch of online comments attacking the integration revenue program that are pretty far off the mark. I think that the misunderstanding derives partly from the lack of clarity in the state law itself. The legislative auditor issued a report on integration revenue and urged the legislature and Department of Education to clarify the intended uses of integration revenue, because different school districts are using the money in very different ways. So, I'm not blaming the folks who can't exactly figure out where the money is going.

In fact, some school districts are using integration revenue primarily to create opportunities for students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds to understand each other better. In St. Cloud, we actually use a very small amount of integration revenue for this purpose -- the annual "respect retreat" being a specific example. Other school districts are using integration revenue to strengthen educational results for disadvantaged students. For example, some of the districts in the west metro area are funding the AVID (advancement through individual determination) program, which is a highly rigorous program that promotes better study habits and encourages participation in more demanding coursework. Our district generally emphasizes use of integration revenue to fund improved educational programs and promote student achievement.

The integration program is not a public relations program as one recent commenter contended. Nor, in St. Cloud, is it primarily designed to promote inter-racial understanding, as the Times recently reported. But before you get the idea that my purpose is to defend the state integration revenue program, let me begin, by saying that I think that the current integration revenue law has some major flaws. This year's legislature is requiring that the uses of integration revenue receive a comprehensive searching review. And I support that review. During the last legislative session I wrote a letter to all of the leading legislators involved in education finance urging them to modify the integration revenue program to allow school districts to use that revenue more directly to impact learning. I believe that by far the most effective way of "integrating" minority and disadvantaged students into the mainstream is to assure that they succeed academically. If they succeed, then integration will follow almost automatically. If they do not succeed, integration is a hollow objective leading to disappointment and failure.

You can find out more about the current integration revenue program by jumping to the Minnesota Department of Education's Questions and Answer sheet on that topic. School districts receive integration revenue one of two ways:

Some Districts, like Minneapolis and St. Paul get integration revenue because those districts were defendants in a lawsuit which alleged that the district had become racially segregated and that racial segregation was leading to unequal educational educational results. Ultimately, that lawsuit led to a legislative appropriation for those districts which supported some school bussing and racial transferring, designed to promote more racially balanced schools. Minneapolis and St. Paul receive significantly greater integration revenue appropriations, per student, than any other school district in Minnesota.

Other Districts, like St. Cloud, receive integration revenue because they have a significantly higher percentage of minority students that adjoining districts. When that happens, integration revenue is provided to the district with a higher percentage of minority students at an elevated rate (but lower than Minneapolis and St. Paul), and integration revenue is provided to the adjoining districts (like Sauk Rapids, for example) at a lower rate. But none of these districts are required to conduct an integration program in the sense that most people understand it. Students are not bussed or transferred from one district to another. (I believe that these bussing programs are ineffective, divisive, and counterproductive). Each District submits a plan to the State of Minnesota explaining how it intends to use its money during a four year grant period. In St. Cloud, the school board has sought to use integration revenue, to the maximum extent possible, to improve educational achievement. At times, we have had to wrestle with the bureacracy at the State Department of Education to get them to approve those objectives, giving rise to my argument that the law needs to be clarified and improved.

The Department of Education's position on using integration revenue for improving student achievement is as follows:

Can integration revenue be used to fund programs focused on improving academic achievement for students or closing “achievement gaps” among groups of students?

The Desegregation Rule states that both intra-district and inter-district integration plans “must be educationally justifiable.” (Please see Minn. R. 3535.0160, Subp. 3 and Minn. R. 3535.0170, Subp. 6.) In addition, one of the stated purposes of the rule is to “recognize that the primary goal of public education is to enable all students to have opportunities to achieve academic success.” (Minn. R. 3535.0100) MDE strongly encourages districts to develop programs and activities under their plans that simultaneously advance both the goal of improving student academic achievement and the goal of increasing opportunities for integration as stated in Minnesota Statutes, section 124D.86.

Integration revenue can also be used to accelerate the pace at which non-English speaking students become fluent in English, and in St. Cloud, that is one of the ways that we are using integration revenue. I believe that the sooner that immigrant children become fluent in English, the sooner they will become integrated into school and society, and the sooner they will grow educationally.

Often I read postings by commenters who believe that integration revenue is for minority students only, and that too is not true. The Minnesota Department of Education explains:

The Desegregation Rule does not require the use of race or ethnicity as a test for anyone’s participation in an activity funded with integration revenue. This includes school choice programs, magnet schools, teacher scholarship programs, or any other initiative or planning process. Districts may choose to use race-neutral guidelines for students, families, or staff to participate in programming, such as eligibility for the Free and Reduced Priced Lunch program or residency within a defined geographical area.

Public schools are in the education business. For this reason, we must use our precious education dollars whenever possible to promote the educational success of all of our students. Next year, we will be preparing our new four year plan for the use of integration revenue. At the same time, the integration revenue program will be the subject of careful scrutiny at the State level. I believe that we would do well to change the name of the program and reconfigure its purpose to target the revenue towards providing stronger more effective programs to promote educational success for students who come to school with educational disadvantages. As I've said in my last post, I'm convinced that the key to improving student success is more hard work, more reading, better study habits, and more time learning.

Overwhelming Achievement Gap Before School Begins

2011-10-10T19:10:00.000-07:00

In my last post I wrote about the gap in vocabulary among incoming students at the Kindergarten level. I argued that it is a mistake to believe that any teacher can wave a magic wand and make up this difference with good teaching alone. Learning takes time, I argued. Learning is hard work. Students who are educationally disadvantaged aren't going to make up the gap, unless they compensate for their disadvantage with extra time learning, and lots of it. A ton of research has been accumulating on the cumulative learning disadvantage arising from shortfalls in vocabulary among disadvantaged students.

How big is this gap and what are the significance for public schools. Many studies of incoming kindergartners seem to show that gap between advantaged and disadvantaged populations is approximately one standard deviation. Some of you remember the standard deviation from college statistics. Here's a picture of the familiar bell-shaped curve

The idea is that in a so-called "normal distribution," just about one third of the population is within one standard deviation above the median and another third, within one standard deviation below. Put differently, more than two thirds of the normally distributed population is less than one standard deviation of the median. So, what does it mean if we say that the mean score of disadvantaged students is a full standard deviation below the median of advantaged? Consider two populations, advantaged and disadvantaged. The advantage might be economic, linguistic, racial or some other factor that results in a standard deviation difference between the advantaged group and the disadvantaged group.

First, randomly selecting one disadvantaged child and one advantaged child and comparing their scores will show the advantaged child exceeding the disadvantaged child 76 percent of the time and the disadvantaged child exceeding the advantaged child only 24 percent of the time. Second, 84 percent of advantaged children will perform better than the average disadvantaged child, while 16 percent of disadvantaged children will perform better than the average advantaged child. Third, if a class that is evenly divided among advantaged and disadvantaged is divided into two equal-sized groups based on ability, then disadvantaged students will compose roughly 70 percent, and advantaged 30 percent, of the students in the lower performing group. Fourth, if a school district chooses only the top-scoring 5 percent of students for “gifted” courses, such classes will have thirteen times more from the advantaged group than the disadvantaged group. Finally, assume that a reading textbook is written so that the average advantaged student will read it at a 75 percent comprehension rate. The implied comprehension rate for the average disadvantaged student will be 53 percent, virtually guaranteeing that such a reader will not engage with the text. Rock and Stenner, Assessment Issues in the Testing, of Children at School Entry (2005).

A full standard deviation between advantaged and disadvantaged groups is a huge gap with grave consequences for the disadvantaged group. It doesn't mean that members of the disadvantaged group can't succeed, because some will. But it means that the disadvantaged group faces overwhelming disadvantages right from the start of school, and that these disadvantages compound themselves, year after year, unless the disadvantages are attacked at the very beginning. And, I am arguing that the attack on the disadvantage requires compensatory time -- more time learning during school and after school.

The achievement gap is not a product of public schools, it is a product of the disadvantages that arise in families where the parents are themselves educationally disadvantaged. Mastering the achievement gap requires improving public schools so that they can overcome overwhelming disadvantages. They need to be massively better, not because they are terrible schools, but because we have set them a mission that is overwhelmingly difficult and challenging. They need to move a group of children who come to school, on the average, a standard deviation behind, and whose disadvantages continue throughout their schooling.

Suppose for example, half of the students who came to school practiced dribbling and shooting a basketball one hour a night throughout elementary school, while another group never touched a basketball at home. How would those two groups perform on tests of dribbling and shooting? I'll have more to say about this in the next post.....

Attacking the Achievement Gap with More Learning Time

2011-10-06T18:47:00.000-07:00

For the last several decades, education elites in Washington DC and state capitols have propagated the idea that the the achievement gap can be closed simply through better leadership, better curriculum and better teachers. But more and more, overwhelming evidence argues that closing the achievement gap requires us to provide disadvantaged students with significantly more learning time.

Children who do well in school come to us, generally, with some special advantages. Most of them accumulate thousands of hours of informal learning at home before they come to school. They have larger vocabularies, better understanding of phonics, superior preparation for the classroom experience.

This discrepancy between home learning experiences continues unabated throughout school. It is a mistake to believe that any teacher can wave a magic wand and make up this difference with good teaching alone. Learning takes time. Learning is hard work. Students who are educationally disadvantaged aren't going to make up the gap, unless they compensate for their disadvantage with extra time learning, and lots of it. A ton of research has been accumulating on the cumulative learning disadvantage arising from shortfalls in vocabulary among disadvantaged students.

"One of the most persistent findings in reading research is that the extent of students’ vocabulary knowledge relates strongly to their reading comprehension and overall academic success (see Baumann, Kame‘enui, & Ash, 2003; Becker, 1977; Davis, 1942; Whipple, 1925). This relationship seems logical; to get meaning from what they read, students need both a great many words in their vocabularies and the ability to use various strategies to establish the meanings of new words when they encounter them. Young students who don’t have large vocabularies or effective word-learning strategies often struggle to achieve comprehension. Their bad experiences with reading set in motion a cycle of frustration and failure that continues throughout their schooling (Hart & Risley, 2003; Snow, Barnes, Chandler, Goodman, & Hemphill, 2000; White, Graves, & Slater, 1990). Because these students don’t have sufficient word knowledge to understand what they read, they typically avoid reading. Because they don’t read very much, they don’t have the opportunity to see and learn very many new words. This sets in motion the well known “Matthew Effects,” Stanovich’s (1986) application of Matthew, 25:29–“the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” . Lehr, et al, A Focus on Vocabulary, Pacific Resources for Education and Learning

The achievement gap comes, in part, from a gap in learning time, informal and formal, at home. You can find some resources on the cumulative impact of the vocabulary gap in "Big Ideas in Reading", an on line resource maintained by the University of Oregon College of Education:

The importance of vocabulary knowledge to school success, in general, and reading comprehension, in particular, is widely documented.
The National Research Council concluded that vocabulary development is a fundamental goal for students in the early grades.
Hart and Risley's seminal study tells us that there is a vast difference in the number of words heard by pre kindergarten children at home, with some children hearing three times as many spoken words than others. A child living with well educated parents will hear 30 million more spoken words in four years than chlidren coming from less well educated families. They compared children from advantaged families to those in disadvantaged families and found that three year old children in the advantaged families used a greater vocabulary at age 3 than the parents of disadvantaged children.
The discrepancy in vocabulary gets larger and larger as children get older, building greater and greater disadvantages.

Big Ideas in Reading says: "Research has shown that children who read even ten minutes a day outside of school experience substantially higher rates of vocabulary growth between second and fifth grade than children who do little or no reading. (Anderson & Nagy, 1992, see References)" The achievement gap cannot be closed without closing the gap in learning time that begins at home. For students who are deprived of that precious learning time at home, we need to provide make up time in school and after school. Look at the difference in the number of words read by the most active readers and least active readers.
Percentile Rank Minutes Per Day Words Read Per Year
Books Text Books Text
98 65.0 67.3 4,358,000 4,733,000
90 21.2 33.4 1,823,000 2,357,000
80 14.2 24.6 1,146,000 1,697,000
70 9.6 16.9 622,000 1,168,000
60 6.5 13.1 432,000 722,000
50 4.6 9.2 282,000 601,000
40 3.2 6.2 200,000 421,000
30 1.8 4.3 106,000 251,000
20 0.7 2.4 21,000 134,000
10 0.1 1.0 8,000 51,000
2 0 0 0 8,000

Percentile Rank	Minutes Per Day	Words Read Per Year
Books	Text	Books	Text
98	65.0	67.3	4,358,000	4,733,000
90	21.2	33.4	1,823,000	2,357,000
80	14.2	24.6	1,146,000	1,697,000
70	9.6	16.9	622,000	1,168,000
60	6.5	13.1	432,000	722,000
50	4.6	9.2	282,000	601,000
40	3.2	6.2	200,000	421,000
30	1.8	4.3	106,000	251,000
20	0.7	2.4	21,000	134,000
10	0.1	1.0	8,000	51,000
2	0	0	0	8,000

What does all this mean for closing the achievement gap? We need to attack educational disadvantages with more time learning, but we can only justify spending public money to do that for students and families who are willing to reward our investment by meeting high expectations.

Students with educational disadvantages must spend more time in school engaging in reading, math and science.
We need to lengthen the school day and lengthen the school year for those students, the achievement gap is a manifestation of less time learning.
We should create after school programs with academic focus to assist students
Students who don't speak English need extra time to learn English and the sooner that they learn English fluently the better. We should accomplish this objective with extra immersion time in the early grades.
We should offer increased learning time opportunities to students and families who make good use of that opportunity. If we provide increased learning time at public expense, the students who receive that opportunity should meet high expectations of attendance and hard work during school and after school. Parents and students who benefit should sign contracts promising to meet high expectations.
As a community, we must expect parents, day care providers and early childhood programs to provide learning rich environments.
We should assign more homework, and especially homework that increases the amount of home-reading that students do. Not copying lists and doing endless drill, but reading literature that builds vocabulary and reading fluency.
As a community we need to provide more adult mentors to disadvantaged students.

I'll have more to say in future posts about making up the achievement gap with more learning time.

Expanded Learning Time Links
Expanded Learning Time Matters
Expanded Learning Time "Rocketship Education"
Apollo 20 Project Creative expanded learning time program

Mass 2020 Massachusetts 2020's mission is to expand educational and economic opportunities for children and families across Massachusetts
Expanding Learning Time in High School
National Center on Time and Learning

Effective Use of Homework: an example of developing great teachers

2011-09-12T20:10:00.000-07:00

I want to talk a bit about developing good teachers. My post is inspired by a recent article in the New York Times, called "The Trouble with Homework" by Annie Murphy Paul. Paul argues that teachers are failing to use homework effectively. She writes:

The quantity of students’ homework is a lot less important than its quality. And evidence suggests that as of now, homework isn’t making the grade. Although surveys show that the amount of time our children spend on homework has risen over the last three decades, American students are mired in the middle of international academic rankings: 17th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math, according to results from the Program for International Student Assessment released last December.

Paul argues that there are a variety of techniques, some of them quite simple and straightforward, that can make homework a more powerful teaching aid and significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of instruction. One example, is the use of so-called “Spaced repetition" a technique that spreads the learning of particular skills over the entire school year. We learn about the definite integral in one compact unit in calculus, but in spaced repetition, we attack the definite integral over and over again, throughout the entire calculus course, and learning research is telling us that when students do that, they understand the integral more deeply. We learn complex concepts best by visiting and revisiting those concepts throughout the school year. Using this technique is not a function of being a good teacher or a bad teacher, its a function of becoming an improved teacher by developing new strengths and capabilities throughout ones career. Paul writes: Eighth-grade history students who relied on a spaced approach to learning had nearly double the retention rate of students who studied the same material in a consolidated unit, reported researchers from the University of California-San Diego in 2007.

What does this have to do with the topic of good teaching and good teachers? Its an illustration of the fact that good teachers are developed over time and that good teaching is promoted through a process of mentoring, professional development and ongoing professional growth. Often, I hear people claim that there are good teachers and bad teachers, and the way to promote good teaching is simply to get rid of the bad ones. There's a certain macho pleasure that some people take in thinking that if we just got tougher and weeded out bad teachers, that all of a sudden the quality of teaching would improve markedly. They believe what they hear on Fox TV, or on the Rush show, from people who fill time on the air with grumpy uninformed macho talk. Of course, we should get rid of teachers who have no aptitude for teaching and who simply display no potential to become quality teachers. Bad teachers represent a tiny percentage of the teachers in most school districts. You could get rid of every last bad teacher and barely make a dent in the overall quality of teaching, because developing quality teaching is just a whole lot more complicated than the macho crowd can envision.

Paul writes as well about what she calls “retrieval practice," another application of modern learning theory that, she claims, really works.

“retrieval practice,” employs a familiar tool — the test — in a new way: not to assess what students know, but to reinforce it......Students who used retrieval practice to learn science retained about 50 percent more of the material than students who studied in traditional ways, reported researchers from Purdue University earlier this year. Students — and parents — may groan at the prospect of more tests, but the self-quizzing involved in retrieval practice need not provoke any anxiety. It’s simply an effective way to focus less on the input of knowledge (passively reading over textbooks and notes) and more on its output (calling up that same information from one’s own brain).

Another great idea, but my purpose here is not to regurgitate Paul's position on effective use of learning theory. My purpose is to make the point that the bag of tricks used by teachers include all sorts of techniques that really work, and we can develop better teaching if we make the improvement of teaching and teachers systemic in our schools. One way to do that is to find more time for effective professional development. Another way is to put teaching coaches on staff. A third way is to insist that principals are true instructional leaders with strong teacher development skills. Now, every time I say something like this, some self styled macho commenter comes on line and says, stop coddling teachers, if they don't know how to do these things, just dump them and find someone new! But the truth of the matter is that that's not how effective organizations treat their most precious assets, their teaching professionals. Not even macho ones.

Organizations become effective by investing in their employees through effective professional development. Increasingly, then, proponents of meaningful reform in public education are recognizing that the key to improving teaching quality is helping teachers -- new teachers, average teachers, struggling teachers, and even excellent teachers -- to improve their teaching by implementing proven practices that work. Part of the problem is that schools of education tend to view teacher education as just another academic discipline. The people who teach teachers to teach, often consider themselves as academics, just like biochemists, sociologists and literary academics. Teaching is a profession, best taught by excellent teachers as an apprenticeship. Its not about John Dewey or any other theorist. It is about assembling and applying dozens and dozens of tricks of the trade, some of which are specific to the discipline --mathematics, science, language arts, or social studies -- and some of which are native to all teaching. The art of teaching can be learned, but it takes lots of work and lots of dedication. You don't come out of teaching school an accomplished teacher, any more than you come out of law school an accomplished lawyer. Good teaching is developed and nurtured.

Developing effective us of homework, or using tests to promote learning, are just two examples of the kinds of things that a good school can do to promote effective teaching. What we need to do is recognize that that there are hundreds of practices, maybe thousands, that can be learned over time. We must insist that our public school systems install first class professional development systems that grows our good teachers into great ones.

Links to Information About Minnesota School Finance

2011-09-05T07:15:00.000-07:00

The purpose of this posting is to provide some references (links) to resources that provide helpful information on Minnesota School Finance. In most cases, the reports are available online, and I've provided a direct link to the information where possible.

I.   Minnesota Budget

   A.   Minnesota 2009 Budget Trends Report. This critically important report explains the genesis of Minnesota’s structural deficit:   the rising dependency ratio, the reduction in taxation, and the unsustainable growth in Minnesota’s health budget. Provides the best bi-partisan coherent explanation for the importance to Minnesota’s future of educating all students to high levels of proficiency. Links to the Report: Workgroup, MinnPost Version

   B.   1995 Report: Within Our Means is a report issued by Minnesota Planning Report: “If there is a time to solve the state’s fiscal problems, it is now. The economy has been strong. The percentage of Minnesotans of working age is still growing and will reach an all-time high in 2010, before beginning a long-term decline. Over the next 15 years, the combined proportion of children and elderly — the age groups most dependent on support from others — will be less than at any time since 1950. From now to the year 2010, the state will have a maximum percentage of people in their peak earning years. After 2010, solutions will be more difficult, as the percentage of Minnesotans of working age begins to decline

II.   Minnesota House of Representatives, 2010-2011

   A.   Financing Education in Minnesota. This report is updated annually. Explains, but does not analyze, the various components of Minnesota's financial funding formulas.

   B.   The House legislative staff publishes a variety of memos relevant to education finance.

III.   Minnesota 2020 Minnesota 2020 periodically publishes advocacy pieces prepared by staff research associates.   Minnesota 2020 studies advocate for a “price of government” inflation index, which tends to make the inflation adjusted growth in education funding significantly lower than studies using Consumer Price Index.   The organization recently published   Declining Funding, Degrading Quality, August 2011, a Survey of Minnesota Superintendents. Argues that “By Fiscal Year 2013 (the 2012-13 school year), real per-pupil state aid to schools will have declined almost 13 percent over the decade. That’s taking into account the legislature’s recent $50 per pupil increase to the base funding formula. Nearly every Minnesota school district will be operating with less per-pupil, inflation-adjusted state aid for the 2012-13 school year than in the 2002-03 school year.

IV.   Minnesota Department of Education

   A.   A helpful list of MDE school finance links may be found on the Parents United Webpage

   B.   MDE Budget Spreadsheets.    Minnesota Department of Education maintains a variety of financial data on its websites. Many of them contain worksheets that allow you to plug in the school district number and bring up detailed information about the particular district.

   C.   Special Education Cross-Subsidies, Report to the Legislature, January 2011 The adjusted net cross-subsidy declined slightly from $352 million to $345 million between FY 1999 and FY 2001, but began to increase in FY 2002, and grew at an accelerating rate between FY 2003 and FY 2007, reaching $599 million in FY 2007.   As a result of the 2007 legislation, the cross-subsidy decreased to $507 million in FY 2008 but began to grow again in FY 2009 to $547 million. Due to federal stimulus funds in FY 2010 with anticipated carry-over in FY 2011, the cross-subsidy is projected to drop below the FY 2008 level in FY 2010 to $491 million and rise slightly in FY 2011 to $518 million. It is projected to exceed the FY 2007 level by FY 2012 and to reach $742 million in FY 2015. Shows Concludes that average adjusted net cross subsidies varies by classification of school district. As of 2010, The smallest of non-metro school districts average $380 per student.   Other non-metro school districts between $400 and $500. Metro non-Minneapolis/St. Paul Districts averaged $617, and Minneapolis and St. Paul, $850.

   D.   Policy Issues in Special Education Finance (Minnesota Family Impact Seminar Briefing Report - 2009).   Excellent discussion of the issues presented by Minnesota's special education funding system.

V.   Parents United for Public Schools ( This highly respected public school advocacy organization publishes or links to a number of studies and newspaper articles on the State of Minnesota public education.

VI.   Schools for Equity in Education Schools for Equity in Education (SEE) is an association of 58 school districts throughout the state of Minnesota. See’s predecessor was a leader in the commencement of the Skeen litigation. Its member school districts serve approximately 250,000 children, over one-third of Minnesota's K-12 public school students. SEE explains: “SEE districts tend to receive the minimum in state aid based on its student population and also tend to have lower property wealth. These combined characteristics along with the current problems in the state funding formula result in most SEE districts receiving well below the state average in funding.” See maintains a variety of useful studies on its website.

   A.   The History of the General Education Basic Formula The basic formula is per pupil funding that districts receive from the state. These dollars determine a district's operating fund. This chart shows that the basic formula would have to be increased by $1,903 for schools to have the same buying power they had back in 1991.

   B.   District Referendum Information

   C.   Revenue Disparity 2009/10 The gap in funding between school districts is growing and most of the growth is due to disparities of referendum revenue between districts.

   D.   An Exploratory Analysis Hamline University School of Business April 30, 2009. Discusses the inflation adjusted growth in school funding; the E-12 share of the State budget over time. Argues that the Minnesota legislature has allocated funds to various formula components without making a meaningful effort to connect the amount of funds allocated to the cost of achieving the objective assigned to those funds.

School Finance Litigation: The Rose Decision

2011-09-03T08:00:00.000-07:00

During the last several years, Minnesota's public education community has begun to form a consensus that the school funding system in Minnesota is fundamentally broken, and not just broken, but unconstitutionally broken. The issue is not merely one of the distribution of funding, or the level of funding, it is more systemic than that. We have a system that in many respects cannot be called a system at all, because the pieces of the system do not work together, and are not made to work together, in a rational coherent way. The legislature and governor have established a system that forces districts to spend more than they receive in an irrational way that results in financial and educational chaos.

As we in Minnesota discuss what has happening to our system, and what must be done, we seek to understand better the efforts of other states to address constitutional deficiencies in their public systems. Today, I'm posting about an historic constitutional case, Rose v. Council for Better Education, 790 S.W.2d 186 (Ky. 1989). The Rose case was initiated by a council composed of 66 school districts. The Council was joined in the litigation by the parents of 22 school children in bringing suit. They argued that Kentucky’s statewide school funding system violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th amendment and Section 183 of the state constitution, which specifies that the “General Assembly shall, by appropriate legislation, provide for an efficient system of common schools throughout the State” (Ky. Const. § 183).

