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Recent State and Local Education News
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Local organizers hope to bring male role models to students
Virginian-Pilot
January 1, 2017
When students return to Lynchburg City Schools on Tuesday, they'll be welcomed with words of encouragement by possibly 100 or more men from around the community.
Dubbed "Men 2 School," the idea is to get more than 100 volunteers to show up and cheer students on as they begin the second part of their school year. The initiative first was organized in August.
"Our kids really need that extra push sometimes, and we're hoping an encouraging word or a smiling face can do it for them," said Jonathan Willis, co-organizer of the event and pastor of Prayer Faith Temple.
Willis said the goal not only is to encourage students to take education seriously and do their best in school but also to provide positive male role models for children who may not have one in their lives.
Virginia Board of Education member who resigned over racist, sexist tweets leaves teaching job
Virginian-Pilot
December 27, 2016
A Virginia Board of Education member who resigned last month amid controversy over inappropriate Twitter posts has stepped down from a teaching position.
Wes Bellamy posted on his Facebook page late Monday that he is resigning from his job as a teacher at Albemarle High School.
“We have to ensure that our students have the best possible learning environment, and I do not want to do anything that will compromise that,” Bellamy’s statement said.
Bellamy left the state Board of Education in late November, a few days after tweets he made were uncovered. Blogger Jason Kessler published a story about a series of tweets and retweets Bellamy made between 2009 and 2014.
Hands-on educator wins elite eductional honor in Virginia
The Progress-Index
Bristol Herald Courier
December 28, 2016
A local biology professor who recently won a prestigious award said he is most proud of his students’ success.
Kevin Hamed, biology professor at Virginia Highlands Community College in Abingdon, is one of 12 recipients of the 2017 Outstanding Faculty Award for the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. This is the top award given to higher education professors in the Commonwealth, according to college spokeswoman Anne Dunham.
Hamed said he is humbled by the recognition and it reflects the mission and strength of the college as a whole.
“I don't think it's anything that I do special. I'm just a facilitator. So much of education is just facilitation,” Hamed said.
Proposal would require Virginia schools to notify parents of ‘sexually explicit’ literature
Washington Post
December 31, 2016
Virginia regulators are drafting rules that would require school districts to red-flag objectionable teaching material and make it easier for parents to control what books their children see in the classroom, though a similar bill was vetoed last year by Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
Virginia schools would have to send parents a list of any teaching materials containing “sexually explicit” content at the start of every school year under a policy being considered by the state Board of Education. All local school boards would be required to set up a way for parents to opt out of objectionable materials; teachers would have to provide replacement texts for those who ask for them.
School reading lists have long been sources of controversy, with parents concerned about exposing their children to vulgar language or sensitive topics, fighting to expunge even classic works — such as Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” — from classrooms. Teachers and literacy organizations often decry such moves as censorship that erase important literature from curriculums.
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Recent National Education News
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How Indiana’s school voucher program soared, and what it says about education in the Trump era
The Washington Post
December 26, 2016
Indiana lawmakers originally promoted the state’s school voucher program as a way to make good on America’s promise of equal opportunity, offering children from poor and lower-middle-class families an escape from public schools that failed to meet their needs.
But five years after the program was established, more than half of the state’s voucher recipients have never attended Indiana public schools, meaning that taxpayers are now covering private and religious school tuition for children whose parents had previously footed that bill. Many vouchers also are going to wealthier families, those earning up to $90,000 for a household of four.
The voucher program, one of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing, serves more than 32,000 children and provides an early glimpse of what education policy could look like in Donald Trump’s presidency.
Trump has signaled that he intends to pour billions of federal dollars into efforts to expand vouchers and charter schools nationwide. Betsy DeVos, his nominee for education secretary, played an important role in lobbying for the establishment of Indiana’s voucher program in 2011. And Vice President-elect Mike Pence led the charge as the state’s governor to loosen eligibility requirements and greatly expand the program’s reach.
Five Numbers That Explain Education in 2016
The Atlantic
December 31, 2016
As a writer, I generally favor words over numbers. But sometimes a good number is worth a thousand words. Or something like that. In that spirit, here are five numbers that help explain the state of education in 2016 (with a smattering of words thrown in for good measure).
83
This is the percentage of American high-schoolers who graduated on time during the 2014-15 school year (the most recent year for which there is data available). While 83 percent is a record-high overall graduation rate, the rates for some groups of students, such as blacks and Latinos, are much lower. Although persistent gaps remain, schools and nonprofits are finding creative ways to serve what is an increasingly diverse student body.
These Will Be The Five Biggest Education Issues Of 2017
The Daily Caller
January 1, 2017
2017 could be a year of chaos in education.