You can read about the Kentucky experience in a 2009 publication, Substantial, and Yet Not Sufficient: Kentucky's Effort to Build Proficient for Each and Every Child , (The Campaign for Educational Equity, Teachers College Columbia December, 2009.) In 1989, Kentucky's school system was suffering from very substantial statewide deficiencies that made it one of the most ineffective public school systems in the nation. After the Court issued its decision in Rose, virtually every aspect of the State's educational system has been subject to major reform and restructuring. To the extent that Kentucky has improved its performance, the consensus indicates that it was not just improved funding that achieved these results, but rather a systemic effort to implement structural reforms, and that these reforms resulted from the active participation of the executive and legislative branches of government, of the education community itself, of parents and business interests.

Let's look at the Rose decision itself The Rose decision begins with reference to the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. "The goal of the framers of our constitution, and the polestar of this opinion, is eloquently and movingly stated in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education:"

education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.” Id., 347 U.S. 483, 493, 74 S.Ct. 686, 691, 98 L.Ed. 873 (1954) (emphasis added).

The Supreme Court found that the evidence presented in the trial court established that Kentucky's educational system was plainly deficient:

The overall effect of appellants' evidence is a virtual concession that Kentucky's system of common schools is underfunded and inadequate; is fraught with inequalities and inequities throughout the 177 local school districts; is ranked nationally in the lower 20-25% in virtually every category that is used to evaluate educational performance; and is not uniform among the districts in educational opportunities. When one considers the evidence presented by the appellants, there is little or no evidence to even begin to negate that of the appellees. The tidal wave of the appellees' evidence literally engulfs that of the appellants.,,,The achievement test scores in the poorer districts are lower than those in the richer districts and expert opinion clearly established that there is a correlation between those scores and the wealth of the district. Student-teacher ratios are higher in the poorer districts. Moreover, although Kentucky's per capita income is low, it makes an even lower per capita effort to support the common schools. Students in property poor districts receive inadequate and inferior educational opportunities as compared to those offered to those students in the more affluent districts

Moreover, the court found, "most of the witnesses before the trial court testified that not only were the state's educational opportunities unequal and lacking in uniformity, but that all were inadequate. Testimony indicated that not only do the so-called poorer districts provide inadequate education to fulfill the needs of the students but the more affluent districts' efforts are inadequate as well, as judged by accepted national standards."

The defendants in the case argued that the State had met its responsibility to provide adequate funding by granting local districts the opportunity to impose additional "permissive taxes," which could provide additional funding beyond the funding provided by the state. These permissive taxes, however, were subject to local referendum repeal, and many districts were unable or unwilling to implement these supplemental taxes. The Court explained:

The Court ordered the legislature and executive to implement comprehensive and sweeping relief:

A child's right to an adequate education is a fundamental one under our Constitution. The General Assembly must protect and advance that right. We concur with the trial court that an efficient system of education must have as its goal to provide each and every child with at least the seven following capacities: (i) sufficient oral and written communication skills to enable students to function in a complex and rapidly changing civilization; (ii) sufficient knowledge of economic, social, and political systems to enable the student to make informed choices; (iii) sufficient understanding of governmental processes to enable the student to understand the issues that affect his or her community, state, and nation; (iv) sufficient self-knowledge and knowledge of his or her mental and physical wellness; (v) sufficient grounding in the arts to enable each student to appreciate his or her cultural and historical heritage; (vi) sufficient training or preparation for advanced training in either academic or vocational fields so as to enable each child to choose and pursue life work intelligently; and (vii) sufficient levels of academic or vocational skills to enable public school students to compete favorably with their counterparts in surrounding states, in academics or in the job market. ......Lest there be any doubt, the result of our decision is that Kentucky's entire system of common schools is unconstitutional. There is no allegation that only part of the common school system is invalid, and we find no such circumstance. This decision applies to the entire sweep of the system-all its parts and parcels. This decision applies to the statutes creating, implementing and financing the system and to all regulations, etc., pertaining thereto. This decision covers the creation of local school districts, school boards, and the Kentucky Department of Education to the Minimum Foundation Program and Power Equalization Program. It covers school construction and maintenance, teacher certification-the whole gamut of the common school system in Kentucky.

Following implementation of the Rose reforms, NAEP test scores on nationally normed reading and mathematics assessments increased substantially. Critics of the decision argue that possibly these increases might have occurred even without the fundamental changes in funding and the structural and accountability changes that accompanied those funding changes, but the consensus in Kentucky is that the Rose litigation shocked the system, woke up legislators and the executive branch to their fiduciary responsibility to education, and resulted in groundbreaking reforms to Kentucky's educational system.

School District Considers Self-Financing Energy Savings Projects

2011-08-18T18:21:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, the Board's finance committee listened to a presentation from a consultant who has been evaluating our school facilities and assisting us in preparing a long term maintenance plan. (Every school district must prepare and update long-term facilities plans to assure the State that we are not allowing our facilities to deteriorate and also to assure that we use our facilities improvement budget responsibly).

Our consultant is recommending that we consider implementing about $1 million dollars in energy-saving projects next year.   We spent most of our finance committee time listening to his recommendations and asking probing questions.   The selected projects supposedly will pay for themselves, literally, out of the savings in energy costs.

Let's use lighting fixtures as an example.   In many of our buildings we have very old, energy inefficient lighting, dating from the days when energy was cheap. Today's newer fixtures use far less energy, and if you buy the new fixtures, allegedly you can recover the cost of the fixture (including installation) in under ten years with the savings. The idea is that the vendor leases the electrical fixtures on a lease-to-own basis, and promises that the lease payments will be lower than the energy cost savings. Under the plan, your payments never exceed the actual energy cost savings realized by the improvements, guaranteed.

Additional savings come from taking advantage of a variety of rebate incentives that will make a contribution to the cost, and some federal tax credits that are available to the vendor for offering and implementing an energy savings project.   Now the lighting is just one example.   If an old school has a door system that is not energy tight, that door system can be replaced as well, and potentially paid for out of the energy savings. When all is said and done, the consultant claims, our school district could implement $1 million in energy savings projects, completely paid for by energy savings, guaranteed.

The concept seems attractive.   We retrofit our facilities, for free, as it were, paid for out of reduced energy costs, and when the lease period is over, we have continued energy savings and newer improved facilities fully paid for.   But there is significant due diligence left to be done.   The finance committee recommended that the administration begin that due diligence process by obtaining a detailed proposal on the items that could benefit from this approach. Then, if the administration recommends that we continue, we would develop a request for proposals, to assure that we afford competing vendors with an opportunity to submit competing proposals. We must assure ourselves that the work, if authorized, is done by the best qualified vendor for the lowest possible price.

Care is required in implementing these projects. Because they are self-financing, it is important that one doesn't think of them as "free." Public money is involved: scrutiny should be applied to assure that the best value is being obtained for the money expended. Also, scrutiny is required to assure that the method of calculating savings is legitimate. The vendors who facilitate these transactions have expertise, and they are surely motivated to prevent themselves from taking an undue risk.   It is important to make sure that the formula only recognizes legitimate savings arising from the project.

Resources:
Easy Access to Energy Improvements in the Public Sector
Energy Star
Lease and Lease Purchasing for School Facilities
Learning by Design
Minneapolis Tribune Article "Schools Learning to Save"

Washington Cuts Montana Schools a NCLB break

2011-08-16T20:11:00.000-07:00

Education week reports in this week's edition, that the State of Montana was allowed retroactively to revise its No Child Left Behind (NCLB) proficiency targets downward so that 155 more schools would make "adequate yearly progress" this year. What's going on in Montana?

The underlying assumption of the NCLB law is that all children can reach an arbitrarily set standard of proficiency by 2014. Each state sets its own standard designated arbitrarily as the proficiency cut score. There is no basis -- none whatsoever -- for setting the standard at any particular level. The level set is totally political. Whatever the level, it will be too high --unattainable-- for some children, and too low to challenge others. Some states have very high proficiency cut scores, and some much lower. But no matter what level is set, there is no research that suggests that all students can reach the proficiency level set by any of these states, and in fact, whether you send kids to good schools are bad schools, public schools or private schools, some of them are not going to pass the proficiency level, no matter what it is, because by golly, children are not all the same.

But here's the problem. NCLB says that all students must reach the State's NCLB standard by 2014, and that is not possible. At the beginning, states could set the AYP (adequate yearly progress) level at some low percentage of students proficient. So for example, it might have been acceptable for 65% of the students in any school to reach proficiency in math. But each year, the percentage is supposed to increase, until eventually, in that utopian year, 2014, all students, 100%, must be proficient, even though everyone knows that's not possible. If a student has various ethnic or racial groups then each ethnic or racial group of 20 or more students counts separately. So, an all white school with few disabled students only has one way to fail AYP, but a school with 5 ethnic groups and students with disabilities has six different groups who have to pass the cut score level separately.

Now as years went by, schools with higher disadvantaged populations started to fail AYP first. That was no problem, at first, because the school districts who made AYP kind of bragged about it and pretended that their teachers and their curriculum were superior, really. It was sort of fun, really, to beat up on disadvantaged kids in disadvantaged schools. But as the AYP cut scores went up and up, year after year, more and more schools were branded as failures, until the vast majority got "dinged" by AYP, even the schools where the children of bankers, lawyers, and doctors attended. Not because they were doing worse than before, but because no matter how well you did, the passing scores kept rising and rising. NCLB was either designed purposely to make all public schools fail, or it was designed by total blithering idiots, or a little of both. Even the children of doctors and lawyers and bankers can't all pass an arbitrary proficiency level, because by golly their kids aren't all the same either.

Now some pretty smart people have been warning for years, that it was just a matter of time before all schools, even schools that are highly regarded, would be branded as failures. A few days ago, the Washington Post reported that some of suburban Virginia's highly rated exceptional schools and districts, are no longer making AYP, because the ever rising score requirements have passed them by too. That shocked lots of people in the Washington elites who had concocted NCLB. Nobody ever dreamed that their own schools would get penalized; this was supposed to embarrass schools where other kids attended. Everybody knows that suburban Virginia has wonderful schools, but still some students in these fantastic schools just can't reach the ever increasing requirements. It was ok when urban school districts were branded failures, but once NCLB started to brand mostly white suburban districts as failures, well that was just too much. There was a rising tide of demands for exceptions, waivers, or anything to prevent these districts from having to pay the penalties that NCLB brings.

This year, the State of Montana had way too many schools fail to make adequate yearly progress, and the leadership of the State and its Congressional delegation demanded relief. NCLB wasn't supposed to penalize Montana kids either. The state Superintendent of Montana's public schools wrote:

If the game of basketball operated like NCLB, every student, despite her or his athletic ability or interest, must make the team; and then, the only way a student can score points is by a slam dunk. Under NCLB rules, free throws don't matter, lay-ups don't matter, three-point shots don't matter, assists don't matter, and rebounds don't matter. Only the slam dunk matters. And, over time, the basket keeps rising in height.

"Montana schools", the superintendent wrote, "have steadily increased the percentage of students reaching proficiency or advanced on its state test. Since 2005-06, the percentage of students scoring proficient or advanced in reading has increased from 78 percent to 85 percent this year and, in math, from 61 percent to 68 percent." But that increasing test performance was not rising as fast as the NCLB targets, which must go up to 100 percent by the utopian year of 2014. And so, Montana, Utah, Idaho, and South Dakota all applied for retroactive reductions in their NCLB proficiency targets. And by golly, somebody in Washington listened, and Montana was allowed to go back and lower its goals retroactively. Bingo, 155 schools that were going to be called failures are now designated as making adequate yearly progress.

In the meantime, the deadlock over NCLB re-authorization continues. Nobody is willing to fix the law. Republicans blame Democrats; Democrats blame Republicans. We are driving our public schools over a cliff. We have designed a system that is based on the false premise that all children are the same, as if all we have to do is snap our fingers and eventually all children will be perfect. In the meantime, instead of fixing NCLB for all children, the schools with powerful friends get waivers and exemptions.

Past Post:
AYP Means Are you phooling

Replace Lane System with Leadership and Responsibility Compensation

2011-08-14T09:43:00.001-07:00

In this post, I want to suggest that it is time to replace traditional lane compensation -- progression in teacher pay based upon the earning of post bachelor degree credits -- with responsibility pay embedded in a career ladder.

The University of Wisconsin's Consortium for Policy Research in Education has done a lot of work on strategic management of human capital in education. Among their publications is a series of papers making recommendations for reform in teacher compensation, and I often turn to CPRE research, because it is is thoughtful and well documented. One of the things that I like about CPRE's work is that it carefully distinguishes among teacher "base pay," "base pay progression," and "variable pay". Base pay is the regular pay that you receive in your particular position. It is the pay that you are entitled to as long as you keep your job. Base pay progression is the way in which your base pay increases. Across the country, in almost all districts, teachers base pay progresses based on steps -- the number of years that the teacher has been employed in the District, and lanes -- a pay increment that is earned by passing post college coursework. In most districts, the teacher must pay for the credits earned out of her own pocket in order to earn lane credit. The cost and time commitment required to earn lane credits can be considerable. A teacher who advances to the highest possible lane puts in tens of thousands of dollars earning lane credits and numerous hours of class-time and (hopefully) study. Variable pay is pay contingent on meeting some objective, such as student test score results, and variable pay is almost non-existent in most systems. Today's post does not argue for variable pay: it argues that responsibility and leadership pay should supplant the current lane system for base pay progression.

Public teacher compensation provides base pay progression based on "training and experience." There is a fair amount of research that suggests that teacher performance and student results improve with experience, although some critics claim that the effect is limited to the first five years of teaching, more or less. However, because step increases are provided regularly and somewhat reliably (when the State provides adequate funds to pay them), steps attract teachers into the professions at lower salaries than they would otherwise accept, if only base pay, without step progression, were offered.

The problem with lane pay is that there is overwhelming evidence that, with some exceptions, lane pay does not equate to conduct that improves teaching and learning. The Center for Educator Compensation reform presents a bibliography of studies that make this point:

The preponderance of evidence suggests that teachers who have completed graduate degrees are not significantly more effective at increasing student learning than those with no more than a bachelor’s degree. Five studies reviewed by Rice (2003), which examined student achievement in a wide variety of grades and subject areas, found that teachers having completed an advanced degree had no significant effect on student performance (Summers &Wolfe, 1977; Link & Ratledge, 1979; Murnane & Phillips, 1981; Harnisch, 1987; Monk, 1994). Clotfelter, Ladd, and Vigdor (2007a) also found that on average, elementary teachers who had completed master’s degrees were no more or no less effective than others at raising student achievement, with one exception. Elementary teachers with master’s degrees appeared to be less effective, on average, than those without advanced degrees if they earned the degrees more than five years after they started teaching.

Now there are exceptions to this basic claim. Secondary teachers surely benefit from advanced substantive training in their field of responsibility. Biology teachers who know more biology will likely do a better job of teaching biology, especially when they are teaching higher level courses. Historically, however, Districts have exerted very little control over the kind of courses that must be taken, and districts have demanded virtually no proof that the course taken actually translates into improved instruction. The question is whether there might be a better use of scarce compensation dollars that would actually attract and retain quality teachers, and do a better job of improving teaching and learning, than the current lane system. I believe that the answer is responsibility pay -- compensation for leadership and responsibility.

CRPE writes that many young highly motivated teachers come to public education with expectations for advancement that differ from the old training and experience paradigm:

Anecdotal evidence from several sources, however, suggests that once in the system, these individuals want to be successful in the classroom, to be in schools led by instructionally oriented principals, and to be in an organization with high expectations for the achievement of all students and that relentlessly pursues that goal. The individuals also want career ladder structures that put them in positions of responsibility around the instructional program, such as a teacher team leader role, an instructional coach role, a content expert role, etc. They also want a pay system that is based on their performance, taking into account both their level of instructional expertise and improvements in student achievement. They do not want to have to wait several years for a leadership position as an assistant principal, nor wait 20 years to get to the top of the salary schedule. They want a performance-based career ladder and salary structure that lets them move up to higher pay either based on new and increased responsibility or their own performance and/or the performance of their students.

This idea of advancement through leadership, I believe, is critically important to the ability of education to respond to changing needs. Contrary to the popular belief system, education has too few leaders, not too many, and the shortage of leaders makes it almost impossible for public education to be agile -- that is to respond to changes at the pace necessary to make necessary changes. We can't add tons of more administrators to solve this leadership gap, and it wouldn't help anyway. We need to rethink the pyramid of leadership within the teaching profession itself. In some districts, those few with plenty of resources, the solution is to add specialists in the central office, but these specialists are not part of the district's teaching infrastructure. They aren't in the school on a daily basis. They don't eat with fellow teachers in the lunchroom. They don't teach any longer, and consequently, their ideas are constantly being criticized as being out of touch and unrealistic. In most organizations, leadership is embedded in the organizational infrastructure. Leaders have supervisory responsibility as well as productivity responsibility. But the teaching profession is structured so that teachers as a profession are basically powerless to participate in the management of their own profession.

An army has privates, corporals, sergeants, lieutenants, captains and so on. Each level of leadership has a direct connection to the persons above and below. In a school district, there is no pyramidal structure of leadership. Teachers are teachers are teachers. This system stifles teachers who have drive to improve their institution. It turns professionals who would like to see change into cynics instead of active contributors. We desperately need to reform the profession of education so that young teachers who aspire to display their talents for leadership have a recognized place in the systemic structure: so they can make a difference in what we do.

If the school district wants to improve elementary science instruction --- something that we need to do -- there should be science leaders in each building, teachers with strong science backgrounds who, as part of their instructional leadership role, can be delegated the responsibility to lead their fellow teachers in making that transformation. If the school district wants to improve the implementation of its use of web-based communication with students and parents -- something that we need to do -- there should be teacher leaders who can lead the implementation of these changes, not as a special assignment, but because they are recognized teacher leaders with operational responsibility. And the only way that we can make this happen is to restructure the current structure of the profession and provide opportunities for advancement and compensation through leadership and responsibility.

A teaching structure that rewards initiative, leadership, and contributions to school improvement would transform the profession. It would be good for teachers, especially those with leadership potential, and it would create public support for better teacher compensation.

New Teacher Pay Structures CPRE Research Paper (2009)
Lane Improvement as a Cost Component
Arizona Career Ladder
Center for Educator Compensation Reform Summary of research on link between student achievement and training and experience.

A word about Matt Damon's Attack on Testing

2011-08-07T08:10:00.000-07:00

About a week ago, the media paid quite a bit of attention to a passionate speech in support of public school teachers by actor Matt Damon. The speech included an attack on the overuse of standardized tests, as follows:

I said before that I had incredible teachers. And that’s true. But it’s more than that. My teachers were EMPOWERED to teach me. Their time wasn’t taken up with a bunch of test prep — this silly drill and kill nonsense that any serious person knows doesn’t promote real learning. No, my teachers were free to approach me and every other kid in that classroom like an individual puzzle. They took so much care in figuring out who we were and how to best make the lessons resonate with each of us. They were empowered to unlock our potential. They were allowed to be teachers.

I've been writing a bit about the widening scope of the standardized testing scandals in which individual schools and even school districts have been alleged to have produced quantum leaps in standardized testing scores through organized cheating by some of the educators themselves. And in the course of those posts, I've made it clear that I believe in regular use of standardized testing as an important component in teaching and learning. At the same time, Damon's emotional attack on overuse of testing resonates. The best teachers do make learning exciting for its own sake. The best teachers don't engage in "silly drill and kill nonsense" and the best teachers do approach children "like an individual puzzle." How does one harmonize the truth in Damon's argument with a belief that standardized testing is important?

I think we have to recognize that we don't have to choose between the folks who claim that standardized testing will transform public education through a system sanction and rewards, on the one hand, and the folks who seem to want to drive standardized testing out of education altogether. Standardized testing --- like the NWEA progress based testing -- provides data that can be used to approach each child "like an individual puzzle." These new testing systems actually adjust the difficulty of the test to the level of the student, automatically, as the student answers questions. They provide individualized scaled scores that provide information to the teacher on where the student is struggling. They reward the student and teacher for the amount of progress. As we get more sophisticated in the use of these tests, the hope is that educators will become more and more sophisticated in using the results of these tests to help each student progress.

Standardized testing also provides no-nonsense information for parents. Instead of telling a parent, "Mary is such a hard worker," properly read, these tests tell a parent exactly where a student stands on the important skills of reading and math. If a student is not progressing, a parent finds out immediately, instead of finding out in 8th or 9th grade, when it is way to late to develop a remediation plan.

Part of the fear of standardized testing is that testing will be used improperly to rate teachers, not based on the quality of their teaching, but on the preparation and intellect of the particular students who happen to be assigned to her classroom. This issue is not unique to education. A hospital that handles the most difficult cases fears that ratings based on outcomes may wrongly suggest that the hospital isn't as good as a hospital that specializes in less difficult cases. In education it has become customary for school districts serving exclusive neighborhoods with low poverty populations, few immigrants, and few first-generation students, to boast that "our test scores are really high." Yet, we all know that the most important factor in determining the test scores of students at the end of the year is the test scores that they had at the beginning. When I taught two classes of the same subject, one after another, my class of high fliers way out performed my other class, even though I worked just as hard to help both classes excel.

The strength of progress-based testing is precisely that it focuses on the progress that the individual student has made. Properly used, progress based testing rewards a teacher for moving a student a year (or more) ahead, whether the student started behind or ahead at the beginning of the year.

Teachers understandably fear that their evaluations, and perhaps their continued employment, will depend not on their effectiveness, but on a political process that assigns students to their classroom. This is a legitimate fear, but the solution is not to wage a war on standardized testing, but to use testing appropriately. The primary purpose of standardized testing is to help teachers do their job better. Standardized testing like the NWEA can do that by providing meaningful data to teachers and administrators and parents that tell them how well students are learning. If used wisely, that information can be an invaluable tool in public education.

Prior posts and links on testing
NWEA Provides Window on Student Achievement
Using NWEA for Accountability
RITS, NWEA and Progress Based Testing
Testing Scandals I
the Notebook
Editorial in USA today
National Center for Fair and Open Testing
Washington Post article
Los Angeles Charters Accused of Cheating Closed
Testing Scandals II

The Challenge of Keeping School Districts Sustainable

2011-08-04T20:01:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot in the last couple of months about how we are going to keep our school district financially sustainable. We who are stewards of public education revenues at the local level need to take a long hard look at what the future is bringing, and how we are going to manage our budgets. We are living in a time of high unemployment. Across the country many districts have cut teachers and raised class size significantly. These teacher cuts have resulted partly from real budget cuts in many states. But they have also resulted from wage and benefit increases in districts across the country. In Minnesota during the last two years, many district increased their compensation costs by amounts significantly greater than the state revenues would allow and they made big cuts to do it. Can this go on year after year? At the same time, most districts in Minnesota experienced significant growth in their special education deficits, reflecting the failure of the state to cover the growth in special education costs that is happening across the State in most districts. How can we justify cutting our work force, at a time when we have high unemployment and young people are graduating from college prepared to teach in a brutal market?

In Minnesota, and many other states, there is significant upward pressure on teacher salaries resulting from the step and lane system of compensation. Education Week writes that forthcoming research by Stanford University economist Eric A. Hanushek concludes that, in 2008, 9.5 percent of teachers’ total salaries was devoted to paying them for obtaining advanced degrees, and 27 percent for accumulated experience past the second year of teaching. At the same time, average teachers salaries have probably not kept pace with the growth in salaries paid to other college educated professionals. So this posting is not the beginning of an argument that teachers are overpaid!

The question that is panicking those of us responsible for managing school budgets is that we cannot see a way to make the current compensation system work and keep our school districts afloat. Like the United States Government, we have a revenue problem and we have a cost problem. If we were making cars or building roads, or running banks, we'd solve this problem by making productivity gains. We'd buy labor saving devices and cut our labor force. Or, we'd outsource our production to some third world country. But teaching is inherently labor intensive. But children still seem to need adult contact when they are learning. Colleges respond to revenue cuts with a broad variety of options that aren't likely to work in elementary and secondary education. They grow their class size into the hundreds. They use graduate students to provide low cost teaching assistants or teachers for introductory courses. Increasingly, they have taken to covering many courses with poorly paid adjunct teachers who work without tenure, benefits, or pension. And, they cover revenue shortfalls by increasing tuition.

In the next several years, especially during the coming funding crisis, school districts are going to be forced to decide whether they will continue the current practice of increasing compensation costs faster than revenues and making cuts to make up the difference. Going down that road is eventually going to destroy public education as we know it. If we are to survive, we need to step out of the current paradigm of solving our problems with continuing cuts, and work harder to find alternatives.

What are the alternatives? If we are going to find alternatives, the first thing that we have to do is get off our current treadmill. We are locked into a negative spiral, addicted to a pattern of cuts and more cuts. If we don't start considering alternatives, pretty soon, we'll wake up one morning and discover that there's nothing left that is recognizable as a school. I'll write more on this toic in my next post....

Another Testing Scandal

2011-08-02T18:51:00.000-07:00

In a recent post, I wrote about the test-score cheating scandal in Atlanta Georgia and Washington, D.C. The two scandals have some things in common. Both involve challenged school systems with nationally recognized former superintendents. Both received attention nationally as examples of how great leadership in the central office can lead to eye-popping growth in test scores. In both cases, there are allegations that leadership looked the other way when teachers or parents brought forward troubling information that might have revealed the problem. As we discuss the implications of these scandals, we can't emphasize enough that the vast majority of educators recoil at the concept that other educators would engage in this conduct. And, in some cases, these scandals are steps away from being proven: they rest on statistical evidences suggesting that something is seriously amiss. In Washington, D.C., as well, some of the schools ensnared in cheating scandals have experienced significant reduction in test scores once new testing regimens were installed to ward off cheating.

Now we are hearing reports of possible widespread cheating in Pennsylvania. July 21st New York Times carries a story about a small Philadelphia publication called the Notebook has exposed what appears to be a new round of cheating scandals:

In Pennsylvania, the 2009 statistical analysis that was unearthed by The Notebook has provided many good leads. Chester Community Charter, one of the state’s biggest schools, with 2,700 students, was among those most often flagged for suspicious erasure results. It also was flagged for questionable test scores: in 2009, 65.4 percent of eighth graders were proficient in math, compared with 22 percent the year before......Chester Community Charter School, which was heavily flagged in the 2009 study for “aberrant” erasures and test scores, is operated by Vahan Gureghian. Mr. Gureghian was the largest individual contributor to the governor’s election campaign last fall, giving more than $300,000.....In April the governor visited Mr. Gureghian’s charter, praising it as a model “that needs to be reported to all the people of Pennsylvania,”

A total of 89 schools — 28 in Philadelphia — both charters and traditional publics had been flagged by the state for, among other things, an improbably high number of erasures, as well as questionable gains on reading and math tests.

What is happening in these schools where cheating is occurring? Let us all agree that part of what is going on is a manifestation of deep moral failure. There is no justification, no rationale for distorting the results of student testing. None. But it is important as well to consider some of the pressures that are leading to this epidemic of cheating at times endorsed or facilitated by a very small unrepresentative group of teachers and administrators.

The National Center for Fair and Open Testing wrote in an Editorial in USA today:

The cheating spike is the predictable fallout from the pervasive misuse of standardized tests in public schools. When test results are all that matter in evaluating students, teachers and schools, educators feel pressured to boost scores by hook or by crook. Just as in other professions, some will cross the ethical line.Cheating is not the only negative consequence from test misuse. Many schools have turned classrooms into drill-and-kill test-prep centers, reduced the difficulty of exams and narrowed curriculum. Some even encouraged students to drop out in order to boost scores. Basing teacher evaluations on students' test scores, as some propose, is guaranteed to ratchet up the pressure and further distort schooling.

According to the National Center, "in the past few months, improper test score manipulation have been uncovered in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando and many smaller communities."

I disagree with folks who argue we need to get rid of standardized testing. I disagree with the suggestion that we shouldn't use test scores to assist with teacher evaluation. I disagree that if we drive standardized testing out of our schools that teaching and learning will improve. Quality testing, and especially quality standardized testing provides teachers, parents and administrators with critical information.

The problem is that we are misusing testing by demanding that all students must reach an arbitrarily selected proficiency score, and the misuse is placing extraordinary pressures on children and their teachers.

The problem lies in the pundit and political class who have decided that all it takes is for someone in the nation's capitol or in state capitols to decide that all children will achieve at an arbitrarily chosen proficiency level, and presto chango, if we humilate their teachers and school districts for failure to reach that level, magically, all students will reach that level. I personally witnessed an example of this form of educational malpractice here in Minnesota, when I served on a state committee that set the basic reading standard at a level driven by politicians, despite overwhelming evidence that this level could not be achieved. Test score objectives are being set by politicians and uninformed advocates who have no clue what they are doing.

The truth of the matter is that we can do better for a lot of kids, but there is also a limit to what teachers can do on their own. Not every child can reach a level that somebody in Washington pulls out of their you know what. Children have varying intellectual capabilities. There are some children who have great difficulty understanding addition and subtraction. Teaching them second year algebra, as the State of Minnesota demands that we do, is not likely to succeed. There are some children who arrive at school alienated and unmotivated. There are some children who arrive at school with physical or mental disablities that drastically limit their ability to learn. There are some who refuse to do their homework or cooperate with their teacher. Yes, we can do better with some of these children, and we should. We can use test scores to provide valuable information on how students and their teachers are progressing, and we should. But what we are doing instead is establishing by fiat proficiency goals for all children, whether they can meet those goals or not.

Everyone who actually teaches children knows that the proficiency standards that are being utilized across the country are too low for some children -- not demanding enough-- and too high for others. Children are not widgets; they aren't interchangeable parts on an assembly line. Some work harder than others. Some get more parental support than others. Some have high intellects, and some have low. Some just can't stand math, darn it. We don't need to get rid of testing: we need to stop misusing testing to humiliate teachers and students. We need to stop overstating how much and how fast we can bring about change. And, certainly, we need to take steps to assure testing integrity.

While there are many negative impacts of the distortion of test results, one of them is that the cheating schools have been used by pundits and politicians as proof that radical transformation can occur almost overnight simply by adopting a superintendent's visionary plans. In today's Washington Post there is an article reporting on the test scores in some of these turnaround schools a year after their testing practices were examined.

Reading and math scores on citywide tests fell this year in several D.C. schools that came under scrutiny for potential security breaches in the previous year’s exams, according to data made public Tuesday. In a few cases, the plunge recorded through the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System was especially stark. At Noyes Education Campus in Northeast Washington, the pass rate in reading dropped more than 25 percentage points, to 32 percent, and the pass rate in math dropped more than 20 points, to 28 percent. Noyes was one of three schools for which some 2010 scores were invalidated in May after an investigation found evidence or strong suspicion of cheating.

Links in this post. I encourage you to look at these sources.
My recent post on Atlanta
the Notebook
Editorial in USA today
National Center for Fair and Open Testing
Washington Post article
Los Angeles Charters Accused of Cheating Closed
Connecticut Cheating Investigation

Executive Pay Increases Require School Board Approval

2011-07-31T08:53:00.000-07:00

An editorial by the Minneapolis Tribune properly criticized the "timing" of pay raises granted by the Minneapolis Superintendent, but the Editorial failed to understand the root causes for the problem. If you haven't followed this story, the Strib reported that after the special session, the Superintendent approved more than $270,000 in retroactive pay increases to executive school district staff, some of whom had already resigned. Now before I move along with this posting, let me say that this isn't an attack on the Superintendent or her board of education. I'm sure the folks in Minneapolis could find fault with a number of things that we do up here in St. Cloud. But I want to use this example to make a few points about an important issue in the area of school governance. Nor is it an attack on school leadership pay. School leadership perform a valuable function, and they deserve to be paid appropriately.

But the Superintendent approved these pay increases without board approval. Her justification was that the Board of Education had recently accepted a pay study presented to the Board, and that the pay study argued that Minneapolis school leaders were underpaid as compared to similar positions in similar school districts elsewhere in the country. She also noted that the Board Chair had been informed of the planned pay increases, although all other board members steadfastly say that they had no idea that the increases were going to be issued.

Now the Minneapolis Tribune's position is that the Superintendent should be able to approve pay increases for executive leadership, all on her own without Board approval. This is what I call, the "Superintendent is the King (Queen) of the school district" approach to school district governance. This is a deeply flawed, legally erroneous approach to school district governance. It arises from a mistaken belief that elected school board members should be relegated to sitting at board meetings and listening to endless reports, nodding their heads yes, and staying out of anything that really matters. It arises from a mistaken understanding of what micromanagement really is, and what it is not.

There is a broad arena of operational details that belong to the province of the superintendent of schools and his or her cabinet. Indeed virtually all of the operational details of running a school district belong to the Superintendent or his or her delegates. One of the great mistakes that a school board can make is to try to meddle in these daily operations. School boards should govern on a policy basis, absolutely, but like it or not, the public regards executive pay as a key policy issue. Certainly, many superintendents are going to cultivate the concept that every decision that matters is the superintendent's decision, because of course, it seems easier to run a school district if nothing is policy and everything is operational. When a board undertakes to disapprove or challenge any decision by the superintendent, some leaders try to respond by arguing that the board is committing the sin of micromanagement. The question of where to draw the line between the board's policy role and the superintendent's operational domain is not always clear, and a superintendent will often try to push the boundaries as far as possible.

A school board approves pay increases for executive leadership because the leadership is just too close to the superintendent for the superintendent to dispassionately decide whether to provide an increase. School board supervision is an important protection to the superintendent as well as the public. School leaders come out of a union environment which builds a spirit of mutual self protection. This same spirit can arise in a large business among management as well, but private business is not dealing with public funds. Executive pay is a policy issue, because everyone looks at the leadership to get a sense of whether the leadership runs the district in an accountable way: if the district promotes accountability at the highest level, it is much easier to develop respect for accountability throughout.

We see in this example some of the warning signals that the boundaries have been expanded well into the Board's territory here. The first warning sign is the statement that the Chair was informed but not the rest of the Board. A board functions as a whole. Telling the Board chair that the superintendent is about to do something that could be very controversial is a danger sign that the Superintendent is looking for cover, but avoiding scrutiny by the entire board. In these days of email, it is just as easy for the superintendent to inform the entire board as it is to inform the chair.

Minnesota school boards have an obligation to approve changes in salary before they are implemented. Absolutely, they should listen carefully to the recommendations of the superintendent. School boards approve all sorts of things on our consent agenda that we would never dream of disapproving. We are required to approve every licensed teacher hired by the District. But we don't interview teachers, we don't check their resumes, we don't ask questions or have a discussion about their merits. Hiring teachers is an example of an area that belongs to the operational responsibility of the superintendent, but which the law allocates to the board of education for final approval. There are other areas where we exercise our approval with more caution. We ask questions before we approve, but almost always we approve.

But the level of executive pay is a policy issue that should be reviewed by the school board, because that review is essential to developing public confidence that public money is being used wisely. There is a grave danger that the public will come to believe that school leadership see themselves as part of a band of brothers and sisters who mutually need to protect their pay levels against unfair public hostility towards educational leaders. Part of this results from the fact that these days, no matter what we pay educational leaders, there will be a gang of citizens who step forward and attack that pay, because they refuse to recognize that educational leaders are critical to the success of a school district. But the solution doesn't lie in sweeping pay under the rug. It lies in developing transparent procedures designed to subject these decisions to careful scrutiny by the board of education. The Board needs to develop policies that value administrators, that create an atmosphere of fairness to the public and to the employees.

One of the important functions of a board of education is to serve as an early warning function to tell the superintendent when he or she is about to do something that will raise a public firestorm. When a coming decision is going to be unpopular, but correct, then it is the board of education's job to create an atmosphere of close scrutiny, so that the public knows that their representatives have carefully considered the merits. And then, the board must step up to the plate and defend that decision with vigor. A second important function is to say no, on occasion, when a decision doesn't make sense.

I agree with the Tribune that this decision appears to have been a mistake. But the mistake was more systemic: it lies in believing that public school leaders should be able to raise their own pay.

Balanced Budget Amendment Silliness

2011-07-29T20:13:00.000-07:00

Since the founding of our current constitutional republican democracy, Americans have disagreed heartily over the proper role of the national government in using its fiscal and monetary powers to assure economic growth. As a nation, we have disagreed over establishment of a national bank, over tight money policy and easy money policy, over the use of tax cuts and spending increases financed by borrowing as an instrument of national fiscal policy.    Throughout all of these debates, honest thoughtful statesmen and economists have disagreed mightily, and at different times in our history, different views have prevailed.   Now, the proponents of the Constitutional amendment seek to win this argument not just for today, but forever, by threatening to destroy our economy unless the rest of us agree permanently to lock their views in the United States Constitution.

Throughout most of our history, the voters have supported parties which believed in using the national government's fiscal powers to promote growth, to invest in infrastructure and development. The predominant founding party, the party of George Washington, saw the federal government as a great engine of economic development and growth. The federalists believed that the federal government should use its powers to create infrastructure, and they used the national government to promote economic development. The party of Jefferson, the democrats, were skeptical of that power, although at times, they used it as aggressively as the Federalists.   The proponents of a constitutional amendment intend to take this national debate over the role of government in promoting economic development out of the hands of the voters and their representatives, and to resolve it for all times.

The proponents don't believe that the great problems of our nation should be resolved by the people: they want to win the debate for all time. They believe that they know better than the party of Lincoln, which during the second half of the 19th century used the powers of the federal government to create a great railroad infrastructure. The Republicans won the civil war using debt to finance the effort, and would not likely have been able to prosecute the nation's defense if a 2/3 vote was required. The proponents of a constitutional amendment believe that they know better than the party of Roosevelt, which used the federal government's borrowing power to win World War II and pull our country out of the great depression   They believe that they know better than Ronald Reagen, who used the government's borrowing power to stimulate the economy and to spend the Soviets into the ground with massive defense spending. They think that they understand economics so well that they are willing to insert their position on macro economics into the United States Constitution for all time.

In truth, perhaps proponents are so sure that history may judge them wrong, that they lack the courage to win this argument on the merits.   They threaten instead to destroy the country's economy and its credit unless the rest of us who disagree not only bend to their will, but that we embody their position in the Constitution in the exact language that they propose, so that it will be virtually impossible for the people to change course, if history proves them wrong. The political party that is doing this is the same party that, when it came into power ten years ago, immediately cut taxes and vastly increased spending, ballooning the deficit and fighting a war without raising taxes to do it. This is the party that took the Clinton surplus and converted it to the largest deficit in history. A balanced budget amendment is silly, because it ties the hands of our democracy permanently and locks us into a position on the role of government that has been a minority position throughout the course of our history.

A balanced budget amendment is silly because it won't solve the problem that it is designed to solve. It is silly, because it will tie the government's hands in times of crisis, and make us less powerful than our adversaries. It is silly, because most of the greatest funding problems that our government faces are not even addressed by the amendment. It's silly because it represents an attempt to allow a minority of Americans to dominate decisions of the majority. But it is silly also, because the language of proposed amendments is poorly conceived and poorly written. Let's take a look at the text of one of the popular versions of a balanced budget amendment. Here is section 1 and section 8:

Section 1. Total outlays for any fiscal year shall not exceed total receipts for that fiscal year. `Section 8. Total receipts shall include all receipts of the United States except those derived from borrowing. Total outlays shall include all outlays of the United States except those for repayment of debt principal..

Ok. That seems simple doesn't it. Let's see if we can figure out how this is gonna work. The first issue that we have to address is whether the United States is going to be run on the cash basis or the accrual basis, or on the modified accrual basis, or some other accounting basis. The answer is found in section 7. Section 7 tells us that "The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." Now if you are a tea party patriot, I suppose right away, you are going to tell me, banging your fist on the table, that of course we should account for our outlays and our receipts on a cash basis. But frankly, a lot of accountants are going to tell us that running the books of any complicated business, and certainly the government, on an accrual basis will actually give you a far more accurate picture of the financial picture. Running on a cash basis allows for all sorts of manipulation, and as our experience in Minnesota shows, manipulation is the first thing Republicans and Democrats run to when they want to evade an amendment like this. And, accountants will tell you that you can do a whole lot of manipulation under either system especially if you are allowed to switch back and forth from one accounting method to another.

If you are on the cash basis, you can manipulate things by changing the timing of when taxes are due, for example. And, you can manipulate things by delaying payment on bills into the next year. So, if the legislature wants to spend a bit more this year, it can decide to pay all of its December bills in January. There are all sorts of accounting nightmares presented by this attempt to make a very complicate problem simple

We've not begun to discuss, however, the incentives under this amendment to use "cooperative federalism" to create government obligations that don't count against outlays. A simple example is special education. Right now, federal special education requirements mandate state and local expenditures in Minnesota of two billion per year. Federal and state reimbursement for those mandated expenditures total about 700 million less per year. The federal government funds only about 20 percent of these mandated expenditures, passing the burden on to the state, and then the state underfunds the remainder, passing the burden on to the local government. Under this amendment, we will see all sorts of hijinks of this kind, pushing unfunded burdens down to local government, so that federal and state legislators can comply with their respective balanced budget amendments. Medicaid, Medicare, social security, all of these are possible venues for creative cooperative federalism.

Revenue shifts will become more common like the education revenue shift that Republicans and Democrats jointly introduced in Minnesota. But still we haven't even scratched the surface. There is nothing in this constitutional amendment that prohibits the federal government from creating entitlements but deferring payment for these entitlements. Entitlements such as veterans benefits, social security commitments, medicare benefits, all of these benefits are building up future expectations, and the constitutional amendment does nothing directly about this problem. Instead, it essentially creates a situation where entitlements drive out all other expenditures.

Who is going to resolve issues like this? The Congress gets to interpret it, according to the amendment. But if a group of Congressmen disagrees, they can challenge the decision of the majority by taking it to the federal courts, which now become sort of the federal board of debt review. Section 6 says. "Any Member of Congress shall have standing and a cause of action to seek judicial enforcement of this article, when authorized to do so by a petition signed by one-third of the Members of either House of Congress. No court of the United States or of any State shall order any increase in revenue to enforce this article." So, the Courts can lower taxes but they cannot eliminate loopholes. Can they cancel debts if they exceed the ceiling? Which ones do they cancel? Who would buy American debt obligations with an amendment like this in force, anyway, without a significant surcharge for the new risk that a debt instrument is going to be declared illegal by the Constitutional debt court.

Could the courts cancel social security? If the economy is running at full steam, and one Congress wants to cut taxes because we're running a surplus, can the next Congress restore that tax cut without a 2/3 vote? Can Congress evade this problem by cutting taxes only for two years, or would a Court adopt the Norquist position and say that at the end of the two year period, its a tax cut? Can a Congress evade the amendment entirely by voting in a large permanent tax increase by a 2/3 vote and then implementing a temporary tax cut? Suppose a group of liberals refuses to vote to increase the debt limit in a time of war unless the Constitutional Amendment is repealed? Would that be called economic blackmail?!. And would the response be, what goes around comes around: you got the amendment in this way; now we're going to get it out the same way?

Section 4. says that any bill to levy a new tax or increase the rate of any tax shall not become law unless approved by two-thirds of the whole number of each House of Congress by a roll call vote. What is a new tax? Can the government substitute a flat tax for the income tax without a 2/3 vote? Suppose the Congress gives a big tax break to a special interest group (by a majority vote). Can the next Congress remove that tax break by a majority vote, or does it require a 2/3 vote? Can we eliminate the interest deduction for home mortgages by a majority vote? Is that a tax increase or not? Suppose Congress declares war by a majority vote, but a significant number of Congressmen are opposed to the war. Can 1/3 of the Senate stop us from funding our troops? Really?

If the government wants to build a a major hydroelectric system, as for example the Hoover Dam project, does that count against the national debt. It would not count under a state constitution, because capital budget expenditures that build wealth are not subject to the balanced budget amendment? Is it really wise to prevent national borrowing for infrastructure projects.? And, when are we going to have a meaningful dialogue about these issues? How can we have that dialog, when the the amendment is being rammed down our throats by threatening to create a national financial calamity lest we adopt the amendment right now.

Board approves Health Insurance renewal lowering rates by 9 percent

2011-07-28T19:54:00.000-07:00

Thursday night, the school board approved a two year proposal for health insurance rates for District employees from Blue Cross. The new proposal contains several elements. It reduces the number of our insurance carriers down to one -- the lowest bidder, of course. There are several reasons for doing this. We have been concerned that when we award bids to the two lowest bidders, there is less incentive for any of the bidders to bid as low as they can. If all bidders can succeed by coming in second, all bidders may may try to come in second place.

Also when there are multiple carriers, each carrier worries that there will be an adverse selection process that sends higher risk employees over to one of the two carriers, and that risk causes actuaries to raise prices. We have also phased out the District's highest cost insurance policy, leaving us with only two policies from the one carrier. Phasing out that richer costlier policy has again improved the actuarial performance of the remaining policies. We are left with two policies, one of which is a high deductible lower cost policy that is attractive to employees who cannot afford higher premiums.

The result of all of this is that our premium cost for next year will go down nine percent. That will result in a significant savings to both employees and the district. Depending on the particular coverage, premiums (district and employee combined) will be reduced anywhere from $50 to $167 per month. The bid included a rate increase cap for the second year of not more than 5%, so that we are guaranteed rate reductions for the next two years.

These changes required collaboration between the District and representatives of its employees. It required the agreement of our employee unions to reduce from two carriers to one and it required the agreement of our employee unions to reduce from three policy choices to two. The rate declines we realized result in part from the changes we made in our approach to health insurance over the last several years combined with a favorable insurance market this year.

We have a revenue problem and a spending problem!

2011-07-26T17:35:00.000-07:00

I'm tired of hearing the facile slogan, "we have a spending problem, we don't have a revenue problem." Its a marketing statement unworthy of serious discussion. We heard it during the Minnesota shutdown, despite the fact that Minnesota's structural deficit grew after the State cut taxes at the same time that it increased spending. We hear it now from Congressmen, Senators and pundits, with regard to to the federal structural deficit despite indisputable evidence to the contrary. Listen, you can believe that we should solve our problems with spending cuts only if you want. But don't deceive yourself into believing the canard that spending increases are the sole cause of our problem. It's just not true. We have a spending problem and we have a revenue problem.

During the Clinton administration, the President and Congress cut the deficit by increasing taxes and cutting the growth in spending. They eliminated the deficit entirely and began to run a surplus. At the same time, the economy boomed, unemployment fell, and Americans, including the wealth, improved their incomes.

Under the Bush administration, the Congress and the President implemented massive tax cuts while spending increased massively. The Bush administration paid for the war off budget. Even today, when Republicans talk about the size of the deficit, they do not acknowledge the off-budget Iraq war spending. What did the Bush tax cuts accomplish: they preceded the greatest recession since the Great Depression of the 1930's. They coincided with a great change in the division in wealth in America, with more and more wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. Why does a policy which promotes a transfer of wealth to the rich destroy employment? The answer is very simple. When the middle class does not do well, people stop buying. Middle class consumption is the driver of the American economy. When a country promotes wealth transfer towards its wealthy by tax policy, it is killing off consumer demand. Higher wages, higher middle incomes, drive consumption. Transferring wealth through tax policy to the rich at the expense of middle income taxpayers is a job killing policy.

As often as the sloganeers claim otherwise, they cannot deny that our economy went in the tank at the same time that we lowered taxes massively, and lowered them especially on the rich. This is not a class warfare issue. Look at the evidence. Where in these charts do you see the justification for the claim that "taxing the rich is job-killing," or "we don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.

Charts courtesy of MSNBC. Click on link to reach the source.

Education Bill Requires New Educator Evaluation Program

2011-07-23T13:33:00.000-07:00

I'm going to discuss some of the new Education legislation that was passed this past session over the next few postings. The omnibus education bill contains amendments which require more effective teacher evaluation and peer coaching. In Minnesota, a teacher is a probationary teacher during the first three years of service. While previous law has required an evaluation system for probationary teachers, the new law creates a default system of evaluation and peer coaching which is mandatory, unless the school district and the teachers union agree to a different system and it requires evaluation with significant consequences for all teachers, whether they are on probation or have tenure.

The old statutory language provided that the teachers union and the school board were to jointly agree on a peer review process through joint agreement. The new legislation continues to encourage the board and teachers to agree on both a teacher evaluation and peer review process. However, if the union and the board cannot agree, then the school board and union must implement the default plan that is provided for under the legislation. The law now requires, for the first time, that the evaluation and peer review process "Must include having trained observers serve as peer coaches or having teachers serve in professional learning communities." The plan "must establish a three-year professional review cycle for each teacher that includes an individual growth and development plan, a peer review process, the opportunity to participate in a professional learning community, and at least one summative evaluation performed by a qualified and trained evaluator, such as school administrator." In any year that the teacher is not evaluated by a trained evaluator, then the teacher must be evaluated by a peer review process, so that means that each year, some form of formal evaluation is required. A summative evaluation means an evaluation that rates or describes performance. All of this takes effect beginning in the 2014-15 school year.

Under the new evaluation process, student outcomes are an important part of the evaluation. The evaluation process must used "an agreed upon teacher value-added assessment model for grade levels and subject areas for which value-added data are available and establish state or local measures of student growth for which value added data are not available." This information must constitute 35% of the teacher evaluation results.

Implementing all of this will be easier said than done. Those of you who think implementing a major transformation in personnel evaluation is a snap, think again. Where a system like this does not yet exist, it requires lots of hard work in creating the appropriate systems and structures. It requires training people to use the system that has been devised. It demands signficant personnel resources must be devoted to evaluation. In a building that has, say, 30 teachers and one principal, implementing a first class evaluation system along these lines is a major undertaking for the principal, unless teachers are utilized to assist in the evaluation and coaching process. It requires observation time, data review, meetings with evaluated staff, and significant efforts to assure that the requirements are being fulfilled consistently, professionally and fairly. Most educators have simply not been trained in their teacher and administrator training to implement a program of this kind. And before you make a negative comment about educators, let me just emphasize that most lawyers, most doctors, most accountants, indeed most professionals of every kind, receive no training in conducting quality evaluations. Creating and implementing an outstanding evaluation process is a very demanding task, and its going to take lots of hard work on the part of school boards, administrators and teachers to get this job done fairly and effectively.

The new law requires teachers "not meeting professional teaching standards....to improve through a teacher improvement process that includes established goals and timelines." It mandates that the evaluative process must "discipline a teacher for not making adequate progress in the teacher improvement process that may include a last chance warning, termination, discharge, nonrenewal, transfer....leave of absence or other discipline a school administrator determines is appropriate." In other words, the evaluation process has significant impact on teacher careers, and so this whole process needs to be done professionally and competently.

The legislation envisons a process to be developed by the Minnesota Department of Education that will create more detail in the default process that is used, if the union and district do not agree to their own process. The new law becomes effective the beginning of the 2014-2015 school year, so that is three years hence. In the meantime, there is a lot of work that will have to be done to prepare.