In contrast to previous years, when the stakes in education were easy to see at the outset, what will happen this year is almost anybody’s guess. Unsurprisingly, this uncertainty is all thanks to presidential victor Donald Trump. Had former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won, education would be easy to gauge; she almost certainly would have continued President Barack Obama’s policies with a big push for debt-free college.
But Trump didn’t speak much about education on the campaign trail, and when he did, his plans were lacking in detail. Still, some reasoned predictions can be made about what will happen in the coming year.
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Are Taxpayer-Funded School Vouchers Coming?
Happy New Year from all of us here at CEPI!
The new year brings us closer to the January 20th presidential transition, so many education analysts are pondering what major changes a Trump administration may bring to public education in the United States. One such topic is the use of school vouchers - a mechanism where the state provides a family with a voucher that can be used in private or parochial schools for some significant portion of the taxpayer funding that would be used for a child in attending public schools.
This is not a new idea, as can be seen by the map below showing which states currently employ such a program. In fact, one of the reasons some observers think that a Trump White House will propose a national school voucher program is because Vice-President-elect Pence oversaw a significant expansion of Indiana's school voucher program.
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While not brand new, the policy idea is certainly hotly debated. As summarized by the National Conference of State Legislators, there are arguments for and against such a policy. (Follow these links for a look at NCSL's full analysis of
school vouchers, an up-to-date
state-by-state comparison of school voucher laws, and a 2013 analysis of the
fiscal impact of vouchers.)
What the Proponents Say
Private school choice proponents contend that when parents can choose where to send their child to school, they will choose the highest performing options. Those schools performing poorly will be forced to either improve or risk losing students and the funding tied to those students. While public school choice policies like charter schools serve a similar purpose, private schools have more flexibility in staffing, budgeting, curriculum, academic standards and accountability systems than even charter schools. This flexibility, supporters argue, fosters the best environment for market competition and cost efficiency.
What the Opponents Say
Opponents of private school choice raise a number of concerns. They argue shifting a handful of students from a public school into private schools will not decrease what the public school must pay for teachers and facilities, but funding for those costs will decrease as students leave. Some also see government incentives to attend private religious schools as violating the separation of church and state. Others believe the positive effects of school competition on student achievement are overstated by proponents.
A recent
Washington Post article takes a deeper look at the Indiana program as well as concerns that the program is largely making it more affordable for parents already sending students to private/religious schools rather than allowing low-income students from failing schools to access high-quality alternatives. The article notes:
"But five years after the program was established, more than half of the state’s voucher recipients have never attended Indiana public schools, meaning that taxpayers are now covering private and religious school tuition for children whose parents had previously footed that bill. Many vouchers also are going to wealthier families, those earning up to $90,000 for a household of four."
Such an analysis that pivots on who benefits from such a policy may also raise the question of who supports such a policy. Though somewhat dated (data is from 2004), we found the visualization compiled by Andrew Gelman and colleagues to provide interesting insight into the variation of support across income and racial/ethnic categories. The authors conclude that those who support such a policy are largely wealthier whites (especially Catholic and evangelical whites), low-income Hispanics, and in some places Asians and Blacks. (To read their full analysis, click on the visualization or
here.)
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| Compiled by Yu-Sung Su, Yair Ghitza and Andrew Gelman - andrewgelman.com |
As noted by the first map, Virginia does not have a school voucher program, but does provide tax credits for donations that go to support educational scholarships (including ones that allow students to attend private schools.) It remains to be seen whether Virginia legislators will submit any bill to establish a school voucher program within the Commonwealth in the coming legislative session.
But in providing a bit more of a Virginia focus to the question of school vouchers, in this week's
poll snapshot we look back at public opinion a few years ago when we asked Virginians about both support for a general school vouchers program and one that would be available only to students in failing schools.
In keeping with the topic of school funding questions, we're also happy to share the third issue of our Education Law Newsletter for this school year. CEPI's Senior Fellow, Dr. Richard Vacca, reviews a range of court decisions that have impacted the parameters states and localities must follow in developing school funding mechanisms. We excerpt portions of that Education Law newsletter
below.
We hope you find this collection of analysis and insights useful.
Sincerely, CEP
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Poll Snapshot - Support for linking student test performance to teacher pay
In 2003, our Commonwealth Education Poll asked respondents “Do you favor or oppose giving parents vouchers to pay for their child’s tuition at a private, or parochial school of their choice?”
The same poll asked “Suppose vouchers were only available for parents with children enrolled in schools that fail to meet state performance standards . . . would you favor or oppose this?”
The table below summarizes the responses for all survey participants, as well as the breakdowns by income category.