How much money is enough, Mr. Von Korff

2011-07-16T06:57:00.000-07:00

During the shutdown, I wrote furiously to legislators and the Governor, urging them them to provide more revenues to education. I appreciate the careful consideration given to these letters and emails by many, of course. But near the end, one of the key legislators in the education fray wrote, as if frustrated with my pleas, "Mr. Von Korff, how much of an increase would be enough." It felt as though I was being told, no matter how much we send you, it's never enough?

My answer is more complicated than the legislators want to hear. My answer is that the amount of money we need depends a lot on the legislators themselves. One of the great problems in St. Paul and Washington, D.C. is that legislators don't seem to make a connection between the policy bills and mandates they pass and the answer to the question "how much is enough." Over the last ten years, the governor's office and the legislature has piled on new responsibilities and mandates for local school districts. And, the State has created a costly structure of labor policies, benefits, licensing, and prohibitions that together speak loudly: "let's make public education more expensive in Minnesota." Many of these policies have good reasons behind them, but St. Paul doesn't have enough discipline and policy coherence to cost out these policies and connect them to revenues.

In the last decade, total special education costs in the State of Minnesota has skyrocketed. These costs are driven by intentional, and well-meaning, policies in the executive and legislative branch designed to provide more and more services, and more costly services, in special education. But never do these policies come with money needed to pay for the new policies attached to them. Nobody estimates the implementation costs, let alone, passes funding legislation. The result has been that the annual deficit in special education in Minnesota, the difference between total spending and total revenues for special education, has risen from about $350 million per year to about $740 million projected for 2013.

This year, the Republicans tried to dial back the amount of revenues provided to special education, but they refused to advance legislation that would help local districts reduces special education costs. And so I say to the esteemed legislative leadership: "The answer to your question, how much is enough, is partly in your hands. In St. Cloud, we are doing everything we can -- everything the law allows -- to keep our costs down, and the deficit in special education funding has risen from $5 million to about $9 million." We'd like the State to wipe out our special education deficit. We need legislative authority to control costs. And, we need the legislature to fund what it forces us to spend.

This year, advocates for school districts urged the legislature to repeal the bargaining penalty, which penalizes districts and taxpayers if their school board refuses to increase labor costs faster than state revenues rise. If the bargaining penalty repeal is one of those policy items that Dayton forces the legislature to remove from the education bill, that will substantially increase the cost of public education next year, because many school boards simply will not risk paying that penalty, even if they have to pay out higher labor costs many times greater than the penalty itself. If the legislature wants to penalize local districts that refuse to increase compensation more than they can afford, then it ought to have the courage to pay the cost of that policy.

Last year, the legislature raised the assessments against school districts for state employee retirement benefits, an assessment that will increase our costs by $1 million over the next four years here in St. Cloud. But not a dime of revenues was provided to cover these increases.

These are three examples of the connection between what folks in St. Paul do on the policy side and the cost of education. One of the remarkable facts of state governance is that our state legislature writes policy bills and school financing bills virtually without making any serious effort to hold hearings on the answer to the question that the legislator asked me: "how much should it cost to deliver the education we need in Minnesota." Some time look at the hearing schedule of the education committees. You will see precious little on the hearing schedule seeking to answer this fundamental question.

This year, the Governor convened a committee to discuss education finance reform. But the committee didn't study what public education should cost, it studied possible changes in who gets the money we already have. The question of what it costs to do what the legislature requires was basically removed from the table. Nobody wants to know the answer any more, because frankly, they already know that the answer they get won't be popular. The State of Minnesota is forcing school districts to spend 1.5 billion per biennium more in special education alone than total federal and state revenues combined. If we tried to solve this problem by reducing the mandate, a long line of advocates for the disabled would, understandably, descend on the State Capitol and demand protection of these important initiatives. If we tried to solve this problem by increasing revenues, a group of legislators would say that they promised the tea party crowd that they won't raise taxes. Its easy to keep the no new taxes pledge if you wash your hands of the real problem: providing revenues to fund the good things that you want to take credit for.

Minnesota's school finance "system" is no longer a system. It consists of a set of mandates and policy prohibitions completely disconnected from costs and revenues. It is symptomatic of this total disconnect between the cost of programs and the revenues that we collect, that school districts have now become the official banker for the State of Minnesota, essentially lending the State billions of dollars to do what the Constitution was designed to prohibit: to spend more than we collect in revenues.

Pass a Clean Bi-partisan Lights on Bill Now

2011-07-12T18:24:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, July 12, 2011, I had the privilege of appearing on the dais with Governor Dayton for a discussion of education finance and the budget deadlock. The audience was mostly friendly to Dayton, but everyone also urged Governor and the legislators present to get government working again. It would be fabulous if the House, Senate and Governor could come together and break the deadlock immediately. But frankly, listening to both sides on Tuesday, it sounds like we have a long long way to go.

For this reason, I say, lets get government working again with a clean bi-partisan lights-on bill. Not a Republican version of a lights-on bill. Not a Democratic version of a lights-on bill. But one that is fair to both sides and above all, fair to all Minnesotans.

Republicans have been pressing for a lights-on bill, of course, but what they have in mind is a bill that they craft to provide only the taxes and spending that they favor. Democrats naturally fear that their purpose is not bipartisan. Democrats believe that Republicans want the Governor to approve a lights on bill that spends exactly what Republicans want-- and taxes exactly what Republicans want to tax, and approves the revenue only that Republicans want to approve. Once a lights-on-bill is passed, the Republicans could stop negotiating and essentially turn the lights on bill into permanent legislation. Neither party should have to support a lights-on bill that's a ruse.

The lights on bill I'm calling for would be a true bipartisan lights on bill. It would have the following elements:

Starting next Monday, spending and taxation would occur at a compromise level, half way between Dayton's position and the legislative position, until the light's on bill terminates.
That would mean that on a temporary basis there would be a temporary 1 percent tax on millionaires, half of Dayton's demand, only for the duration of the lights on bill. This would mean that if the lights on bill lasted one month, millionaires would be taxed 1/12 of one percent, because the tax would be in effect for only 1/12 of a year. The Governor would get half of what he wants, but only for 1/12 of a year.
As part of the permanent agreement, the Republicans would be free to insist that the temporary millionaire tax would be rebated. Indeed, any of the temporary spending and taxing could be altered in a final deal.They could support the lights on bill, knowing that the permanent bill could repair what they don't want to agree to permanently.
Finally, to provide an incentive to honest negotiation, either party could unilaterally terminate the operation of the temporary light's on bill.

This lights on bill could put Minnesota government back in operation on Friday this week without requiring either party to capitulate. The clean Bi-Partisan lights-on bill involves minor concessions by each side, but neither side is forced to capitulate. And the agreement is only temporary. The bi-partisan lights on bill would restore child care for Minnesota low income workers. It would immediately start up construction projects and, yes, even get horse racing going again. The beauty of the bi-partisan lights on bill is that both parties can agree to it without capitulating to the other.

Now I believe that a bi-partisan lights-on bill has to have increased revenues and it has to provide some cost controls, because there is no question that Minnesota has a massive structural deficit that is cost by spending more than we must, and taxing less than we must. Mainline real republicans and and mainline real democrats, the experts in both parties know this. (See my blogpost from December 2009). The two great bipartisan budget commissions, 2009 and 2005, both warned that Minnesota will be facing a huge financial crisis, because our taxation was reduced below a sustainable level and because our spending-- especially health care spending has been maintained at an unsustainably high level.

What lesson from Atlanta school testing scandals?

2011-07-06T18:17:00.000-07:00

An article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution by Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, and an expert on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, one year ago touted the fantastic gains being made in the Atlanta Public Schools:

Atlanta’s public schools have made the fastest reading gains of any major city school district in the country. They also have made significant progress in math. Those are the facts. Between 2002 and 2009, Atlanta’s fourth- and eighth-graders increased their reading scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress — the “Nation’s Report Card” — by 14 points. The next fastest-improving city school systems, the District of Columbia and New York, saw their fourth-graders gaining 12 and 11 points, respectively. No other city’s eighth-graders improved their reading skills by more than seven points.

The article goes on to explain that experts came to Atlanta to learn how other cities could replicate Atlanta's amazing success.

Earlier this year, a team of national reading, math and science experts who have examined instructional programs in scores of cities nationwide came into Atlanta to investigate the reasons behind the district’s gains, especially in reading.

What was the reason? Vision; proper use of data; accountability and great leadership in the Superintendent's chair:

The results of the examination — based on extensive interviews, data analysis and document review — attributed the improvements to a number of organizational and instructional factors: strong community support; an increasingly cohesive school board; a visionary and skilled superintendent; a clearly articulated strategy for reform that was sustained over a prolonged period; a strong mechanism for holding adults accountable for student results; good data with which to monitor progress and inform classroom practice; and other factors.

By the time the article was written, already troubling rumors had begun to circulate that at least some of Atlanta's test scores were the product of fraud. Yet plaudits for Atlanta persisted. The education establishment, pundits from all sides, desperate for proof that great gains in education can occur on the cheap, had seized on districts like Atlanta and Washington, D.C., looking as education always does for that magic bullet, that free ride to transformation.

The AASA, the school administrator's journal, in February of 2010 touted Atlanta's success as proof that use of the so-called "Balanced Scorecard" and strategic planning could transform a troubled school district.:

Ten years ago, the Atlanta Public Schools had low and declining student achievement, demoralized teachers, crumbling buildings, high turnover among superintendents (average tenure of two years) and disaffected parents pulling their children out of the system. More than 60 percent of the city’s high school students missed at least two weeks of school per year, and the district had more than 700 teaching vacancies. The system was failing its students and stakeholders. Fast forward 10 years, and Atlanta has reversed its dismal numbers. Fourth graders’ reading and math scores are nearly on a par with their Georgia peers, chronic absences have plummeted, and 91 percent of the district’s elementary schools made adequate yearly progress in 2009. Last June, the New Schools at Carver had a 94 percent graduation rate. Superintendent Beverly Hall said of the transformation, “Atlanta Public Schools is becoming a model urban school district.”

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., USA Today began a series of stories suggesting that success under reform minded Superintendent Michelle Rhee, might likewise be the product of test alterations. Rhee had created a performance pay and bonus system that provided substantial financial rewards to principals who met district goals. One hundred three schools in the District displayed remarkably high erasure rates, often a sign of cheating:

USA TODAY examined testing irregularities in the District of Columbia's public schools because, under Rhee, the system became a national symbol of what high expectations and effective teaching could accomplish. Federal money also was at play: Last year, D.C. won an extra $75 million for public and charter schools in the U.S. government's Race to the Top competition. Test scores were a factor.

In Atlanta, a recently released report alleges that at least 100 school employees are implicated in a massive systemic cheating scandal. Allegedly, 38 principals, were involved in facilitating the cheating, cheating on a massive scale.

The Huffington Post writes:

The report paints a vivid picture of a culture where teachers were publicly humiliated or fired for underperformance, and whistleblowers faced more consternation than cheaters. For example, a group of teachers at Gideons Elementary School held a weekend "changing party" at a teacher's home, where they systematically altered test answers to boost results. The report describes the case of Michael Milstead, who, upon beginning his tenure as principal of the Harper Archer Middle School, noticed an incredible gap between students' elementary school scores and the scores they were achieving at his school. After he raised the issue of inflated scores at a May 2008 meeting, an education official confronted him -- and he was soon told his services were no longer needed.

This is a blog, and so I should end with an opinion. I know that I should be able to discern a deep lesson here, but all I have to say is, oh dear, what a disappointment. Next time a pundit tells me that he or she has discovered a super star school district with a great visionary leader whose reforms have magically transformed a school district, what am I supposed to believe?

The Hidden Tax Shift Neither Party Wants to Discuss

2011-07-02T16:30:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I wrote about the fiscal tricks that Pawlenty and the DFL used in the last budget to allow the State to spend 34.5 billion dollars with only about 30 billion dollars in taxes.   They used 2.3 billion in federal stimulus money -- which was the purpose of that stimulus in the first place, to avoid the layoff of state employees and especially teachers in the midst of the massive recession that began in 2007.   Then, they forced school districts to borrow about 1.8 billion dollars so that the state could shift aid payments for the current year into the next year.   These numbers are widely discussed.   The 1.8 billion dollar figure is a one-time shift, and each year, the folks in St. Paul can avoid reckoning with the Pawlenty budget shift, by just shifting the 1.8 billion on to the next year again.   That's what Dayton and the Republican legislative majorities are proposing to do -- the shift isn't even in dispute.   In fact, the discussions just before the shutdown contemplated an even bigger shift.

But there's a much larger shift in the education budget that neither party talks about, but its used year after year, and that's the special education aid shift that shifts the State's special education mandate onto local districts, forcing them to raise local property taxes. For 8 years governor Pawlenty and the legislature shifted larger and larger special education costs onto local districts, and the total of these shifts make the 1.8 billion shift that everyone talks about look like spare change.   Every biennium, the governor and legislature wink at each other, give a shout out to the Federal government, and intentionally underfund special education by at least 600 million dollars for the biennium, but unlike the smaller shift that we talk about, the State never reimburses local districts for the special education shift. They just keep larding the deficit onto local districts year after year.

This biennium, the legislature and Governor have served up the largest special education deficit in history, just about 1.3 billion for the biennium. If this practice continues, the total deficit for the next decade will exceed 7 billion dollars. Local district have no revenue source to cover this deficit, and the size of the deficit varies greatly from district to district. The special education deficit, along with unrestrained labor cost increases, represents the major cause of class size increases, of teacher layoffs and of other program cuts, but our policy makers in St. Paul refuse to address the problem. They are making the problem worse.

The folks in St. Paul love to blame the federal government for this problem, but that is a prevarication. Minnesota has a higher special education requirement than the Federal Government. If the Federal Government repealed the special education law tomorrow, we'd still have the same special ed spending in Minnesota.   A few legislators proposed a bill to reduce our special education cost mandate down to the federal level, and the bill couldn't even get a committee hearing in the Republican legislature.   Republicans are big fans of the special education deficit, just like their DFL colleagues.

How do local districts cover this gigantic deficit. They have to go to the voters and get an operating referendum. In the vast majority of school districts in Minnesota, excepting some of the wealthy suburban districts, the special education deficit for the district is larger than the voter passed operating referendum. That's right, in many districts, if the state fully funded special education, the districts could function without an operating referendum.

When you hear a Republican or Democrat rail against unfunded mandates, its time to chuckle. They're just pretending. The 700 million unfunded mandate, the great special education deficit shift, is passed every biennium by both parties with a wink and a nod, and nary a concern for by far the most significant unfunded mandate ever conceived in education.

Trying to find the missing six percent Minnesota budget increase

2011-06-30T19:49:00.000-07:00

Republican ads on television keep claiming that the Republican legislative budget proposes a six percent increase, which "is enough" according to the ads. Democrats deny absolutely that there is a six percent increase. The six percent increase claim has really bothered me, because supposedly K-12 education is being protected in the legislative budget, and it looks to me like in education, we are getting cut. Where could the six percent be going, if not to Education. So, every time I hear the six percent claim, it seems like it just can't be true.

Listen, the spending and revenue issue can be argued a number of ways. But its pretty hard to think clearly about it, if we don't even know whether we are increasing spending or keeping it the same. A six percent increase is a pretty big increase, if there really is one.Its really hard work to trace down the real numbers, because in a political war, truth is the first casualty. Here is the best information I can find. If somebody out there has better numbers than mine, I should would appreciate hearing from you.

What was last year's budget?
Last year's budget was $34.5 billion. Not $30 billion as some Republicans are claiming. If last year's budget really was $30 billion, a six percent increase, would bring it to about $32 billion. If, it was 34.5 billion, then a six percent increase would bring it to about $36.5 billion. But never mind the six percent: its a fiction of somebody's advertising agency.

Why are Republicans claiming that last year's budget was $30 billion? Because the Pawlenty budget last year was funded with some tricks that allowed him to spend $34.5 billion, but "balance" the budget with only $30 billion in revenues. The Pawlenty Budget was partially funded by $2.3 billion in federal stimulus money. Without the Stimulus money, (and the K-12 shift) the Governor would have had to implement $2.3 billion in cuts, or $2.3 billion in tax increases. By taking the stimulus money, the Governor was able to keep on spending while keeping his no new taxes pledge. He kicked the can down to the next year, which is this year.

Ok, I get that, but 30 billion plus 2.3 billion is only 32.3 billion. I thought you said that last year's budget was 34.5 billion?! The rest of the difference was made up by a $1.89 billion K-12 aid shift. The State shorted school districts in the 2010-2011 fiscal year, deciding to pay the last $1.89 billion out of this years revenues. That allowed the State to authorize school districts to spend a billion - eight more last year than the state had in revenues, sort of a constitutional evasion of the balanced budget requirement. The result is that the Pawlenty budget of 2010-2011 called for more than 4 billion in spending than revenues. The Governor and legislature was running the State at a bigtime deficit, but they papered it over with shifts and stimulus money.

So is the budget 6% higher or not. Who is right? The Republican budget is NOT six percent higher than last year's budget. It's just not. The problem is that this is a year of reckoning. Merely keeping the budget flat, required the governor and legislature to come up with 4 billion in revenues. Dayton and the legislature agreed to cover some of the shortfall by pulling another aid shift. They decided to kick school aid shift down the road another year. But they still had to deal with the fact that the one-time stimulus money is gone.

So, are you saying that the real problem is how to confront the loss of $2.3 billion in stimulus? Well, there are parts of the budget that are going up because of inflation, so its higher than that. Part of the shortfall is made up because we are taking in more revenue this year, than last, because of a partial recovery from the Bush recession. The Republicans wanted us to make up the rest of the difference entirely with cuts. The Governor wants to make up the difference with a combination of cuts and tax increases on top earners. The issue isn't whether we are going to increase the budget by six percent, the issue whether to slash the spending in the Pawlenty budget that was accomplished with stimulus and school aid shifts.

So, the 6 percent we hear about on television is a fiction, or a wee bit of a prevarication...... It would be more accurate to say that the Obama stimulus package and the aid shift allowed Pawlenty to keep on spending without raising revenues, and that left us with a question of whether to cut the budget big time or raise some revenues to avoid those major cuts.

America Needs More College Graduates....and a sermon in economics

2011-06-28T19:52:00.000-07:00

Do we really need more college graduates? Is college going overrated? In my last post, I wrote about our work with the Minnesota College Access Network, which is promoting efforts to increase dramatically the number of students who go to college. Their idea is that K-12 education should inculcate a "college going culture." Historically, we have created college-going opportunity -- that says that we provide opportunities for young people who choose to take advantage of it. The College going culture idea says, let's run our school as though college (or other post secondary education) is the first choice for everyone: "going to college is what we do here", we say in a college going culture.

Now as we promote this idea, more kids by far going to college, there has been a counter argument that suggests that college is over-rated, that we are pushing too many kids to go to college. Now a new report, Under-Educated American by Anthony P. Carnevale and Stephen J. Rose and the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, argues that actually we are in grave danger of producing way too few college graduates. These labor economists argue that

The United States has been under producing college-going workers since 1980. Supply has failed to keep pace with growing demand, and as a result, income inequality has grown
precipitously.
If we continue to under produce college educated workers, the large and growing gap between the earnings of Americans of different educational attainment will
grow even wider.
The wage premium (for college degrees) currently stands at 74 percent, a historically high rate that implies the economy would benefit substantially from additional workers with a Bachelor’s degree.

They argue, based on persuasive data, that the income gap between college graduates and persons without college degrees is rising to historic proportions. That wage gap, they explain is a symptom that there is a relative oversupply of non-college graduates as compared to college graduates. The law of supply and demand says just that: wages are rising for one, because there is an under supply as compared to the other. They write:

Our analysis of wage and employment data shows that the United States has been under producing college-educated workers for decades. Post secondary education is in high demand among employers—and as the recovery takes hold and hiring resumes, it will continue to be in high demand. The under supply of post secondary-educated workers has led to two distinct problems: a problem of efficiency and a problem of equity. Without enough talent to meet demand, we are losing out on the productivity that more post secondary-educated workers contribute to our economy. Moreover, scarcity has driven up the cost of post secondary talent precipitously, exacerbating inequality.

See also an article in the New York Times: Even for Cashiers, College Pays Off As the Times reports:

Using an economic growth model pioneered by noted labor economists, the study finds that if we are to make up for lost ground in post secondary attainment and respond to future economic requirements, we will need to add an additional 20 million post secondary-educated workers to the economy by 2025. This includes 15 million new Bachelor’s degree holders, 4 million workers with non-degree post secondary credentials, and 1 million Associate’s degree holders. In the new report, The Undereducated American, the Center demonstrates that adding these workers will boost GDP by $500 billion, add over $100 billion in additional tax revenues, and stop and begin to reverse the growth of income inequality. Many of these additional graduates could come from the half a million students per year who graduate in the top half of their high school class but do not go on to college.

Now, I want to pause to point out that we must distinguish a separate economic issue -- the question whether the cost of a college education is appropriate to the reward. There are many who argue that the cost of college education is rising too fast in comparison to the return on a college degree. The issue that is discussed in the "Undereducated American" is somewhat different. The authors are claiming that there is an under supply of college graduates, that this under supply is growing more serious and that under supply is destined to increase the wage gap between college graduates between college grads and others:

The relative wages of college-educated workers have been rising much faster than the wages of people with a high school diploma. The laws of supply and demand are the best single indicator of whether the United States is producing enough, too few, or too many college graduates.

We need to be far more proactive in assuring that more students enter college and graduate successfully:

A clear trend has emerged: The United States is losing ground in post secondary education relative to our competitors. President Obama and other leaders are rightly alarmed at our current position and have called on the nation to redouble its post secondary education efforts to regain a competitive edge. The significance of these rankings goes beyond mere bragging rights— increasing our supply of skilled labor is central to the vitality of the U.S. economy. It is no coincidence that the expansion of American higher education occurred as the nation was enjoying economic growth and global economic domination. Education was a primary driver of that growth.

What must we do. The report argues that : "Any strategy to increase the number of college graduates must be based on improving the quality of graduating high school seniors; otherwise, we cannot produce the additional college graduates needed to meet the desired goal." the cost of highly qualified teachers is going to rise as well. Why? Not because of unions or incompetent school board members, but because there is an under supply of well educated people, and that under supply is is going to increase the price of educators.

Now I promised a bit of an economics sermonette and here it comes. We can't produce significantly more college graduates...we can't produce significantly more college-ready high school graduates, without more resources and a more accountability too : If we want to increase more well educated students, we need to assure that our schools are accountable, true. We need to reform what needs to reform. But the people who argue that schools can be reformed and starved to death financially are ignoring the fact that it takes value to create value. The more we reform our schools, the more productive that they are the more its going to cost to produce that extra value; that is market economics. Economics rewards productivity with additional revenue, and if you want to reap those rewards at the outset, you need to invest more resources to reap that reward. If you believe that we can starve schools financially while making them far more productive, then you don't really believe in market economics and you don't understand what causes wages to go up and to go down. Value comes from productivity, and productivity is rewarded with higher wages and more resources. The two go hand in hand. If we want to produce more high paid workers, we are going to have to insist on accountability and greater investment in the people who we hire to accomplish the mission.

College Connections Team works to Create "College Going Culture"

2011-06-25T07:13:00.000-07:00

Last fall, I was invited to join a local group selected to work with the Minnesota College Access Network.   Our goal was to develop recommendations that would lead to a stronger "college going culture" in our school district. Our group consists of educators, two school board members, counselors, representatives from St. Cloud State University and the Technical College, a high school student among others. One of the motivations of the "College Connections" project is to significantly increase the number of "first generation" students in our community who graduate and enter post-high school programs that lead to a successful career. It could be a four year traditional college program, but it might be a technical college program leading to careers in a health profession, technology, manufacturing or a trade. As Minnesota's population diversifies, we need to recognize that the number of minority students, for example, who are graduating from high school and then enroll in a college or other post-secondary program that prepares them for a career is unacceptably low.

The Minnesota College Access Network tells us that of the ninth grade students enrolled today in Minnesota high schools, only 3 percent of American Indian students, 5% of Hispanic students, and 3% of black students will get a bachelor's degree in Minnesota within 10 years. We can work to address this problem, in part, by working more effectively to increase the number of students in elementary school who reach proficiency, and all across the State there are efforts underway to achieve that goal. We are spending more time on core subjects; raising standards; intervening earlier to challenge students who get behind. We are monitoring performance in the classroom more effectively and asking more of teachers, students and parents. College Access Network says According to the Committee for Economic Development in their document, “Cracks in the Education Pipeline: A Business Leaders Guide to Higher Education Reform,” demographic changes will make it increasingly difficult to maintain a skilled workforce without engaging more students in higher education.

The idea behind "college going culture" however is to connect these efforts to a sense of purpose -- that high standards aren't just to make our teachers and schools look better, but that they are part of an effort that leads to college and career. College Access Network says that in education, we've been in the business of providing college going opportunities, but now we need to be in the business of providing a college going culture. If we want Minnesota to remain a leader in technology, the health professions, and many other fields, we need to continue to produce highly educated career ready young people, and part of doing that is creating a sense that school is about learning for a purpose that leads to a rewarding career.

For the last six months, our college connections team has been taking a full day each month, to get training on strategies and skills that we can bring back to St. Cloud on what works to increase our capacity to graduate more students to college and career. We spent time as well, studying what we are currently doing in St. Cloud, and what is being done successfully in other communities. We learned about programs in some elementary schools, for example, that create a college and career oriented atmosphere in the early grades. For example, in elementary school, on Fridays teachers may wear their college sweatshirt to celebrate their own colleges. On bulletin boards, teachers provide information about their own educational background, where they went to college, and other career oriented personal stories.    In the early grades, students are encouraged to talk about their career goals and learn about the educational requirements for those careers. Elementary school students take a field trip to a college, meet college students, explore the kinds of career preparation available. In the junior high grades, students work with the PLAN and EXPLORE testing inventories that tell them whether they are on-track to be accepted to post secondary education, and set goals for their remaining education to reach their career goals.

On Thursday, June 30, our college connections team, from St. Cloud, will make a presentation to the College Access annual meeting, on recommendations for improvements here in St. Cloud to create a more effective "college going culture." Our team believes that we have already a number of quality programs that are seeking to increase the number of our students who graduate college and career ready. But we can do more. We are proposing that we begin next year to examine ways to significantly improve our efforts in this regard. We know, for example, that more students graduate college and career ready when they get early college readiness counseling. It's too late to discover in 11th grade that one hasn't got the reading, math, or study skills necessary for success. Yet, budget cuts are reducing significantly the available counseling resources in many school districts, making it difficult for counselors to provide individual attention to students who are not on track.

One approach to this problem is to build college readiness skills into the regular curriculum, so that teachers become counselor extenders. Another approach would be to develop a network of volunteer mentors who can work with students in the middle grades, to make sure that they understand what they have career objectives, and that they are developing the skills and work habits that are necessary to succeed.

Our district is participating now in a four year long partnership with St. Cloud State University and the Technical College, called "Access and Opportunity."

We spend a lot of time pushing children to get proficient, testing and retesting, and urging them to study harder so that they can past tests. The college going culture idea says, maybe we can be more successful if young people are studying hard not merely because their parents and teachers exhort them to pass proficiency tests, but because they are internally motivated to graduate career and college ready.

School Board Members express grave concerns regarding K-12 Finance Bill

2011-06-11T19:36:00.000-07:00

Over the last few weeks, I've received a number of explanatory communications from Republican representatives and senators trying to reassure me that the House-Senate education finance bill that Governor Dayton vetoed is, well, a great financial boon to school districts. The fact the bill represented an effort to inflict significant reductions on districts with growing poverty and growing special education costs, in order to transfer funding to a select group of districts with lesser needs. Across the State, school leadership is rebelling against this idea, that we can solve our education budget problems by moving money from some districts to others. The fact is that over the last four years, school districts have struggled with the worst funding in a long long time, and this new proposal is significantly worse than the legislation passed in the last two bienniums.

The most frustrating thing about all of this is that those of us who live with education budgets day in and day out know that the proposed House-Senate legislation is going to be devastating to school districts, and especially those districts with the most educational challenges. At some point, we'd like to feel that our legislators would give us a bit more credit and recognize that when we say that a proposal is going to inflict significant pain, that it would give pause.

Earlier this week, a group of school board members, most of them in the metro area joined together to express their grave concern at the approach that the House and Senate have taken. I've copied the letter here.

The Honorable Pat Garofalo, Chair	The Honorable Gen Olson, Chair
Honse Education Finance Committee	Senate Education Committee



Dear Chairs Garofolo and Olson,

The forty two signers of this letter are elected by our communities to assure that our children have access to outstanding public education. We do this so that all of Minnesota's children will have the capability to be successful, contributing members of our state.

The K-12 Education funding bill that was vetoed hurt our school districts' ability to educate children. It is that simple. Key elements of the bill including reductions in special education funding and eliminating integration aid effectively cut funding for all districts in the state. The elimination of integration aid cuts millions in the next two years affecting three large school districts with uniquely needy student populations.

By cutting integration aid and reducing funding for special education and de-linking compensatory aid, the budget effectively transfers funding from those who need more attention to those children who are already succeeding.
This will make it much more difficult to intervene and educate children with special needs, children from families in poverty and children of color. will increase the achievement gap that the legislature aims to close .

As school board members, we ask you, the leadership of our state legislature, to find another way to maintain funding for the education of Minnesota's children. Balancing the budget on the backs of special education students, students in poverty and students of color will make it that much more difficult to close the achievement gap and that much more difficult to educate the people who will make Minnesota's future.

We would welcome an opportunity to talk with you in greater detail. We can be reached through John Hoffman, Vice Chair, Anoka Hennepin School Board.

Joel Albright	Apple Valley-Eagen School Board
Carol Bomben	Eden Prairie School Board
Mark Bomchill	Robbinsdale School Board
Ann Bremer	Westonka School Board
John Brodrick	Saint Paul School Board
Kathy Buchholz	Stillwater Area School Board
Anne Carroll	Saint Paul School Board
Deborah Clark	South Saint Paul School Board
Ann Counihan	South SI. Paul School Board
Mary Jo Deters	Mahtomedi School Board,
Shari Dion	Roseville School Board
Kirby Ekstrom	North Branch Area School Board
Rita Ericson	South Saint Paul School Board
John Estall	Eden Prairie School Board
Natalie Fedie	Stillwater Area School Board
Natasha Fleischman	Stillwater Area School Board
Marilynn Forsberg	Spring Lake Park School Board
John Fossum	Northfield School Board
Rebecca Gagnon	Minneapolis School Board
Jim Gelbmann	South Washington County School Board,
Cristina Gillette	West Saint Paul School Board
Kitty Gogins	Roseville School Board
Patsy Green	Robbinsdale School Board
Peter Hamerlinck	Saint Cloud School Board
Bruce Hentges	Saint Cloud School Board
George R. Hoeppner	Stillwater School Board
John Hoffman	Anoka Hennepin School Board
Cheryl Jechorek	Brooklyn Center School Board
Linda Johnson	Robbinsdale School Board
Richard Mammen	Minneapolis School Board
Paul Mandell	Inver Grove Heights School Board
Jean O'Connell	Saint Paul School Board
Bruce Richardson	SI. Louis Park School Board
Thomas E. Ring	Roseville School Board
Jeff Risberg	Saint Paul School Board
Peyton Robb	Edina School Board
Vicki Roy	Intermediate District 917
Hussein Samatar	Minneapolis School Board
Sherry Tyrrell	Robbinsdale School Board
Dick Tirk	Eastern Carver County School Board
Tom Walsh	Robbinsdale School Board
Melissa Halvorson Wiklund	Bloomington School Board

I explain to a skeptic why laying off teachers can make the economy boom.....

2011-06-02T18:39:00.000-07:00

The other day, I had an opportunity to help a skeptic understand economics better. The world is full of people who don't understand economics, and I was happy to do my part. My argument was so persuasive, that I thought you might benefit just like my friend the skeptic.

Skeptic: Jerry, I know you are a student of economics. I've been struggling with a question I can't seem to answer to my satisfaction. Mind if I ask you a few questions.

Jerry: Always happy to help a skeptic gain understanding. Go ahead.

Skeptic: So here is I what I don't understand. Pundits on TV, and lots of people in a certain political party keep saying that the best jobs plan is to cut government jobs. How would cutting the jobs of teachers and other government employees improve the jobs picture? How would cutting government purchasing for highway projects and other government projects improve the jobs picture? Wouldn't that reduce jobs and create more unemployment?

Jerry: I know that seems logical. Sure, if you lay off teachers or cut highway projects, its going to put some people out of work. That's true. But you don't understand how economics works. There's a lot of economics that's, well counter-intuitive. That's why we call economics the dismal science.

Skeptic: But look, suppose you cut government spending by a million dollars and cut government employment and payroll by a million dollars, won't that put a million dollars of employees on the unemployment line and won't they stop paying their mortgages, stop buying things, and won't the stores that they buy from also suffer losses?

Jerry: You're just looking at the downside of cutting government spending. You have to think of the person who lives next door to the laid off teacher who gets a tax break . She has more money to spend, and that helps the economy.

Skeptic: Ok. So far, we have a teacher without a job, some kids who have larger class sizes and a neighbor next door with some extra money. I'm waiting for the part where we get back as many jobs as we lose, by laying off all of those government workers.

Jerry: We're almost there. So the neighbor, goes out to Walmart, or Best Buy, bringing her tax cut with her, and buys a new television. See?

Skeptic: I'm not following you. How does that help the economy? What if the television is made in China or Japan? So we have an unemployed teacher, with a neighbor next door with a new television, and some more jobs in Japan. I still don't see how that helps the economy?

Jerry: It's not just teachers. It might be a bridge inspector, or a park attendant, or the guy who manages the motor pool? They are out of work too, so nobody really is trying to just lay of teachers. Besides, the people who get the tax cut, might spend some of it on American products.

Skeptic: That's fine, but so far, you have a bunch of Americans laid off, how long will it take before the tax cuts actually bring back as many jobs as we lose from laying off all those government employees?

Jerry: Well, you know, it works a whole lot faster, if you don't give the tax cuts to average people like the teacher's neighbor. Giving it to high income people who know how to make jobs works a whole lot better.

Skeptic: Now I see why economics is the dismal science. It teaches us to lay off teachers and other public servants and use the money to give tax breaks to the wealthy. Count me still as a skeptic.

Education Finance Bill Scoring is a Financial Shell Game

2011-05-28T07:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I started trying to share information on the financial impact on our local district as compared to other districts and charters across the state. To catch a reminder of what I said, just click here. In yesterday's post, I described one way, the traditional way, to score the impact of the biennial education finance bill --called the "compare to base" approach. When you compare to base, you are comparing the amount of funds that the district would have received under the old formula to the amount it will receive under the new. Under the "compare -to - base" method, our district is scored as receiving a $74 per student reduction, one of the largest reductions in the State of Minnesota. The education finance bill proposes to transfer money from school districts with large poverty populations and to move it into districts with less poverty, fewer minorities and non-English speakers.

Now the House and Senate majorities argue that my scoring approach to the education bills is unfair. They claim that the "compare-to-base" approach doesn't give their bill due credit for increases that they claim we are going to receive. They claim that we had no right to count on the increases that the existing formula was going to provide us, and so, when we don't get them, its not a cut. In the last five years, childhood poverty in St. Cloud has skyrocketed. As that has happened, we've also had a significant upswing in children who come to the district not speaking English. The compensatory education component of the formula was designed to pay us a bit more to educate these children, because the State expects us to make extra efforts to help these kids catch up. We are required to find ways to get them to progress significantly more than a full year's growth in one year, and the compensatory education formula pays us more so that we can do that. The House and Senate majority says, taking that money away is not a cut.

Our Republican representatives rely on the information that they are getting from legislative staff assigned to the majority. So, I suppose its not fair for me to blame them for this mess, or to yell at them about the way that the majority is scoring their handiwork. Staff scores the education bill like this: if they change the formula to take some of our money away, its not a decrease, because we "never had that money anyway." So, when they score the bill, they don't count cuts in the formula that would have paid us more. Its just an increase that we never had any right to expect to receive in the first place.

They took some of that money away -- the money that they claim we never had any right to count on in the first place-- and tranferred it over to other school districts and charters, and gave them an increase. And when they gave it to those districts, they counted it is an increase for those districts. The net result is that in St. Cloud and other financial loser districts, the cuts don't count as cuts. But in the financial winner districts, that same money is counted as an increase. As you can see, this is a win win for the legislative majority. When they take money away, they accept no blame, but when they give it back again, they get tons of credit. Its sort of a fiscal shell game.

Now that explains how the legislative majority is seeking to avoid blame for money that loser districts lost. But there is another part of their scoring system that allows them to take credit, even in St. Cloud, for supposedly giving us increases, when in fact we will never receive those increases. I'm going to write more about that in my next post. But to get you prepared for that, I need to remind you about the screwy way that Minnesota's special education finance system works. Because, in St. Cloud, the legislative majority is claiming that we are going to get increased special education support, and they are calling that an increase, when in fact, the only way we can get an increase is if we increase our special education budget by significantly more than the money they say that we're going to recieve. In short, they are inviting us to spend ourselves into bankrupcy, and if they do, they will take credit for the giving us more money to help us do that.

Here is the state of Minnesota's pre-legislative session projections on special education spending in the State of Minnesota. The numbers in the first row show total spending by school districts in the State of Minnesota, and projected spending, for special education. I want to emphasize that this spending is advocated for by both parties. We, in St. Cloud, have urged the legislature to change the system to reduce state mandates, and incentivize efficient spending, but neither party has been willing to support legislation to solve this problem. So what you are looking for is not a symptom of local school district irresponsibility. It is primarily a result of a dysfunctional state policy that forces local districts to spend more than the state is willing to pay.

	2011	2013	Change
Total spending	$1,829,000,000	2,001,000,000	$172,000,000
Total State-Fed Revenues	$1,279,000,000	$1,278,000,000	$0
Deficit	$ 550,000,000	$ 722,000,000	$172,000,000

Now the point I will discuss in my next post, is the how the legislative majority has scored the increased spending caused by this state unfunded special education mandate. Its another situation where they are taking credit for something that actually causes more misery. In that post, I'll explain that the legislative majority has been telling local districts that if the mandate causes them to have to spend $100,000 more, and if the state pays them $50,000 more to do that, why, that's an increase. And, in my next post, I'm going to explain, that it appears that the increase that the majority scoring claims to be providing St. Cloud, isn't coming to us at all. So, the money that we are losing, is not counted as a decrease. And, we are getting credit for an increase that we will never receive.

No increase for District 742 in Education Finance Bill, Despite Claims to the Contrary (1)

2011-05-27T05:18:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to share information on the financial impact on our local district as compared to other districts and charters across the state. In my last posts, I showed that our district, one of the most financially stressed in the State, is slated for a $74 per student reduction by the house and senate education finance bill. I complained that some other school districts and charters are receiving substantial increases, but that urban districts and districts serving students in poverty, come out substantially worse. To catch a reminder of what I said, just click here. Some constituents passed along my position to a local legislator, who wrote back claiming that I was wrong. Actually, he claimed, our district was in for a great big increase. Now we're still sorting through all of the end-of-session material. And as we sort, we're finding out more about what happened, but the more we learn, the less we like what we see.

This happens every two years, whether the republicans are in control, or the democrats. After the education finance bill is passed, and the session closes, the majority party comes home and brags about how much they have done for education. And, typically, when we look at the increases (if any) that we received, and compare that to the increases they tell the public we are going to receive, we find a substantial discrepancy. So whose right and what's the explanation. None of us, the legislators, nor I, want to be wrong on this. Because sooner or later, if the law passes, we're going to find out when the money actually is distributed. So I'm spending chunk of time analyzing, probing and querying to make sure. As of today, to my regret, I'm still claiming that I'm right: and that the Education bill cuts funding for the St. Cloud school district.

Scoring Education Finance Bills--Understanding Comparison-to-Base Runs: Education finance bills are passed once every biennium, in odd numbered years. The traditional way to score education finance bills is to create a spreadsheet called "runs," which show what each school district would receive under the former funding formula (called the base) and compare what that school district would receive under the new funding formula for the new biennium. The comparison-to-base method, then shows what we would have received per student under the old bill (including any increases and decreases that result from application of the formula), versus the amount that we would receive by application of the new formula.

The formula includes a variety of measures designed to reimburse school districts for higher or lower costs. Special education is the best example (although the actual reimbursement is way way lower than actual cost). The formula provides the district with more money for special education because educating students with disability cost more. Under the comparison to base method, the "runs" assume that if the base formula awards more money to the school district for special education, that's not an increase that is caused by the new legislation. Similarly, if a school district loses money under the formula, because it has fewer students who are costly to educate, under the comparison to base method, that's not counted as a decrease caused by the new legislation.

Under that measure (new formula versus base) -- which is the customary measure used to evaluate education finance our school district takes a $74 per student bath. Our annual cuts will thus reach $710,000 in the second year of the biennium. But the comparison-to-base runs do not fully state the magnitude of the cuts. One reason is that the legislature is forcing up our contribution to employee pension plans by $250,000 per year, without reimbursement. These runs don't report the mandated spending increases that come with legislation..

Another problem is that the legislative counting system wrongly assumes that each school district will receive a substantial increase in special education funding, even though in our case we will not. Our state special education support has not increased since 2005, but each biennium, the runs report that we are going to receive an increase. We can't increase special education spending, because we cannot afford to do that. That's because the State doesn't reimburse all of our expenditure increases in special education and provides no revenue source to fund the difference. This gift of additional special education funds, that they offer us comes with a poison pill. If we accept the invitation of the comparison to base run to spend more in special education, the unreimbursed extra costs will drive us into deeper financial difficulty. So the comparison-to-base system pretends that you will get money that you will not get. And if you do get the money, you are actually put deeper in debt. This system is so flawed, so misleading, so dysfunctional, that the accounting for it is wildly difficult to explain and even more difficult to understand. Most legislators have given up trying.

There is another method of comparing the impact of legislation, and that is to count as an increase money that you were going to receive anyway on programs that require you to spend more as an increase provided by the legislation. Under this approach, if you were going to receive a $100 per student increase under the existing formula (because of a change in student mix) and the legislation takes all $100 of that increase away, why that would be counted as revenue neutral. So some legislators are telling voters that their school district didn't get cut, even if they took away increases that their district was due to receive under the old formula. I'll talk more about this method of analyzing school finance legislation in my next post.

Some Districts Get Significant Cuts, while charters get increases

2011-05-22T15:34:00.000-07:00

The House and Senate education bills have been marketed at holding public education harmless, but the House and Senate majorities have an unusual definition of harmless. Actually, what is happening, is that some school districts are being held harmless--receiving an increase even, and other school districts are receiving significant cuts. The cuts are all the more difficult for districts to sustain, because Governor Pawlenty froze the funding formula for the last two years, and provided only 2 percent and 1 percent respectively for the prior two years. So all of these districts are getting cuts, on top, already, of the four leanest years in decades.

These cuts are inflicted on school districts that have made huge cuts already. Now if these cuts were spread across the board, it would be perhaps understandable. But actually, at the very same time, the legislature is providing increases to other districts, and especially to charter schools. Now constantly, we hear the drumbeat in opposition to school funding that, well, this money doesn't make all that much difference. One asks, then if money isn't important, why then is the house and senate majorities providing much bigger increases to charter schools.

Are the increases to charter schools a reward for closing the achievement gap. No: a study by the independent legislative auditor found actually that charter schools no better, and probably a poorer educational record in gap closing. So what, then, is the increase to charter schools for, actually? The average charter school is slated to receive $11,210 per student, significantly more than we will receive in St. Cloud, even before makes allowances for the fact that St. Cloud and other traditional publics have special education deficits that charters do not have. It is difficult to understand what in the world the legislature has in mind with this strategy, of significant charter school funding increases in a time of great need, and it is even more difficult to understand why the republican legislators in our district and others that are sacrificing their own local schools for this adventure.

The average change in school funding for school districts across the state is a $10 per student reduction. The average change for charters is a $215 increase. The average change for regional centers like St. Cloud, is a reduction of $7 per student, but our local legislators, except Hosch, voted for a $77 per student cut for St. Cloud.

The reductions per student listed on this chart does not tell the entire tale of the house and senate cuts. Because the legislature has the regrettable habit of treating as a positive revenue, special education money that actually costs the school district more in mandatory expenditures. In fact, the more special education money that a district receives, in general, the worse off it is doing. Just to use St. Cloud as an example, St. Cloud is given credit for receivingt $1500 per student in special education. But that $1500 per student comes with a spending mandate of more than $2200. However, when legislators look at the funding chart, they seem to think that they are doing St. Cloud a favor by giving us $1,500 that comes with a mandate that we spend $2200 per student. That $700 deficit (which is slated to grow) makes special education money, "hot money," that seemingly causes you to go further in the hole, the more that you receive. So most of these districts are actually experiencing even more significant cuts than this chart would indicate.

2011-203 Reductions per pupil for school districts
receiving cuts $40 per student or greater

Minneapolis	-$190
St. Paul	-$152
Anoka	-$66
Columbia Heights	-$179
Pine Point	-$75
New Ulm	-$44
Montevideo	-$46
Burnsville	-$60
West St. Paul	-$80
Inver Grove	-$51
Albert Lea	-$64
Hopkins	-$70
Bloomington	-$61
Richfield	-$119
Robbinsdale	-$97
St. Louis Park	-$86
Wayzayta	-$43
Brooklyn Center	-$41
Wilmar	-$45
LeCentre	-$48
Montgomery Lons.	-$53
Ivanhoe	-$46
Marshall	-$86
Round Lake	-$114
Worthington	-$49
Fergus	-$46
Mounds View	-$64
No St. Paul	-$84
Roseville	-$60
White Bear	-$71
St. Paul	-$152
Milroy	-$47
Faribault	-$54
Duluth	-$84
Belle Plains	-$46
St. Cloud	-$74
South Wash	-$40
Butterfield	-$54
Madelia	-$48
St. James	-$50
Lake Crystal	-$58
Yellow Medicine E	-$76
Long Prairie	-$64
Eagle Valley	-$48

St. Cloud Legislators and Community Leaders: Time to Stand up For St. Cloud Public Schools at the Legislature

2011-05-21T06:53:00.000-07:00

A few years back, as a member of the school board,. I made a trip down to the legislature to show my support for the Mayor and city leadership's efforts to get legislative support for a civic center. Its something you do when you are a community representative: fight for legislative recognition for your own community. Because, if the leadership of your own community doesn't stand up for your own community at the legislature, who the heck will.

But the truth of the matter is, if the legislature funded twenty civic centers in St. Cloud, or their equivalent, it would not undo the damage that is about to be done to St. Cloud public education by the House and Senate education bills this year. The financial damage is significant in this first budget year, but in the years following, the approach the legislature is proposing to take is catastrophic.

When the new majority came to St. Paul, it is clear they came to St. Paul with a mission to hold non-urban districts harmless from cuts by taking money away from urban districts, and they are doing that with a vengeance. Some of these legislators come from rural or semi-rural districts with people who believe that the DFL used its urban voting strength to unfairly fund rural and semi-rural districts, and outer ring suburban districts. There was more than a tinge of partisanship in this: time to get even with the blue cities and move some money back into the red districts where it belongs. But instead of holding districts harmless, the Republican majority is providing increases to some, and slashing funding for others.

The primary target of these efforts was Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Duluth, which historically have had significant special funding that prefers them over all other cities in the state. But in the heat of the moment, the new Republican majority in St. Paul has swept cities like Mankato, St. Cloud, and Anoka into the metro category, and is trying to blast those districts with huge cuts as well. The Republicans came to majority in St. Paul promising to hold education harmless, but they are only holding red school districts harmless, and they are doing at the expense of the districts they count as blue.

Now the leadership of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Duluth have fought back. The Mayors have recognized that public education funding is critical to the survival of their communities. See Link. In a letter to the legislative leadership, the Mayor of Minneapolis launched a campaign to protest against the legislative war on the three big cities. He wrote:

Public education. Similarly, bills for funding K-12 public education in both the House and Senate disproportionately target Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth schools for cuts — so much so that once the cuts for the three cities’ districts are subtracted from the total, the rest of Minnesota public school districts take no cuts at all, or actually receive increases in funding.
The Senate cuts K-12 education funding by $30 million — all of which comes from Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth.
The House of Representatives cuts K-12 education funding by $14 million overall — but cuts $57 million from Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth, leaving an increase of $43 million for schools everywhere else.
As the mayors of Minnesota’s three largest cities, we have regularly expressed our view that the young people of Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth are the key to our region’s future economic competitiveness. Disproportionately targeting cuts to our core cities will hinder our ability to educate and train a workforce that will enable Minnesota’s businesses to create jobs and compete effectively in the global economy.

So far, the leadership of St. Cloud have remained strangely quiet as the legislature proposes to crush St. Cloud education financially. One is inclined to cry out to our legislators: hey you guys, you don't get it. We're not a blue district we're red. St. Cloud has a nine million special education deficit. What the republican leadership is proposing to do is to take more money from St. Cloud, to fund districts and charters with very small, or no special education deficit at all.So, I'm writing to say to anyone who will listen: time to prove that your vote counts at the legislature. Stand up for St. Cloud public education.

This is not the first time that St. Cloud has been under legislative attack with respect to funding. In 2001, the legislature adopted a new funding formula that took away nearly 5 million dollars from St. Cloud, money that the district had raised by operating referendum, money that was needed to cover our special education deficit, and that action through the District into a downard financial spiral that wiped out its fund balance completely, and took four years to recover from. At the time, our local legislative delegation was unwilling, or unable, to protect St. Cloud from these devastating cuts.

This is a time for our legislative representatives, Baniaan, Gotwald, and Peterson, to think long and hard about who they represent-- the republican leadership, or the children of St. Cloud. Some of these representatives have, I know, worked really hard to help us be heard. And, who am I to tell these hard working legislators how to do their job? But I will say this: as a legislator, once the legislative leadership learns that you are willing to vote against the interests of your own community, you get put on the list of legislators who will not fight for their own district. By voting for the current anti-St. Cloud school funding legislation, the legislators will be sending a message to the leadership: never mind about St. Cloud. Their legislators will lobby for St. Cloud, but when the chips are down, they can be rolled.

St. Cloud needs an emergency effort on behalf of public education. We are being challenged at the legislature by a republican majority that has decided they can move money out of the St. Cloud school district budget to hold other school districts without consequence. They haven't heard from the City Council; they haven't heard from the Mayor; they haven't heard from communities of faith; they haven't even heard, in a way that counts (by their votes) from our own legislators.