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The difference between the questions is minor for all respondents, though support drops by 3% when the program envisioned becomes more targeted toward helping students in failing school systems. However when examining a breakdown by household income level, it becomes clear where the drop in support is occurring – those in the middle two income brackets both show declines in support. It seems that support for the program may be partially affected by whether respondents think their own families are likely to benefit from such a policy.
To read the full 2003 poll, visit our
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Education Law Newsletter - Teacher Effectiveness and Student Learning Outcomes
Excerpted from the January edition of CEPI's Education Law Newsletter. This issue is written by Dr. Richard Vacca and looks at Morath,et al. v. The Texas Taxpayer and Student Fairness Coalition, et al. (Tex. 2016). Read the full newsletter on our
website.
Overview
The 1960s and 1970s marked a period when the federal government reached deeply into public education. It was an era when a number of new federal anti-discrimination statutes (including federal funding eligibility and regulations) came into being. Within this timeframe, the United States Congress passed, and the President signed into law, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VI and VII; Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, Title I; Education Amendments Act of 1972, Title IX; Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Sec. 504; Family Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974; Education for all Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (now IDEA), and others.
While over the past five decades federal governmental involvement in our nation’s public schools has grown in magnitude, the educational rights of school age children remain grounded in the constitution and statutes of each state. The silence of the United States Constitution, coupled with the language of the Tenth Amendment, reserves to the states the legal authority and responsibility to establish statewide public school systems. As a general rule, the constitution of each state contains an education mandate (some more detailed than others) and places authority to enact laws and make policies establishing, organizing, funding, and maintaining a statewide public school system in the hands of the state legislature. (Vacca and Bosher, 2012)
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Morath,et al. v. The Texas Taxpayer and Student Fairness Coalition, et al. (Tex. 2016)
Recently I reviewed a forty-one page, comprehensive and detailed, decision handed down by the Supreme Court of Texas. The case involves that State’s school finance system and the constitutional education mandate calling for a “general diffusion of knowledge” and “adequacy of funding.” Because the Court’s opinion is very comprehensive, detailed, and complex it is not possible to present the entire analysis in this commentary. As such, what follows is my attempt to summarize various key points made in the opinion.
This marked the seventh time since the late 1980s that the Supreme Court of Texas was called upon to assess the constitutionality of the Texas finance system. In deciding the case the Court made it clear that it was not its responsibility “to second guess or micromanage state education policy” or “to issue edicts from on high increasing financial inputs in hopes of increasing educational outputs…”or “substituting the wisdom of nine judges for that of 181 lawmakers.” The responsibility for educational policy making “is placed squarely with the Legislature.” Morath (Tex., 2016)
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Policy Implications
In my view the Texas Supreme Court’s opinion (including the concurring opinion) in Morath is in line with the advice offered by Justice Powell more than four decades ago in Rodriguez (1973). The remedy to fiscal disparities existing between and among public school systems in the same state “must come from the lawmakers and from the democratic pressures of those who elect them.” Moreover, while it recognized that more has to be done to carry out its obligation to provide equal access to educational opportunities for all its school age children, the Court’s decision is consistent with its own past decisions and decisions of courts in other states. It did not require equal expenditures for all children nor did it equate increased spending on education with an automatic increase in student academic performance. The adequacy, suitability, and fiscal efficiency of education provided in the public schools of a state must be measured against the specific constitutional mandate, statutes, and policies of that state.
In this era of transparency, accountability, and “tight budgets,” while implications flowing from the Texas Supreme Court’s opinion are more appropriate for policy makers at the state level, the information contained in the opinion has implications for local school systems as they strive to gain the financial support of their communities –financial support necessary for the maintenance and operation of the schools.
Local school boards must make it clear that:
- The Board’s intent is to carry out the state’s constitutional and statutory mandates governing educational opportunity for all children in the school district.
- The primary use of all funds and other resources allocated to the school system is for (1) improvement of instruction; (2) providing access to educational opportunities available to all students; (3) hiring and retaining qualified personnel—especially classroom teachers; and (4) up-dating and improving equipment and physical facilities.
- As a part of the formal budgetary process all requests for financial and other resources are needs based (supported by appropriate documentation) and form an integral part of the school system’s strategic plan for growth and improvement—especially requests directly tied to remediating existing problems as well as those providing a foundation of support for future incentives.
- The community (especially parents) will be kept regularly informed of school system curricular changes and modifications; student academic achievement and progress; school accreditation; special education; bilingual education; extra-curricular activities; administrator, teacher, and other staff salaries, benefits, and turnover; vintage and condition of equipment, buildings, and other facilities.
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