I want to close by saying that I understand that state government faces a funding crisis. So it makes sense that the education budget would be very tight this year. The issue here is that the republican majority has decided, despite this great funding crisis, that they can provide increases to many districts, most of which are red districts, and to fund that with huge transfers out of urban districts with high rates of poverty. All I'm asking is that St. Cloud's legislators and community leaders stand up and be counted: St. Cloud school funding should not be the cash register that funds other school districts to provide them with funding increases at our expense.

School Boards Look at Digital Textbook Substitutes

2011-05-08T10:02:00.000-07:00

Last week, two accomplished teachers delivered a presentation to our school board demonstrating the use of IPOD touch to deliver a variety of educational books, interactive educational programs, and movies. A panoply of apps are being created for the IPAD, the IPOD, kindle, and many other delivery systems. The purpose of that presentation was informational: to open new vistas and broaden our thinking about the future role of electronic textbooks, educational software, interactive information systems that may radically alter learning and teaching. Our teachers showed us that this new generation of educators have command of an array of technological skills, combined with enthusiasm for using technology to improve teaching and learning.

The earliest efforts at digital textbooks involved the scanning of existing textbooks into PDF, or other digital formats, ala the Google Book project. A Newsweek Article, Digital Textbooks May Revolutionize Education writes:

There are already digital textbooks available, and their numbers are expected to grow: according to Simba Information, which provides data and research on the media industry, they represent less than 2 percent of textbook sales today, but will reach 10 percent by 2012. But in 2010 the offerings were pretty meager. CourseSmart, a San Mateo, Calif., company collectively owned by five of the biggest textbook publishers, has 6,000 educational titles for sale in digital format. But its electronic books are little more than scanned versions of printed works. A CourseSmart e-book includes some neat functions, like search capability and digital note-taking, but for the most part, it has few advantages over a traditional textbook other than weight and price. (CourseSmart books usually cost less than half the price of a new printed book.)

But the advent of new platforms such as Kindle, IPAD, and even IPOD touch, has created new opportunities to create educational tools with flexibility, portability, interactivity, and connectivity. Without question, we are witnessing an explosion of options for teachers and students. The options are so numerous, and some so exciting, that it becomes daunting for policy makers even to figure out the right questions, let alone come up with the right answers. Should we invest in IPAD's, IPOD's, Kindles, PC's, or something that isn't yet envisioned? Will textbooks eventually stop being delivered on paper? Will the new trend lower the cost of textbooks and textbooks substitutes, or increase the overall cost? Who will be responsible for vetting quality, accuracy, and grade-appropriateness of material presented? Will the new flexibility provided by digital media lead to a scattershot approach that leaves out critical components of the curriculum. Will the new flexibility afforded by electronic media, reduce the control over textbook content historically afforded to the large states, particularly Texas and California? What will be the duration of the license for textbooks: for example, Coursesmart textbooks are not owned by the purchaser, but are subject to an expiring license. The student cannot sell the book, after use, and recover some of the purchase price.)

Education is tremendously vulnerable to the excitement of the latest fad. One website source writes: "Teaching is, by its very nature, experimental. We teachers are just as susceptible to snake-oil sales pitches, fads, and cultural pressures as any professionals". In education, we have this undying desire to introduce new ideas, new philosophical approaches, new theories and new techniques. How do we make sure that we are not ensnared into a particular technology, particular strategy, that is destined to fail, or that is not ultimately an improvement in learning? Where can Superintendents, curriculum directors, board members, teachers and parents go to try to understand the exciting challenges that are underway?

We know that the manufactures of hardware devices -- Apple and Kindle, for example, will be putting tremendous pressure on school districts, colleges and universities to adopt their particular delivery system as a national standard. We saw this happen with the dawn of the personal computer, as Apple provided discounted Apples to school districts across the country, hoping to make Apple the delivery system of choice.
Vendors of operating systems (Apple, Microsoft, and others) will hope to dominate by creating industry standards again to dominate the educational market. Its going to take a lot of resilience and care for the education industry to make wise choices.

Incidentally, Korea has decided to control the pace and introduction of digital school media centrally with a national strategy. The Korean Digital Textbook program was announced by the Education Ministry of South Korea on March 8, 2007. The digital textbook is currently being tested in several primary schools and will be distributed free to every school nation-wide by 2013. See Background Article.

In the United States, this process is being dominated by foundations, new startup companies, and industry giants. A conferences on the future of digital textbooks sponsored by O'Reilly provides some useful background information. Click Here At that conference, the keynote speaker argued that a variety of forces are converging to increase the use of digital textbooks and online learning.

Growing movement by students, parents, and professors against high price and weight of traditional textbooks. (It is not yet obvious that ultimately electronic textbooks substitutes of the future will actually be less costly, all things considered, than traditional texbooks
Retirement of baby-boom teachers and full emergence of digital natives—younger teachers who have always grown up among computers and integrate them seamlessly into their lives—fueling use of digital textbooks and other digital content
Policy papers like "A Kindle in Every Backpack” policy paper recommend public funding for student e-book devices
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger launched an initiative in May 2009 to provide schools with free, open-source digital textbooks for high school students
President Obama announced an initiative to invest in creating online community college courses for job training programs, improvements in basic skills education, and free online education

Where then can we go to begin to get a deeper understanding of the trends and choices now underway? The Horizon Report 2010 provides a detailed discussion of the issues that we confront. Here are some other places you can learn more:

Flat World Knowledge , click here. A visit to their website suggests that you can read open source texts on line for free, but the viewing is available in a window that is somewhat inconvenient, although far superior to the experience on the tiny IPOD touch. If you like the text, you can upload it into your kindle, nook, etc for $25. Or, print it out yourself for a $25 fee, plus your own printing costs. You can order it shipped to your door for about $35 to $70.

C-12 Foundation is creating "Flexbooks" for IPad, Kindle and others. The website explains: "Today, textbooks in use in the K-12 system are limiting, expensive, and difficult to update. Because of this, K-12 teachers find it hard to cater to different needs as well as to introduce new concepts. We need a more flexible and less expensive system to create and distribute books and online content. The K-12 system needs to be provided with access to high quality online content, and simple solutions to create, customize, update, and print. This new concept provides a system that will follow an open educational resource philosophy to place content online that can be "mixed, modified, and printed" to suit a teacher's need while adhering to curriculum standards. Our solutions will enable all students to access and obtain an education around the globe.

CourseSmart is run by a consortium of the major textbook publishers. See also CourseSmart Blog, You can acquire digital versions, many merely scanned into PDF, for use on your platform of choice.

Inkling is a company dedicated to publishing digital textbooks for the IPAD. They write:

Publishing in this new era will cast aside the constraints of the printed book and embrace the opportunity of multitouch devices and their impressive computing power. It will generate content that responds to the user, and it will engage people in new ways that television, newspapers, magazines and websites never could. Inkling is the realization of that potential. It’s a flexible, interactive publishing platform where the human is at the center of the creative process, not the book. Where the iPad is the canvas, not paper. And as people start to grasp the power of the platform, you’re going to see ever more exciting content inside. What we’ve done so far is just the beginning, but it’s already exciting.

Inkling continues:

Interactivity, though, is only part of the story. Bringing texts onto a digital platform provides an opportunity to make the book as social as the classroom. With Inkling’s technology, for instance, a student can choose to follow another’s “note stream,” or view a heat map of the class’s most-highlighted passages. Professors get real-time information on how much of the reading assignment the class actually did, or whether a particular review problem is tripping up large numbers of students. All that comes on top of the cost savings: even these advanced digital textbooks will cost less than their print equivalents (with most of them in the $99 range) and some will even come “unbundled,” allowing students to buy the individual chapters they need most for a small fraction of the cost of a full textbook.

But others are less sanguine about the future of e-textbooks on the IPAD. An article in Wired Campus writes: "Matt MacInnis, Inkling’s chief executive, said that students have resisted e-textbooks because they have been difficult to use, but that the success of the iPad offers a chance to start over. Inkling’s focus on painstakingly rebuilding textbooks from scratch in an iPad-friendly format, along with their lower price, will make the difference, he said. (Wired Campus) Kenneth C. Green, director of the Campus Computing Project, said he was skeptical that e-textbooks would see a major turnaround on the timeline that Mr. MacInnis suggested. It is not clear that students actually want digital textbooks, he said, and early indications are that few students believe e-textbooks are a better experience. It’s also not clear that electronic textbooks will cost much less than their printed cousins, he said. Publishers and others “have to thread the needle between the great aspirations and expectations that these products are going to cost less, and bring dramatic added value,” Mr. Green said. “It just hasn’t happened yet.”

NWEA Scores Provide one window on student achievement

2011-05-07T19:24:00.000-07:00

I"ve begun a series of posts on how the Board of Education and our educational leadership is using data to monitor our educational progress. One of the ways that we measure student progress is to use the NWEA's nationally normed progress indicators in math and reading. Information about the NWEA testing system is widely available. I've posted about the NWEA testing system in the past. You can find those posts here: (Board gets Accountability Results) and (More About NWEA Accountability). See also: St. Cloud Board of Education Uses Achievement Data to drive Continuous Improvement

The table below is a cutting from the testing results for this year. The scores are reported as "RIT Scores." A RIT score RIT stands for Rasch Unit, which is a unit of measure that uses individual item difficulty values to estimate student achievement. RIT scores create an equal interval scale. Equal interval means that the difference between scores is the same regardless of whether a student is at the top, bottom or middle of the RIT scale, and it has the same meaning regardless of grade level.

On this table, you see, for example, that the the national math median score for Kindergarten entering in the fall is 148 (Fall target). The national median for first graders at the beginning of the year is 164, and the median for the second grade at the beginning of fall is 179. Another way of looking at this is that from kindergarten to first grade, the median score rises nationally by 16 points, and by 15 points from the beginning of first grade to second grade. You can find all of the RIT scale norms for NWEA math and reading tests by clicking here.

Let's take a look at what we can learn from this data.

The first line tells us that 734 students took the test in kindergarten this year. The median RIT score for these students, coming into the district for the first time, was 144, or about 4 points lower than the national median. We've marked the median for our school district in red for KG fall entrants, because the median entry score is lower than the national median. What does that mean?

We need to start by recognizing that the median is a measure of the middle score. It doesn't tell us about the top 25 percent of students, and it doesn't tell us about the bottom 25%. It merely tells us the cutoff score that divides the top 50% of students from the bottom 50%. Recognize also that District 742 has a higher rate of students who come to the school district not speaking English, and a higher rate of students with learning disabilities. So we would expect to find the median entry score somewhat lower than the national average. One of the dangers of looking at the median is that it doesn't tell you very much about how most students are doing.   A school district can have a large number of highly proficient students and still have a lower median. Moreover, the goal in education is not to raise the median score of a group of students. The goal in education is to assure that all students reach their potential. We are dealing with children here, not statistics.

What can we say about the magnitude of the difference in median score from the national average? Its about a quarter year behind. The median score of kindergartners is about 1/4 of a year behind. Now some students are going to be much farther behind, and other students are going to be quite a bit behind.

Notice that the standard deviation for entering kindergartners is 11.7.   The Standard Deviation is a measure of how spread out numbers are. A low standard deviation indicates that the data points tend to be very close to the mean, whereas high standard deviation indicates that the data are spread out over a large range of values. Roughly, we might expect that about 34% of the students score between 144 and 155 when they enter kindergarten and about the same percentage score between 133 and 144. The children who score below the median may score below for a variety of reasons. Perhaps their parents haven't read to them. Perhaps English is not their native language. Perhaps they are just running a bit behind, as children at this age often do. Perhaps they have a developmental delay or disability. Our challenge, as educators, is to help these children grow. Whether they are behind or ahead, they are not statistics, they are god's children.

In winter, this year, the same group of kg students were tested and their median score was one point below the median (for winter). Because the median score is below the national median, by one point, we've marked the score in red. That's kind of ridiculous, really, because the one point diifference is almost meaningless. Its a just a smidgen below.   We could say, also, that the cohort of Kindergartners made up a couple of points on the national average. Whether that is significant, I leave to you. Keep in mind, again, that some of the kids may have advanced significantly more, and others significantly less than the median growth. These statistics are merely one window on what is going on in Kindergarten this year. Let's not make the mistake of overstating their value.

Let's look at the first grade scores a bit, now. When politicians and pundits, and sometimes school people, look at statistics like this, they make the mistake of saying that the first grade scores were 17 points higher than the Kindergarten scores. That's a mistake, because these are two entirely different classes of students. We can't compare the first grade scores to the kindergarten scores as if the first grade "progressed" or didn't progress beyond the kindergarten, because we aren't measuring the same students. We see that the median score for first graders this year was three points behind the national median, and that by winter test-taking time, that same class had a median score equal to the national median (for winter). Similarly, we see that the median score for entering second graders was three points below the median, and then by the winter test, the second grader St. Cloud median was at the national median.

Now we are looking at the aggregated scores, here. But classroom teachers are looking at individual student scores and they are trying to assist students, all of them, to grow. They can see whether a student enters behind, and they can see whether the student is catching up, or falling further behind. They can look at NWEA growth scores for demographic subgroups of particular students. If they try a new teaching technique, or find a mentor for a student, they can see whether that approach seems to be engendering growth The NWEA growth patterns help us at the Board level to monitor progress in the aggregate. But the NWEA individual scores help parents and their teachers to focus in on whether the individual student is behind, or ahead the median, and whether they are making progress.

In the next post, I'll look at some further ways that we can use NWEA scores to focus our attention on student growth and student achievement.

Commissioner’s Education Funding Working Group strikes out on special education funding.

2011-05-06T18:42:00.000-07:00

From time to time, a task force is convened to fix Minnesota's broken school finance system. Every time that happens, the task force or commission runs up against a major problem: the growing special education deficit. Every time, the task force must decide whether to solve that problem, or to continue the current system, which shifts most of the burden onto a selected subset of school districts, primarily urban center districts, the Twin Cities, Duluth, and regional hubs like St. Cloud. The basic problem has always been that whatever formula used, it works out that districts with high special education populations lose out and carry huge deficits.

St. Cloud's current deficit is approaching $9 million. Anoka's is rising beyond $28 million. Minnesota's projected special education deficit is projected to be 700 million per year by 2013. (See chart at the bottom of this blog post) The Education Finance Working Group has not adopted a final solution, but the news is not looking very promising for an honest, courageous, and fair solution in special education. It appears, based on postings at the MDE that the Commissioner's Education Funding Working Group has decided to put a few bandaids on the problem, and call it even.

This blog may be unjust, and its author unfair. I certainly hope so. But it appears that the price tag is too big to advance a straightforward solution. And so, we are beginning to see, regrettably, once again, a bandaid solution that ignores the most significant and financially stifling problem facing education finance in Minnesota.

There is one and only one possible solution to this problem, and that is to provide $700 million in additional revenues to local school districts, or to provide them with discretionary revenues to fund the part of the deficit which the State refuses to cover out of state sources. True, the magnitude of this special education deficit problem could be cushioned by reducing state mandated spending. For example, the State could eliminate spending mandates in excess of the Federal IDEA requirements. But neither Republicans nor Democrats, nor the MDE Commissioner, nor anyone on the task force, apparently, is willing to advance this idea. That means, evidently, that the Funding Working Group is apparently beginning with the assumption that special education costs will continue to rise unabated in Minnesota and that certain districts will continue to eat those costs.

As long as the task force insists in holding the cost side of special education harmless, there is only one honest, constitutional solution to this underfunding problem, and that is to close the funding gap with additional revenues. Why will the task force not advance this simple straightforward solution? The answer is that the education community in Minnesota has continued to enable the MDE, the legislature and the governor, in sweeping the special education funding problem under the rug, as if it was someone else's problem.

Time after time, this issue has been addressed with half measures and evasions. Time after time, the solution in Minnesota has to been to blame the federal government, and pass the deficit on to a subclass of local districts. It is as if the representatives of the education in Minnesota has agreed to the proposition that the Emperor has new clothes. They say, "we have a 700 million dollar annual special education deficit in Minnesota:. If we solved that problem in a straightforward way, it would cost too much money, so lets not bother trying."

And so, the Working Group appears headed once again to place bandaids on special education funding.. Various funding formula devices seem to be under discussion, none of which even remotely equalize the burden. Some form of minor cost shifting in favor of "receiving" districts is under consideration, it appears. The result would be modest adjustments still leaving great gaping holes in special education funding to be carried by the unfortunate districts who are designated to carry the load for the entire state.

Again, I would be happy to be proven wrong. If my interpretation proves unjust, I'll be the first to extend my apologies. But it appears that the Working Group is going to continue the Minnesota practice of balancing the education budget on the backs of a few districts once again while calling the result a "Miracle."

At the same time, it appears, the funding working group is toying with the idea of actually limiting the role of local taxation in solving the shortfall for the disfavored districts. Most school districts that are carrying humongous state mandated special education deficits survive by passing operating referendums. Yet, it appears that the Working Group is operating under the mistaken belief that constitutional equality means denying revenue to districts with higher state mandated special education deficits. The Working Group seems still to be operating under the philosophy that was actually rejected in the Skeen decision, to wit, that the constitution requires equality of funding sources. In fact, the Constitution requires exactly the opposite. The Constitution demands that when the state shifts greater costs onto a local district, that the State must provide a revenue source, state or local, to cover that deficit.

Having denied local school districts state revenues to close their state mandated special education funding, logic would suggest that then the Working Group would provide local districts with local revenues to equalize the burden. But instead, the working group appears to be going in the opposite direction. The motto of the Working Group appears to be the same as other task forces in the past: Equalize everything except for special education. Make everything fair, except for special education, which is, well just too hard to solve to make things fair.

Listen. Any solution that fails to equalize the special education burden in Minnesota is doomed to failure. It is not constitutional. It is not just. It is nothing more than a way for the districts with lower special education responsibilities to gang up on the subgroup of school districts who have high and costly responsibilities. And, such a solution fails cannot withstand constitutional strict scrutiny and is destined to be struck down.

Other posts on Special education finance:

Does Dayton Budget Attack the Special Education Deficit

Excess Cost Pro-Ration

House Omnibus Bill Buys formula increases with Special education cuts

St. Cloud Board of Education Uses Achievement Data to drive Continuous Improvement

2011-05-05T20:10:00.000-07:00

This year, our board of education has been working to implement an important step in our “Key Work” of School Boards" initiative to improve our governance. The Key Work model urges school boards to focus on data that describes student achievement. Understanding the budget is important, sure. But our primary responsibility is to create the conditions for maintaining and improving student achievement. The Key Work paradigm says that school boards must study and discuss data on student achievement:

Effective school boards are data savvy: they embrace and monitor data, even when the information is negative, and use it to drive continuous improvement. The Lighthouse I study showed that board members in high-achieving districts identified specific student needs through data, and justified decisions based on that data. Board members regularly sought such data and were not shy about discussing it, even if it was negative. By comparison, board members in low-achieving districts tended to greet data with a “blaming” perspective, describing teachers, students and families as major causes for low performance. In these districts, board members frequently discussed their decisions through anecdotes and personal experiences rather than by citing data. They left it to the superintendent to interpret the data and recommend solutions. (Quoted from “eight characteristics of effective school boards”)

In the 1950's and 1960's, school boards often focused most heavily on financial performance of their districts. In the decades that followed, boards in many school districts followed a national trend of focusing instead on personnel decisions, especially the selection of their superintendent. Carried to extremes, these boards bought into the idea that student performance was the job of the superintendent, and that board's job was merely to select a superintendent who would then take full responsibility for the professional task of managing achievement. By the year 2000, a national trend began to lead us towards the concept that effective school boards must focus most of their work on student achievement.

This trend towards examining the data mirrors a national trend in the use of data by teachers, principals and curriculum and instructional leadership to improve results. See for example: Improving Teaching and Learning with Data-Based Decisions: Asking the Right Questions and Acting on the Answers Click Here

This use of data in teaching and learning, and the use of data by school boards, is still in its infancy. Mastering student achievement data, is easier said than done. For example, a statistic seemingly as simple as "graduation rate" is subject to wide differences of approach. (Click Here) (See also Education Week's Graduation Rates ...Misleading) Any attempt to master student achievement data requires significant study, tremendous patience, and an inquiring mind.

In our district, we've begun to implement this focus on student achievement by adoption of a framework measurable goals that are embodied in so-called "vision cards." The vision cards use a broad array of measurement tools, including proficiency measures, progress measures, and consumer satisfaction measures. One of the central measures that we use is derived from the highly respected NWEA MAP test, which allows us to measure growth at the individual student level, at the classroom level, at the school level and across the district. You can find out more about how this nationally normed testing system works by clicking HERE. NWEA testing norms are based on a population of over one million students who take the tests. Parents who want to understand more about the NWEA testing system can download the "parent toolkit" at the main NWEA testing website.

I've posted about one important part of our data-based accountability system in the past. You can find those posts here: (Board gets Accountability Results) and (More About NWEA Accountability).

What kind of data are we receiving from our testing system. Here are some examples:

Median test scores for each grade level in our school district in reading and math before the school year begins and at the end of the school year.
The standard deviation from these median test scores (a measure of the dispersion of scores above and below the median
A comparison of the median scores at each of these grade levels to the national median scores for each grade level.
Median scores for students by demographic group so that we can compare those scores to district and national averages

As we study the our district's data, and compare it to national norms, we are finding that understanding data is demanding and requires careful and thoughtful study, as I've said. In future posts, I'm going to write more about the challenges we face in using student achievement data at the school board level.

Key Work of School Board Model focuses Board Governance on Student Achievement

2011-04-30T11:08:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, I'll be leading a short discussion on the District's use of the National School Board Association's Key Work of School Board's model. This is the cover memo for the discussion materials which will appear in our online Board Book on Monday.

In 2006, our Board of Education adopted a new governance model recommended by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) called the “Key Work” of School Boards.” The decision to adopt the Key Work model resulted from a consensus on the Board that we needed to replace the Carver-base modeled that had been adopted by the Board in 2003. Adoption of the Key Work model was preceded by a great deal of study and committee work and several work sessions. The purpose of the presentation Wednesday evening is to refresh our recollection of what the Key Work model calls upon us to do and how it may be integrated into our governance and our board meetings.

The Key Works is a systems approach designed to promote educational excellence and accountability through vision, standards, assessment, alignment, and continuous progress. It is modeled in part on the Malcolm Baldridge Excellence model that leads to the Baldridge awards in education and business.

Board Policy 5(B) adopted in 2006 states:

The Board of Education operates under the National School Boards Association Key Works Framework. It focuses governance on the Vision and Mission, High Standards of Excellence, Assessment, Accountability, Alignment, Climate and Culture, Collaboration, and Continuous Improvement.

The Key Work model is a robust model supported by the highly respected National School Boards Association. It has been adopted by an increasing number of school boards across the country and is supported by many state school boards associations, including the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, which has launched a website to support the governance model.

The purpose of the Key Work process is to focus the school board on things that count--the big picture issues that involve policy such as standards, goals and accountability. The Key Work process envisions a collaborative process that allocates operational and leadership responsibilities to the Superintendent and his leadership team, and policy making functions to the Board of Education.

The National School Boards Association’s Key Work model has not remained stagnant. The NSBA is attempting to integrate the model with emerging research on school board governance practices that result in improved student achievement. Attached to this cover memo is a document entitled “eight characteristics of effective school boards” based upon research, including the “Lighthouse” study that looked at districts which significantly improved student achievement. The NSBA argues that boards in high-achieving districts exhibit habits and characteristics that are markedly different from boards in low-achieving districts.in low-achieving districts. The Key Work model asks us – if student achievement is important, where is it on your agenda? If student achievement is important, what work should a board of education be doing to focus on student achievement? You will see in the slide show Wednesday that we are asked to think about where the components of Key Work appear on our agenda. By that NSBA does not mean, do you put the words from the model on the agenda, but how do you integrate the work that you do into your board discussions?

Effective school boards are accountability driven, spending less time on operational issues and more time focused on policies to improve student achievement. In interviews with hundreds of board members and staff across districts, researchers Goodman, Fulbright, and Zimmerman found that high-performing boards focused on establishing a vision supported by policies that targeted student achievement. Poor governance was characterized by factors such as micro-management by the board.

Effective school boards are data savvy: they embrace and monitor data, even when the information is negative, and use it to drive continuous improvement. The Lighthouse I study showed that board members in high-achieving districts identified specific student needs through data, and justified decisions based on that data. Board members regularly sought such data and were not shy about discussing it, even if it was negative. By comparison, board members in low-achieving districts tended to greet data with a “blaming” perspective, describing teachers, students and families as major causes for low performance. In these districts, board members frequently discussed their decisions through anecdotes and personal experiences rather than by citing data. They left it to the superintendent to interpret the data and recommend solutions.

How do we focus on student achievement? The NSBA is telling us that we must do more than celebrate examples of student achievement. If we receive a presentation from science teachers on how they are improving elementary science, there is nothing wrong with that, of course. But that is a communication function. Effective boards that care about elementary science focus like a laser on data that tells the board whether the district is making progress in elementary science by examining data.

It is the Key Work model that drove us to support the Vision Card system. The Vision Card system is designed to fulfill several important components of the Key Work model. It is designed to provide us data. It is designed to set standards of excellence. It is designed to assist us in assessing the progress that we are making towards our standards of excellence.

The Key Work model and research regarding effective school boards suggest, then, that we must spend a significant portion of our board work on understanding data, especially the data that measures student achievement, evaluating our progress towards measurable objectives in Vision Card 1A.

The Key Work model says that when a school board does not focus its work on measurable objectives, the data that measures our progress (or lack of progress) towards those measurable objectives, and aligning resources to meet those objectives, we necessarily tend to focus instead on operational matters. Instead of focusing on whether our students are learning science, we focus on who is teaching it, what curriculum we are using, or which teachers are using fabulous techniques.

As you look at the material regarding Key Work, you might want to ask the following questions:

Does the Board still support and believe in the Key Work principles?

If so, does the work we do at the board and in board committees reflect the Key Work philosophy, and especially the focus on the use of data on student achievement?

Does the work we do in committees support the focus on student achievement and data reflecting student achievement – what is the balance between operational issues and work on understanding the data and connecting that data to our deliberations at the board level?

What does each of the components of the Key Work model look like on our agenda: at business meetings and at workshops?

[1] For example, Maryland School Boards Association, Vermont School Boards Association and South Carolina School Boards Association

Jeb Bush urges Minnesota to emulate Florida's educational mediocrity!

2011-04-26T18:14:00.000-07:00

Jeb Bush visited the State of Minnesota and everyone was fawning all over him to tell us how to run a public school system. Not to be sarcastic, but really, is that what were supposed to do. Implement reforms so that we we can get to where Florida is! For some reason, conservatives have a love affair with leaders of failed Southern state school systems. Its incomprehensible. We're supposed to copy the States at the bottom of the educational heap. Just about as incomprehensible, really, as fawning all over Arnie Duncan, former Chicago superintendent, who came to Minnesota and lectured us on how to close the achievement gap.

So what are we being offered if we model ourselves after Florida? Florida's NAEP average Mathematics scores for 8th grade are not all that bad: 279. Just a few points under the national average. Minnesota's average mathematics scores for 8th greaders are 294, putting Minnesota right near the top of the nation. African American 8th graders in Minnesota average 264, substantially behind white students, and we need to work on that, but that's exactly the same average score for African Americans in Florida, 264.

In reading, Minnesota 8th graders average 270, which is right around the national average. Florida does pretty good, just about 6 points behind the national average, at 264. Minnesota's white students do better than Florida's, while Minnesota's African Americans are behind.

What about Florida's Graduation Rate? By one measure, Florida's graduation rate in 2006-2007 was about 72.4%, one of the lowest in the nation, spawning a "worst to first campaign" in that state, a laudable goal. Graduation rates are controversial, because there are so many ways to report them. Minnesota reports its own high school graduation rate at 91% using No Child Left Behind standards. The US Department of Education reports our graduation rate at 86%. So the best way to compare states is to use an independent source that uses the same method for both states.

Alliance for Excellence in Education says that Florida's graduation rate is much lower than Florida admits, at 60 percent. That's right, folks, 40 percent of the students in the system that conservatives want us to emulate fail to graduate. That same source reports Minnesota's graduation rate, using identical calculation methods at 78 percent. About 100,000 students drop out of high school in Florida every year. If Florida could get to the Minnesota graduation rate, why 50,000 more students would graduate in Florida each year. Keep in mind that when students drop out of school, their testing results don't show up in comparisons for 12th grade results, so that high drop out rate makes Florida's average test scores look way better than they would look if more students stayed in school.

What is the real reform of significance that took place during Jeb Bush's tenure? Conservatives don't want to talk about this, but the key reform in Florida public education during the Jeb Bush term is not the tiny little changes that he hypes. In 2002, over Bush's objection, Florida voters passed a groundbreaking Constitutional amendment that caps class size for K-12 education.

Now, the folks in St. Paul who are hyping the Bush reforms don't want to mention this, but the Florida Legislature appropriated more than $16 billion toward operational expenses and $2.5 billion in facilities funding to implement the Class Size Amendment. Below are the funding amounts for each category since the amendment was put into law.

Year	Operating Funds	Facilities Funds	Total Funds
2003-04	$ 468,198,634	$ 600,000,000	$ 1,068,198,634
2004-05	$ 972,191,216	$ 100,000,000	$ 1,072,191,216
2005-06	$ 1,507,199,696	$ 83,400,000	$ 1,590,599,696
2006-07	$ 2,108,529,344	$1,100,000,000	$ 3,208,529,344
2007-08	$ 2,640,719,730	$ 650,000,000	$ 3,290,719,730
2008-09	$ 2,729,491,033	$ 0	$ 2,729,491,033
2009-10	$ 2,845,578,849	$ 0	$ 2,845,578,849
2010-11	$ 2,927,921,474	$ 0	$ 2,927,921,474
Total to Date	$16,199,829,976	$2,533,400,000	$18,733,229,976

Could it be that the gains in Florida come from these funds, and the class size limitations, and not from Bush's school rating system?

Florida has made some gains in public education, but the idea that Florida is a model for Minnesota could be advanced only by people who get their information about Education from partisan television.

An editorial in the Palm Beach Post comments on Bush's legacy in Florida as follows:

Although fourth-grade results are much better than they were 10 years ago, the improvements are not sustained through high school. For example, Florida high school seniors scored below the national average on the NAEP ......Florida high schoolers also scored below the national average on the SAT. Even judged by Gov. Bush’s beloved FCAT, high schoolers aren’t doing well. Ten years ago, 37 percent of 10th-graders were reading at or above grade level. After a decade, that improved by just 2 percentage points. So 61 percent of 10th-graders still read below grade average. Just 14 percent of Florida schools met federal standards under the No Child Left Behind law. That’s due, in large part, to continued lagging scores among minority students.

We have some major issues in Minnesota. Our African American Graduation rate is appallingly low. But bringing it up to where Florida's graduation rate is, 48%, hardly seems like a success strategy. Everyone's looking for a magic bullet, a simplistic strategy, and when a guy with the name of Bush comes to town selling something, I'd say its time to run for cover. If we really want to close the achievement gap, there are some folks right here in Minnesota who have set their sights on something more ambitious than modeling our school systems after Florida (Jeb Bush), Chicago (Arnie Duncan) or Texas (Rod Paige and Margaret Spellings).

Does your school district keep track of its textbook inventory?

2011-04-24T15:11:00.000-07:00

For about five years, I've been urging that our school district provide the board of education with a report on the state of our text book inventory. The superintendent has agreed to provide that report, but it has taken a lot longer than I had hoped it would. The first surprise has been that our district does not keep track of our textbook inventory in a way that is usable. That has caused me to wonder if other districts have the same problem.

Nobody seems to know when our district stopped keeping an accurate inventory, but certainly, by the time that I joined the board of education in 2004, it is clear that our district did not maintain this information. Based on my experience as a teacher, I had assumed that each teacher, or each department, would be accountable to someone in each school to account for the number of textbooks, and that this information, in turn, would be kept at each school. But, as it happens, it has taken a lot of work to rebuild an accurate inventory of what we have, and the work is still not done.

I believe that our district, and yours, needs an inventory of what we have for several reasons.

Some student continue to report that they are attending classes which do not have individual textbook for every student. If that is true, we need to know that, so that we can understand the academic consequences. If a particular course doesn't need a textbook, that's fine. But if a course doesn't have a textbook for each student because we aren't budgeting enough money, then that is not acceptable.
Textbooks are capital assets of the school districts. Let's say that an average textbook, and the workbooks and other materials that come with the book, costs $75. Assume that the typical student has four textbooks. (I'm just pulling that number out of my hat at this point.) But that would mean that we'd have about $3 million dollars in textbooks, when valued at cost. From a sheer accounting standpoint, the public has a right to expect that we monitor that asset, so that we can be sure that lost books are replaced, that we have neither too many, nor too few in stock. Surely we should know where we are keeping millions of dollars worth of instructional assets. I'm not discounting the fact that locally, teachers and principals are most certainly monitoring textbooks in some way, but the difficulty in obtaining a count, on request, suggests that there are significant flaws in our current system.
We cannot effectively budget for maintenance of the textbook stock, if we don't maintain information on the number of textbooks we have, their age, their currency, the ratio between students taking the course and available textbooks. If you assume that we have about 50,000 textbooks in stock, and if you assume that the average replacement cycle is 6 years, and if you further assume some books are lost or damaged beyond repair, that would translate into about 9000 new books purchased per year. If you accept the $75 per textbook cost, then that translates into about $675,000 just to maintain the textbook supply in adequate condition. (Sometimes, the state changes the standards for a particular subject matter, and that forces you to unload a set of books and replace them out of cycle. In Minnesota, the Minnesota Department of Education recognizes an average textbook and testing supplies cost for non-public schools at about $85, for purpose of the non-public school budgetary allotment, so that number seems about right. Prudence would seem to require that we make sure at budget time that we know whether we are maintaining our stock and assuring that every student who should have a textbook actually has one.
In tough budget times, there is a grave risk that decision makers will make temporary cuts in textbook and other capital-like assets in order to shield the district from unwise staffing or other reductions. However, because school budgeting tends to focus primarily on cuts rather than increases, there is a danger that these temporary cuts may become permanent, and over time the deterioration of textbook stocks will become systemic and built into the budget assumptions.
Once the textbook supply for a particular course falls below the number of students taking that course, it can lead to permanent changes in the delivery of instruction. The course can no longer rely on the textbook as required reading. The teacher may be forced to deliver material by lecture. Students begin to believe that reading a textbook is not necessary or beneficial to the learning process.
Proper use of textbooks is essential to teaching students to learn independently. Learning from a text, a journal article, a manual, or some other written material is an important life skill. If we require students to learn from a lecture, or from a worksheet, we are disabling them from a critical higher learning strategy necessary in most productive careers.

As we discuss this issue, I hear people say that keeping track of the textbook budget isn't maybe as important as it used to be, because everything is going digital. To that I say, keeping track of what you are purchasing, and how much you are purchasing, is an essential part of making decisions about whether you can replace textbooks with some form of digital replacement. Frankly, I think textbooks still represent a critical part of the curriculum.

We can have a discussion, and we probably should,about whether textbooks are going out of style. I tend to be really skeptical. I believe that textbooks may go digital, but you still need a textbook of some kind, whether it resides in a book or on a compact disk, or on a server. The old paradigm was that you purchased enough books for the number of students taking the course (plus a suitable number of extras). The new paradigm may well be that you purchase enough digital licenses for the number of students who will use the textbook software online. But you still need to manage your textbook inventory, whether the textbooks are digital or in hard copy format.

I agree that the textbook of tomorrow is likely to facilitate individual learning. It may have links to online tutorials, online quizzes, online enrichment opportunities and accelerated learning tracks. The textbooks of the future will be more productive than the textbooks of the past, I believe, and as such they are certainly not going to be any cheaper Just as a bulldozer is more expensive than a shovel, so the digital textbook of the future is likely to be more powerful and more expensive than the textbook of the past.

Win Win Win! Take the 700 Million Dollar Constitutional Challenge Win Win Win

2011-04-22T20:31:00.000-07:00

In the next few weeks, I want you to help me analyze what I think are serious constitutional defects in Minnesota's school finance system. I've been having a dialog with folks throughout the state who are in the "I've had enough" camp when it comes to the financial mess that is our public school finance. More and more people are telling me that its time to challenge the constitutionality of our school finance system, and to force the legislature clean up the mess once and for all. Some of the issues are pretty boring to read about--the law being pretty dang dry. So, I decided to try to find a way make a dull topic a bit more interesting.

To whet your interest in a bit of constitutional law, I'm offering a reward to the person who accepts, and wins, the 700 million dollar constitutional law challenge. You don't need to be a lawyer to take the challenge. In fact, being a lawyer probably is going to get in your way. All you have to do is to be a rational person, and that surely is what you are, or you wouldn't be reading my blog, right! Can you anticipate a rational reason why the current system can be justified?

What's the challenge? What's the reward? Be patient. First the challenge, then the reward. Here's the challenge:

The Challenge: Provide a "Rational Basis" -- a rational reason -- for Minnesota's System for Special Education Funding, which will soon force local school districts to spend nearly $700 million ($700,000,000) per year more than the revenues provided to fund that spending.

To answer the question, you need to know how the special education finance system works. The state makes districts spend more money than they have, and some way way more than others. St. Cloud spends about nine million dollars more than it has, and can't do anything about it. Anoka-Hennipen spends $28 million more than it has, and can't do anything about it. If we get into financial difficulty, we can't cut the amount that we are spending. We have to keep on spending the same amount, no matter how tough your financial difficulties get. But that's not all. The state purposely increases the amount that school districts must spend, year after year, and purposely increases the difference between mandatory spending and revenues year after year.

Now your almost ready to answer the question. But you need to know a bit more about the way special education finance system works. Over the last several years, the Federal Government has been putting more money into special education and sending it out to the states. So that helps, right. No, actually, for many school districts, the State reduces the amount of state money paid to the local district for special education by more than the federal government's increase.

Now, when County or city government is required to run a program at a loss, the state gives the county or city government taxing power to make up the difference. School districts used to have some taxing power to cover the deficit in special education funding too. But the state took that taxing power away. Why? Because the legislature decided that the State should cover ALL of the special education costs not paid by the State. But it didn't take very long for governors and legislators to forget about the revenue promise -- and the local districts were left with a growing unfunded deficit in special education, but no local revenue source to cover it.

Now this idea of a "rational basis," has a legal meaning. If you are going to go for the big prize, you need to understand what it means. "Rational Basis" is a legal term. The House legislative research service explains rational basis as follows:

A rational basis test applies to economic regulation not involving suspect classifications and, thus, to most of the classifications involved in the tax laws. In general, a classification has a rational basis and is constitutional, if it reasonably related to or has some rational relationship to the objective the legislature sought to achieve. The rational basis test gives the legislature considerable flexibility in creating classifications.

So the idea is this. Do you think that a court could look at the system I've described above and find a rational reason for setting things up that way. Any reason? In order to convince me that there is a logical reason, any logical reason, for forcing school districts to spend $700 million more than they take in on special education. and keep growing the deficit more and more, year after year.

You get the idea. The winner has to come up with a rational basis for the system. By way of example, if I asked you to find a "rational basis" for the law that says that you can't build a glue factory in a residential neighborhood, you could say, "glue is too smelly; people can't live next to it." Or, "glue fumes are dangerous to children." But I wouldn't accept, "don't put anything that starts with a 'g' in a residential neighborhood." Or, "I don't believe in glue." Or, glue is usually made by Republicans." Those reasons aren't rational.

So that's the $700 million dollar challenge. I call it the $700 million challenge, because that is the amount of the underfunding that is in the Dayton budget for 2012. The republicans are proposing to make the deficit even larger. They're both taking money out of special education, as if it were a government cash register, without allowing local districts to cut their spending or raising revenue to cover the cuts. So I want you to assume that you were the judge in a court case and you were asked to sustain the system because it had a "rational basis," could you come up with one.

That's the challenge. The reward. We'll its not $700 million. I'll publish the best and most creative answers in future blogs. For your information, I've included the chart that shows the total mandated special education expenditures in Minnesota as compared to the total of all state and local revenue sources for special education.

Letter Challenges Governor's Education Funding Task Force to Follow the Minnesota Constitution

2011-04-20T19:21:00.000-07:00

R I N K E - N O O N A N

SUITE 300 US BANK PLAZA, P.O. BOX 1497
ST. CLOUD, MINNESOTA 56302-1497
TELEPHONE 320-251-6700
EMAIL: JVonKorff@RINKENOONAN.COM DID:
www.RinkeNoonan.COM
April 18, 2011

Education Finance Working Group
Minnesota Department of Education
Peggy Ingison and Tom Nelson, Co-Chairs
Minnesota Department of Education

The purpose of this letter is to urge that as you address Minnesota’s K-12 funding issues, that you adopt a recommendation that complies with the Education Clause of the Minnesota Constitution. The current funding system in the state of Minnesota is plainly and unequivocally unconstitutional under guidelines established by the Minnesota Supreme Court in Skeen v. State, 505 N.W.2d 299 (Minn. 1993). If you fail to address these issues directly, any recommendations that you make will not be meeting the fundamental requirements of the Minnesota Constitution and will be destined to be overturned.

In its Skeen decision, the Supreme Court found that education is a fundamental right under the Minnesota Constitution and that right is enforceable in the Courts. Funding systems which restrict that right, or which result in unequal ability to deliver the basic education required by law, are unconstitutional.

The Court wrote:

we hold that education is a fundamental right under the state constitution, not only because of its overall importance to the state but also because of the explicit language used to describe this constitutional mandate. While a fundamental right cannot be found "[a]bsent constitutional mandate," Rodriguez, 411 U.S. at 33, 93 S.Ct. at 1296, the Education Clause is a mandate, not simply a grant of power.

Unfortunately, both executive branch and legislative branches of Minnesota have failed to adhere to the requirements of Skeen. Perhaps this is because the Skeen decision has been widely misunderstood. The Skeen denied relief to the plaintiffs simply because they admitted that financial flaws existing in 1990 were not interfering with provision of the minimum required education as defined by the State.

The plaintiff districts in Skeen were compelled to make this admission – that they could deliver the basic education mandates of the State – because in 1990 the State of Minnesota had no minimum proficiency requirements. In 1990, a local district could lawfully graduate students who were functionally illiterate, and many did. The only State requirements in Minnesota were that a local district offer a basic curriculum, not that all students must be educated to proficiency.

Having admitted that they could comply with the minimal state education requirements, the plaintiff districts in Skeen instead claimed that their districts were required to pay a slightly higher mil rate to fund optional school programs desired by their local district. At that time, local school districts were providing these extra optional programs through a system of “excess levies.” The name excess levy signified the fact that the voters were being asked to endorse extra education beyond that required by state law. This fact is fundamental to an understanding of why Minnesota’s current funding system is constitutionally deficient. The current system underfunds mandated programs, and the underfunding is not fairly distributed. Some districts have sufficient funding to provide all students with an education which meets state proficiency standards, and others do not. Almost all districts are forced to try to raise funding, not for extras, but to keep basic necessary programs, and in some districts voters are denying children in their community the funding that clearly is required to supply a basic education. This is not a mere equal taxation issue: it runs to the very core of what the Constitution protects.

While there are many examples of the current failure to fund mandated programs, there is no more obvious example than the gross failure to fund the cost of state mandated special education. This system, which is scheduled to inflict an annual $700 million dollars of unfunded deficit on local districts, and to spread that deficit unequally, has no justification whatsoever. It must be completely eliminated by any system that you propose, or what you propose will violate the Constitution.

Part II of the Letter will Follow

Click Here For Full Letter

Vaunted KIPP Charters alleged to Spend $18K per Student

2011-04-16T19:39:00.000-07:00

I've been following a raging battle over whether the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) charter schools are effectively attacking the achievement gap. There are about 91 KIPP charter schools (click here) in the United States. They tend to be middle schools serving fifth through eighth graders. They are controversial, because they tend to be non-union schools, although a number have been recently unionized. They make significant demands on teachers, requiring them to work longer hours. They expect students to sign contracts promising to meet high attendance and behavior standards. They provide longer school days for their students and have been held up as making significant inroads on the achievement gap.

A new report, called the Miron study, now asserts that KIPP charters spend $18 thousand dollars per students in efforts to close the achievement gap. (Click Here). KIPP has been held up as an example by pundits, national politicians, and critics of public schools, as an example of what school reform should look like. This has led public school interests to say: Instead of reforming public education by shrinking our budgets, give us $18,000 per student and we'll look pretty good too!

The use of KIPP as a model for what public schools should be doing has led to a series of studies and counter studies, interpretations and counter interpretations. One side adamantly claims that "the research" on these schools proves that KIPP students outperform equivalent students of similar backgrounds in public schools. The centerpiece of the KIPP advocates is the Mathematica study. (Click here) The KIPP skeptics adamantly claims that "the research" establishes that KIPP schools operate under markedly different conditions and that their success arises from selectivity, receive substantially greater funding. They claim that KIPP elevates its results artificially by ignoring the departure of students who aren't capable of fulfilling KIPP expectations. The centerpiece of this view is found in the recent Miron study. (Click Here).

The skeptics have long claimed that KIPP schools have an unfair advantage, because they are more selective than regular public schools. When schools enroll students by choice, the theory goes, they are likely to have better outcomes than schools who take all students. The Kipp supporters argue, on the contrary, the demographics of KIPP students, in terms of race and poverty, are comparable to the schools with which they are compared. That claim is hotly disputed by KIPP advocates.

The KIPP skeptics point out that KIPP schools take significantly fewer ELL (that is non-English speaking) enrollees, and that they also take significantly fewer special education students. KIPP proponents concede that this claim is true. Lower ELL and special education populations would negate statistical comparisons of student results, at least without significant adjustment. This suggests that KIPP schools have a significant cost advantage, (in addition to their receipt of greater revenues per student) because public schools must transfer scarce dollars out of regular education to fund costly special education programs that are not fully funded by the state and federal government.

This is a common flaw in criticisms of public school finance. Critics often divide the total cost of public education by the number of students for public schools and then compare that same ratio to private schools and charter. What they ignore is that the publics are mandated to spend huge sums on special education, but are not reimbursed for those extra costs. Calculating the average cost of educating all students (including non-English speaking students and special education students) for publics and comparing that cost to the cost of educating only English speaking non-disabled students for privates and charters is silly and misleading. That's like comparing the average cost of compact cars and SUV's for Ford to the average cost of compact cars for GM and claiming that Ford spends way more money to produce cars.

The critics also claim that KIPP schools experience higher rates of attrition than comparison schools. They argue that the drop out students represent potential KIPP failures, and so when we look at KIPP results, we are not counting students for whom KIPP fails.

Proponents of KIPP schools rely heavily on a research report which contends that KIPP students make greater than average progress. Critics of KIPP schools claim that this is a statistical artifact of the factors mentioned above. They argue too, as stated above that KIPP schools are beneficiaries of large foundation support, and that as a result, they function with about 50% greater funds than the comparison schools. According to the Miron study, KIPP schools spend about $18,000 per student, where as comparison schools spend only about $12,000 per student per year.

The findings in our report show that students with disabilities and students classified as English language learners are greatly underrepresented. The relative absence of students with disabilities and English language learners results in more homogeneous classrooms. Secondly, in both traditional public schools and KIPP schools, the additional costs for these students—especially students with moderate or severe disabilities—is typically not fully funded, and therefore some of the costs for regular education is devoted to students requiring additional remediation. Because traditional public schools have a higher proportion of students with disabilities, and a higher concentration of students with severe and moderate disabilities, the burden of having to subsidize their education falls more heavily on them.

I report these questions about KIPP despite the fact that I have long admired many of the good things that KIPP schools do. What does the research on KIPP prove? One thing that it seems to prove, beyond any doubt, is that the supporters of KIPP's approach are being disingenuous when they fail to recognize that KIPP schools are functioning on half again as much money per student as comparable traditional public schools. Ironically, many of the proponents use special schools like KIPP to justify reducing funding for regular public schools, when actually, the KIPP experience would seem to support the strong inference that the models which reformers tout, are actually way more expensive. If KIPP is successful, then the success justifies greater, not less, expenditures are necessary to close the achievement gap.

Past Posts on Achievement Gap
Attacking the Achievement Gap Means Helping Students Rise Above their Parents Education
Making Stuff up About the Achievement Gap
Get Ready for College
School Choice will not close the achievement gap
Some students cost more to educate (1)
Some students Cost more to educate(2)

Attacking the Achievement gap means helping students rise above their parents' education.

2011-04-14T19:01:00.000-07:00

The early American colonists left a continent where children's' future was largely determined by their parents status in life. The children of farmers became farmers. The children of landed nobility became landed nobility. The children of artisans became artisans. And so on. The first American settlers came to America not only for political freedom, but also the freedom to rise above the economic and educational status of the parent's station. It is for this very reason, that we find in state constitutions all across the country, that the authors of those constitutions, many of them immigrants, included special protections to assure that American states would assure quality education for all children. They saw education as a key to the kind of freedom that brought them to American in the first place.

The achievement gap represents a threat to this American idea that students will surpass their parents "station in life." I've been writing about the achievement gap lately for several reasons. One of our major objectives in our school district is to implement systemic improvements that will make significant inroads on the achievement gap. In addition, a number of legislators in St. Paul have been offering up proposals, from tax credits for private schools, to the elimination of various forms of funding, based on their contentions that these reforms will somehow help eliminate the achievement gap. Most of what is written, most of what is said about the achievement gap, is founded on little but speculative belief, divorced from data, divorced from research, and divorced from evidence on what really works. I don't claim to have the answers, but I do claim to be interested in research, data, and evidence.

What is the achievement gap? What causes it? What is the "cure," as it were. Its going to take a few more posts to make a dent in that question. But one thing we can say for sure. The achievement gap does not result from a decline in the performance of minority students. It does not result from the decline in the performance of white students. The achievement gap does not result because public schools are getting worse, or because student performance is declining. On the contrary, in general students performance over the last several decades has been increasing. Here is some data summarizing the NAEP testing, the gold standard for measures of reading and math performance.

(Since 1969, NAEP assessments have been conducted periodically in reading, mathematics, science, writing, U.S. history, civics, geography, and other subjects. NAEP collects and reports information on student performance at the national, state, and local levels, making the assessment an integral part of our nation’s evaluation of the condition and progress of education.)

The achievement gap does not result either from a decline in in the difficulty or rigor of courses that students are taking. Actually, a recently released nationwide study, "America's High School Graduates, results of the 2009 NAEP high school transcript study," supports this point. The transcript study looked at the number of students who completed a rigorous course of study, and the number of students who completed a less rigorous "standard curriculum," and the number of students who fell below even the basic standard course of study. The study found:

In 2009, graduates on average earned over three credits more than their 1990 counterparts, or about 420 additional hours of instruction during their high school careers.
A greater percentage of 2009 graduates completed more challenging curriculum levels than 1990 or 2005 graduates.
Since 1990 more graduates from each racial/ethnic group completed a rigorous high school curriculum.
All four racial/ethnic groups on average earned more credits and higher grade point averages (GPAs) in 2009 than they did in 1990.
More students are taking advanced placement courses, and those students are doing significantly better as a result
Since 1990, the percentage of graduates completing a below standard curriculum declined from 60 percent in 1990 to 25 percent in 2009.

So, contrary to popular belief, we are not in the midst of a decline in student performance. Students in every ethnic/racial group are performing better today than they did in decades past. They are taking harder courses; and they are taking more courses.

What is the achievement gap, then? The definition of achievement gap is not uniformly recognized. Some people say that "the Achievement Gap is the difference in performance between low-income and minority students compared to that of their peers on standardized tests." The Department of Education The U.S. Department of Education describes the achievement gap as “the difference in academic performance between different ethnic groups.” Another definition is "The achievement gap, as it's commonly defined, is the discrepancy on standardized test scores between students, with white students outperforming their black peers..." One author writes: "The achievement gap, traditionally measured by test scores, also can be documented by dropout behavior. Examining dropout behavior among Black, White, and Hispanic students, with a particular focus on gaps within groups and not just between Whites and minorities, shows a clearer picture of the achievement gap."

Some folks measure the achievement gap by comparing the percentage of students who score proficient on certain basic skills tests, for example math and reading. The problem with that definition is that different states have radically different proficiency cut scores, and raising or lowering the cut score can change the gap, measured in that way. Another way of measuring the gap is to compare the number of students who score at the basic level or below. This is more of a functional literacy measure of the gap. And then, as mentioned above, another way of measuring the gap is the graduation gap, the number of students who drop out of school without receiving a diploma. Believe it or not, there has been a raging controversy for the last many years over how exactly to measure the graduation rate. In part, this controversy arises from whether to count students who receive their GED as graduating. In part, it arises from difficulties on how to count students who leave school, but possibly transfer to another public school and who exactly to count the failure to graduate against.

There are some people who argue with vehemence that, obviously, we should not count attainment of a GED as "graduation." That reminds me of the graduation of Adult Basic Education students I attended a couple of years back. At that graduation, we heard an eloquent speech from a Somali ABE graduate, who was attending college in the following year. He had arrived in St. Cloud on a flight from Kenya, a tenth grader, by age, speaking no English, a refugee without any formal schooling. He found, not surprisingly, that he could not function effectively in our high school, and so he "dropped out," but was able to obtain his GDE, a few years beyond the normal graduation age. Statisticians and public education critics would announce that the St. Cloud School District "failed" this young man, because he did not graduate on time, but in fact, the ABE program met his needs, and I regard him as a success story.

It is commonly argued that Minnesota is doing an extraordinarily poor job in addressing the achievement gap, as compared to other states, and that really depends upon your point of view. Minnesota's NAEP results in Mathematics (2007) for white students are higher than the national average for white students in both 8th and 4th grade. NAEP results for mathematics for black students are the basically the same as the national average. Because white students are performing above average, and black students at the average, it can be said that we have a larger achievement gap, under this measure, even though all of our students, black and white are equal to or better than the national average.

In reading, Minnesota 8th grade students scored 12 points higher than the national average in 8th grade. Black students performed 26 points below at just about the national average. Once again, that leads to the conclusion that we have a higher achievement gap for black students, even though black students are performing at the national average. In both these cases, the Minnesota's extraordinarily high achievement gap is entirely accounted for, it seems, by the fact that Minnesota white students are performing significantly above the national avererage while black Minnesota students are performing at the national average for black students.

The High School Transcript Study points out that there is a significant gap in the high school performance of students based upon whether their parents finished high school, and that nugget of information holds the key to the achievement gap, in my opinion:

Thirty-four percent of graduates with a parent who did not finish high school completed a below standard curriculum compared to twenty percent of graduates with a parent who graduated from college.

So the achievement gap, however you wish to define it, is a manifestation of the difference in performance of students highly correlated with the educational attainment of their parents. We attack the achievement gap, because we believe that it is the job of public education to allow students to overcome, to outperform the limitations of their family history and background.

Making Stuff up About the Achievement Gap
Get Ready for College
School Choice will not close the achievement gap
Some students cost more to educate (1)
Some students Cost more to educate(2)

GetReady for College Inspires Elementary Students to Think College

2011-04-13T05:34:00.000-07:00

I've been writing about the achievement gap, and today I want to continue that theme, but with a more concrete example of a systemic change that is being adopted by a number of schools in Minnesota and elsewhere. The Get Ready for College program, sponsored by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education preaches the concept that students should start thinking about college and career in the earliest of elementary grades.

The Get Ready program is an early intervention and college awareness program. The program helps prepare fourth through tenth grade students from low-income families and those from groups traditionally under-represented in college with college planning information, academic tutoring and information on career and higher education options.

The Get Ready program argues that children from all walks of life come to school with high expectations for themselves. And, by 5th grade, students have decided whether or not post-secondary education is a reality for themselves. According to Get Ready:

91% of 4th -8th graders and 74% of 9th – 11th graders believe they will be able to get into college.

97% of 4th – 8th graders reported that earning good grades in school is important.

96% of 9th – 11th graders are looking forward to getting a college degree.

87% of 4th – 8th and 83% of 9th – 11th graders have specific career aspirations.

95% of all GR parents believe their students will attend some type of college.

As a result, "If we do not teach students in elementary school as if they are college bound, then our students have higher expectations for themselves than we do." The Get Ready idea is that all teachers in the school district becomes a career and college promoter. Instead of teaching students that their goal is to pass the next test (although that is important), or to get promoted to the next grade, or even to graduate high school, we teach students that their goal is to become prepared for a career choice that excites them, and we help them understand what they must do to achieve that career.

To create a go to college atmosphere, teachers in a Get Ready school talk to their students about their career aspirations in the early years. They make the college idea real, by weaving college into students own personal aspirations for career success. In one school, the teachers periodically come to school wearing their college alma mater sweatshirts and describe their own college experiences. The core idea is intentionally to make college or other post secondary school a regular theme during the school year. Teachers may have morning meeting/advisory discussions about college, careers, or goal-setting Students may get writing assignments to journal about college, careers, or goal-setting. The school may invite local colleges and student groups to visit. At parent conferences, teachers ask the parents if they know what their child wants for a career and how much education it takes to achieve that career. Teachers may display college pennants or posters in their classroom, but above all, they are making real, their students own aspirations to be somebody.

In addition to its partnership with public school, the Get Ready program partners with community organizations and business. To find out more about the Get Ready program, check out this website, or contact

Emily Paoli Johnson
Get Ready Program Manager
1450 Energy Park Drive, Suite 350
St. Paul, MN 55108
Tel: (651) 259-3919

E-mail: emily.johnson@state.mn.us

School Choice Will Not Close the Achievement Gap

2011-04-10T07:51:00.000-07:00

Private education performs a vital role in our society. And, it has been a pillar of central Minnesota throughout the twentieth century. Products of private education, parochial and secular, have made major contributions to our community to the nation and the world. My own masters in teaching and law degree come from two Catholic institutions in Washington, D.C. Parochial schools afford families the choice to send their children to schools which integrate religious and secular education in ways that the US Constitution would not allow in public schools. They offer the choice to found schools and fund them with private resources, organized on educational and philosophical choices determined by the founders. A group can found a Catholic, Baptist, Quaker, Hasidic, Conservative Jewish, Amish, Islamic and many have.

But school choice, and especially voucher credits, is not a solution to the achievement gap. School choice can be a solution for a small select fortunate students who escape a dysfunctional school in their neighborhood (instead of demanding that their school do its job). But school choice, as a strategy to attack the achievement gap has been an unmitigated failure and proposals to increase the amount of school choice are likely to make things worse, not better.

After an intensive review of the performance of Minnesota charter schools, the Legislative Auditor found:

As a group, charter students posted lower test scores and their schools were more likely to wind up on a watch list dictated by No Child Left Behind goals. Half of active charter schools failed to make adequate yearly progress and were subject to federal sanctions, compared with 32 percent of district-run schools.

The Auditor's report squares with a number of other studies across the country that strongly suggest that the school choice movement is not proving to be a large scale solution to closing the achievement gap. Notwithstanding this evidence, spurred by the advocates for private and parochial schools, school choice has attracted a huge fan-club at the legislature. Many of these legislators believe, based on ideology, that school choice certainly must be a solution to the achievement gap, because certainly open competition always produces positive results. But actual results prove otherwise. School choice is destined to fail as a gap-closing experiment for several reasons:

Students cost vastly different amounts to educate. The students who we want to target when closing the achievement gap are typically among the highest cost students to educate. Don't take my word for this. This is the conclusion of the Thomas Fordham Institute -- a leading voucher advocate. The Fordham Institute, with Catholic roots, has authored an important study "Fund the Child" which makes this clear. Voucher and school choice initiatives typically allow private schools to cherry-pick transferees, accepting only the children who need help the least, leaving the rest behind. Often the transfer students are already doing quite well in their public schools, and the result of the transfer is simply to leave the public school with a larger percentage of students who are costly to educate.

In Minnesota, special education, on the average, costs over one-half billion dollars statewide more than the legislature pays for these students. School choice does not share this deficit: it merely increases the proportion of students in the public school who produce the deficit, and increases the deficit load carried by the remaining students. Our funding system does not reimburse public schools based on the number of special education students they serve, but rather on the number of students, disabled and non-disabled, that they serve. That means that the more students who transfer out, the higher the percentage of high cost students with disabilities left behind, and the greater the deficit in public school operations. If a costly special education student transfers to a private school, the public school still pays for that education, and pays for the deficit in reimbursement out of regular education funds. As a result, the more students who transfer out of a public school, the greater the deficit. In Minnesota, school choice is a cherry picking operation, in which the transferee school gets full funding for the student transferred, but the public school is left with an increasingly large number of students who must be educated at a cost greater than state reimbursement. School choice is not based on fair competition or fair funding.

School choice has simply not proven effective in closing the achievement gap. While there are many good charter and private schools, the overwhelming evidence across the country is that state funded school choice has simply not proven effective.

School choice affords policy makers an excuse for not doing their job -- to demand that ineffective public schools follow best practices. If a school is not measuring up, we have a public responsibility to make the changes that need to be made. But the last several decades under Minnesota's school choice system has shown that charter choice has served as a safety valve for parents and community leaders who otherwise would have demanded reform in their own public schools. The result has been that instead of forcing public school change, they have delivered school choice, and the result has not benefited students at large. Measures of performance in the metro area have instead shown that charter schools are doing no better, and often vastly worse, than their public school competitors. When the charter school fails, the public is left with a mess, and the former charter operator retains the profits. At the same time, the transfer out through a cherry picking process has impoverished the remaining public schools, vastly increased their average costs of operation, and made school reform significantly more difficult to accomplish.

The choice movement in Minnesota has been a major factor in the destruction of public schools in the twin-cities. The two major metro school districts share much of the blame for their problems, of course, but the choice movement has significantly limited their ability to recover and overcome their challenges. That might be worth the price, were it not for the fact that the choice movement has made no discernible impact on the achievement gap, and has probably made it worse.

One understands the reason why folks who operate private schools support a voucher system. It allows them to increase their enrollment at public expense. They can accept public money without accepting the public responsibilities and costs that go along with it. It's a great business deal for them. They can hire teachers at non-union rates; deny admission to students who they judge more costly than the state funded tuition justifies, and expel them if they discover that their cost margin expectations do not prove correct. If the advocates for vouchers were truly interested in closing the achievement gap, they would advocating that private schools must accept all students eligible at the same cost, but amendments at the legislature to do just that were defeated by voucher advocates.

In this connection, I want to distinguish the choice movement as a device to help a few lucky students as compared to a device systemically to close the achievement gap. I taught in the District of Columbia school system. That system has a long history of dysfunctionality; it has been so dysfunctional for so long, that it is difficult I think for Minnesotans even to envision the depth of the systemic failures in that system. The parochial system in Washington DC provided a safety value for those students who were fortunate to escape deeply dysfunctional schools. No one can deny the benefits to those individual students.

But we are talking here of closing the achievement gap, which means creating a system that works for all students. If we are not going to make the reforms and provide the funding necessary to assure quality educations for all students, then I suppose providing an escape for some students -- the lucky ones, the cherry picked students -- is better than nothing. But actually, the result of the voucher system is exactly the opposite. It removes pressure for reform, inflicts growing financial penalties on the publics, and allows legislators to rationalize their failure to provide funding and demand reform. They can throw up their hands and claim that they fixed the problem with choice.

The claim that privates and parochials are trying to help us close the achievement gap is a well-intentioned rationalization. Their proposal will make gap closing more difficult; will cripple our ability to do that by transferring out the lowest cost students and leaving us with the most expensive. God bless parochial education. I owe my professional career to a great Catholic institution of learning. But the voucher proposal would destroy public school efforts to make progress on the achievement gap and should be defeated.

"Making stuff up" about the achievement gap.....

2011-04-09T06:54:00.000-07:00

The achievement gap has become a recurrent justification -- or should I say rationalization -- for radical alteration in public school funding. Several legislative leaders with responsibility for school funding at the legislature have repeatedly contended that public education in general has failed, and they have contended that this failure is proven by the persistence of the achievement gap. Indeed, several have suggested that we could attack the achievement gap more effectively, if only we would pull funding away from public schools and transfer that money to a voucher program. Throughout these discussions at the legislature, the claim that the public education system is causing the achievement gap runs largely accepted and unchallenged. Hand wringing editorials; documentaries; speeches from the Secretary of Education (who ought to know better), all accept this claim uncritically.

What really is the achievement gap, what causes it, and who has the solutions? Unless we understand the meaning of the achievement gap, it is impossible to craft sound policy:

We say that there is an achievement gap, because average white reading and math proficiency scores and non-white reading and math proficiency scores both have risen substantially, but that the gap between these scores remains.

Let me say this a different way. The achievement gap is not a measure of whether American students are doing better than they did a generation ago. Actually, the achievement gap is a manifestation of the fact that all students are doing better on the average, and that non-white students (on the average) are not gaining enough ground to close the gap. Highly respected education policy researcher Richard Rothstein provides persuasive statistics to support this important point in a recent article in the Washington Post, "How Bill Gates Misinterprets Education Facts." In his article, Rothstein points out that the most reliable longitudinal measure of student achievement is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP provides trends for 4th, 8th, and 12th graders, disaggregated by race, ethnicity, and poverty, since about 1980 in basic skills in math and reading (called the “Long Term Trend NAEP”) and since about 1990 for 4th and 8th graders in slightly more sophisticated math and reading skills (called the “Main NAEP”).

He continues:

On these exams, American students have improved substantially, in some cases phenomenally. In general, the improvements have been greatest for African-American students, and among these, for the most disadvantaged. The improvements have been greatest for both black and white 4th and 8th graders in math. Improvements have been less great but still substantial for black 4th and 8th graders in reading and for black 12th graders in both math and reading. Improvements have been modest for whites in 12th grade math and at all three grade levels in reading.

Here are two charts he offers to prove his point. Take some time. Read them carefully, because they are probably the most important statistics in education as it pertains to the achievement gap. The challenge the repeated claim that minorities (on the average) are failing to make educational progress.

In the last four decades, Rothstein continues the percentage of colleges graduates in the United States has nearly doubled. In 1970, 16% of young adults (ages 25 to 29) were college graduates. Today, it is 31%. The improvement has been across the board: the share of African-American young adults who are college graduates has gone from 10% to 19%; for whites it has gone from 17% to 37%.

We face a great education challenge in America. We need more children to read proficiently. We need more students to read and write beyond proficiency standards. We need more students to master math and science. There are schools, and in some case entire school systems that can be rated as abject failures by any standard. We need to fix those schools and those school systems. But the people who claim that the story of American public education is one of abject failure, are "making stuff up." Some of them are making stuff up because they want to make things better, and by making things look uniformly bad, they think they will spur us to change. Some of them are making stuff up because they want to dismantle what they call "government schools," and shift money to privates. Some of them are making stuff up because, well everyone else is making stuff up too.

We have a crisis in American education. There are too many young people who are not realizing their potential. Too many of them are poor, are minorities, are first generation families, or are immigrants from third world countries. All of this requires fundamental change in American Education. But let us not develop those changes on bogus information.

Because folks at the legislature are using the achievement gap as an excuse for their favorite solutions, I'm going to spend the next few posts taking a look at the causes of the achievement gap and potential solutions. There are some very promising reforms underway across the country. Some of them require major fundamental change in how we deliver instruction, how we use the labor force, and how we train teachers and administrators. None of those solutions involve pulling funds out of K-12 education, or dismantling our system of public education.

Panic in the Education Lifeboat Leads to Tossing Some Overboard

2011-03-26T07:18:00.001-07:00

House and Senate are confronting a statewide financial crunch. Huge increases in the health care budget, the banking crisis and recession, combined with a decision that the state will not look to new revenues, has led the House and Senate to inflict significant financial pain on K-12 education. State mandated special education expenditures are slated to grow significantly during the next biennium , but the House and Senate are proposing not to fund these increases, leaving local districts with significant unfunded but mandated special education costs ($700 million per year). Last year, the State increased local districts contributions to state employee pensions, but provided no additional revenue to cover those shortfalls. Although employee pay and benefit increases moderated some in the last biennium, any increase in employee compensation had to come from cuts, because the state formula increase was zero in the last biennium. Across the State, districts made significant, often unprecedented cuts, to cover the shortfalls in education funding.

The Education Community has begun to act like a group of mariners in a lifeboat running out of fresh water. Instead of working together to fight for the education of all children, instead of insisting that the legislature perform its constitutional duty to educate all children, many panicked educators and their advocates are beginning to whisper to their legislators "save us, throw other districts over the lifeboat." There is good reason for panic. Anoka, the State's largest District cut about 70 teachers last year along with 47 staff, and it is scheduled to cut more in the coming year. Lakeville, which just provided a generous settlement to its employees, has suddenly been thrust into a downward fiscal spiral caused by declining enrollment. Districts all over the state are looking at unacceptable cuts that will inflict deep and lasting damage to Minnesota's educational infrastructure.

Some Districts have convinced local legislators to provide them a temporary boost with special earmarks, exempting them from some of the pain. Here are some earmarks inserted into the House Omnibus bill.

District	Earmark
Anoka Hennipen	$4,200,000
Rosemount AV	$3,800,000
South Washington	$1,900,000
Rochester	$1,100,000
Elk River	$1,800,000
Lakeville	$1,200,000

These districts rightly point out to their local legislators that their children will suffer tremendous and unacceptable cuts if they have to share the pain that the House and Senate have in mind. They have identified significant unfairness in state funding, by pointing to problems in the funding system that impact them. Legislators are being convinced to help out some districts by taking money away from others. One unfairness is being addressed by making other unfairness worse. All of this is done in the context of trying to convince legislators who come from districts "like us" that the children in districts who look like our kids are getting a raw deal financially as compared to school districts with children who are different from "our kids." The legislature has been convinced by districts who don't have high numbers of disabled children in their district to pull money away from special education funding, and to shift that money into regular education. As a result, some districts will benefit from a very small funding increase in the general formula, and other districts will pay for that increase with much larger special education deficits.

In almost every other year, educators would come together and tell the legislature that the education community believes that we must provide adequate funding to address the needs of all students, whether they live in our own communities, whether they look like our children, or whether the children are poor and powerless, or upper middle class. But this year, panic has set in on the education lifeboat, and some have decided that would be easier to pitch some kids overboard rather than to advocate that the legislature meet its constitutional responsibility to educate all children. When panic sets in on the lifeboat, dehydrated mariners resort to rationalizations as to why they need more water right now, and other mariners don't, and so on. In the face of this growing everyone for himself atmosphere, our board of education has written a letter to the education community urging that we work together. K-12 has a special standing in the Constitution. The authors of the Constitution foresaw a day when there would be pressure to rationalize in this way. They expected us to resist this temptation. We need to stand together and make sure that the children in all districts, regardless of what they look like, or whether their representatives are republicans, democrats, urban or rural, have the resources they need to succeed. Here is the text of our letter:

During this legislative session, some in the education community have argued that K-12 education must recognize that the State of Minnesota can no longer meet its responsibility to educate all children. During the financial crisis, some have begun to argue that educating students who live in poverty, students with disabilities, and refugees and students who come to Minnesota speaking no English is just too expensive. That has led to an effort in the legislature to support a massive revenue transfer from school districts with high rates of poverty and disabilities to school districts with much lower poverty and disabilities.

We are hearing that we can solve Minnesota's education problems by delinking compensatory funding from the formula. We are hearing that integration revenues are a waste of money because we haven't closed the achievement gap yet. We are hearing that the solution to the funding problem of smaller districts is to take money out of special education and put it on the formula. We are writing to express our belief that this approach is not worthy of the Minnesota education community.

The House Omnibus Education Bill funds an increase in the formula by taking money out of special education. School districts negatively impacted will not be able to cut special education. They will be required to take that money out of the formula. Already, in our District we transfer about $900 from each student in our district to cover the state mandate deficit, despite the fact that we have frozen total special education costs for four years. The cuts in special education will negate completely our formula increases, so that other districts with far smaller special education deficits will get a larger net increase. We don 't want to take money from those districts: we want all districts to have the resources that they need.

If we are to meet the State's Constitutional responsibility to educate all children, we need to make sure that public dollars are spent efficiently. But we cannot meet our responsibilities by defunding the programs that are necessary to close the achievement gap or to educate children with disabilities. We would urge those who represent the education community to come together and join in a common effort to provide appropriate relief on the formula and on categorical funding. Won't you join with us in fighting together for the education of all children in Minnesota by contacting your legislators and other legislative leaders? We cannot assure that all children thrive unless we provide adequate funding appropriate to educational need.

House Omnibus Ed Bill buys formula increase with Special Education Revenue Cuts

2011-03-21T17:27:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the of the financial provisions of the House Omnibus Education Bill. Legislators like to increase the basic formula and pay for it by reducing funding for special education and other funds. Doing so makes it look like education is being held harmless or even provided more funding, even when the net result is negative. This is a long-standing device used often by both Republicans and Democrats alike. The key financial features:

Large cuts in special education revenue to pay for smaller total increases in regular education funding. Statewide, total cuts in special education funding to school districts of about $38 million. St. Cloud special education funding would be cut $73 for each student in the district (disabled or not). Across the state, cuts range from about $20 for each student in the district (whether disabled or not) --for districts with low special education student populations --to as high as $100 per student (disabled or not) --for districts with large special education populations. These revenue cuts are not accompanied by policy changes that allow spending reductions. Reductions must be made from regular education, out of the general funding formula, because cuts in special education are prohibited. For many districts, the result is to take away completely, the increase in the formula, and then some.
Major cuts in funding for Duluth, Minneapolis and St. Paul. Duluth is cut $132 per student, or about 1.1 million dollars, Minneapolis and St. Paul are cut about $14 million each.
Small basic revenue increases using some of the money "saved" by special education revenue cuts. The Bill would increase the basic formula allowance from $5,124 to $5,155 in fiscal year 2012, to $5,210 for fiscal year 2013, and $5,375 for fiscal years 2014 and later. Total cost to increase the basic formula is about $28 million in year 1. Thus, the entire cost of the general formula increase is paid for by special education cuts, with red ink to spare. Keep in mind that the cuts in special education are not accompanied by district expenditure cuts. State law still prohibits school districts from cutting their special education budgets, so the House Omnibus bill is a form of bait and switch. The losers are the districts with high special education populations and the highest special education deficits.
Some school districts large increases, some large decreases. The winners generally are the districts who serve the least special education students and the losers are the Twin Cities, Duluth, and districts with high special education populations.
St. Cloud total funding is cut $378,000. Elk River gets a $1.6 million increase; Lakeville $1.1 million increase.
Foley, Rocori, Sartell, get small net increases. Sauk Rapids gets a small net decrease.
Compensatory education revenue. The Bill would "delink: compensatory revenue from the basic formula allowance. The plan is to gradually phase out assistance to school districts with students with high needs so that over time, education money would move from districts with large high need student populations to those with smaller high need student populations.

Earmarks. Fifteen school districts, including Lakeville, Anoka, Rochester, and others get special earmarks of extra compensatory revenue ranging from one million to $4.2 million. Rationale is that these districts seem to have complained that the compensatory education formula doesn't work fairly for them. Special education formula doesn't work for us. Can we have an earmark too, please?

Jokes aside, one of the problems with using earmarks for selected school districts is that it can lead to allocating money based on political favoritism for particular legislators. Perhaps Anoka's legislator will trade some more money for the Anoka school district in return for a vote on gaming, or a football stadium. Under a formula system, at least legislators must provide funding based upon a transparent formula that is applied to all districts.

Integration Revenue. Big cuts in integration revenue for St. Paul, Minneapolis and Duluth. But school districts now free to use their integration revenue to improve learning, which is a good thing.

My prediction: Special education funding cuts and school district earmarks would render this legislation unconstitutional, if it were adopted.