Compass Point
A Weekly Collection of Data, Articles and Insights from the Commonwealth Educational Policy Institute
A project of the Virginia Commonwealth University's Center for Public Policy
L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs
Articles of Interest
State & Local Policy

Schools take action to attract students to education careers
Washington Post
June 21, 2015 

For years, education groups have warned that lagging pay for teachers in Virginia and other states could lead to fewer people entering the field. Now they have evidence to back up their fears.


Between 2010 and 2014, the number of ACT-tested high school graduates who said they were interested in education majors or professions decreased by more than 16 percent, according to the nonprofit organization that administers that exam. About 5 percent of students who took the test last year indicated an interest in becoming educators, down from 7 percent in 2010.

One reason for the negative trends is pay. A study released this month by the New Jersey-based Education Law Center found that teachers starting their careers at age 25 earn about 80 percent of what non-teachers earn, on average. At age 45, teachers earn about 70 percent of non-teacher wages.

Virginia ranked last among all states, with teachers making 69 percent of what non-teachers make at 25, and 60 percent at 45. That comes at a time when demands on teachers are increasing as the state has toughened mandatory exams in recent years.

“I think teachers are quite skillful people, and when they think about their options, they’re choosing to go into education in not quite as great a rate,” said Leigh Butler, assistant dean for teacher education services at Old Dominion University.

Judge approves deal that keeps Sweet Briar open
Richmond Times-Dispatch
June 22, 2015

With the court battle behind them Monday, the vixens of Sweet Briar College celebrated the never-give-in spirit that will keep their college open another year, if not in perpetuity.

Alumnae, faculty, staff and students gathered to picnic and make plans hours after Bedford County Circuit Judge James Updike approved the mediated settlement to three suits filed to stop the private women’s college’s board of directors from permanently closing Sweet Briar.

“It seemed like the odds were so long, but we prevailed,” said Laura Pharis, a Sweet Briar professor, as she prepared to play the fiddle with her old-time band Bramble & Rose.

The new leadership is expected to take over in seven days with Monday’s blessing from Updike, who drew cheers and a standing ovation when he told his crowded courtroom in Bedford that he is confident the college will “not merely endure” but will prevail.

Updike accepted three consent orders presented by Attorney General Mark R. Herring, whose office brokered a mediation effort that continued over nearly six weeks.

The orders, which take effect today, will allow the transfer of leadership to a new president and board of directors under a plan that requires the alumnae group Saving Sweet Briar Inc. to provide $12 million, with $2.5 million due by July 2.

Herring will release restrictions on $16 million from the college’s endowment, which he said will be a sufficient amount to operate the college for the next academic year.


York County School Board member inducted into Virginia education hall of fame
Daily Press
June 16, 2015
R. Page Minter was recently inducted into the Virginia Career and Technical Education Hall of Fame during the Creating Excellence Awards Program in Richmond.

Minter is a member of the York County School Board, and is the board chairman of New Horizons Regional Education Center in Newport News.


U.S. Department of Education Honors Coles Elementary for 'Green' Efforts
Manassas Patch
June 18, 2015

Coles Elementary School has been honored by the U.S. Department of Education as a Green Ribbon School.

It’s one of 58 schools across the country, that have been honored for their exemplary efforts to reduce environmental impact and utility costs, promote better health, and ensure effective environmental education, including civics and green career pathways.

Federal Policy

English Class in Common Core Era: ‘Tom Sawyer’ and Court Opinions
New York Times
June 19, 2015

In Harrison, N.Y., 10th graders read articles about bipolar disorder and the adolescent brain to help them analyze Holden Caulfield. In Springdale, Ark., ninth graders studying excerpts from “The Odyssey” also read sections of the G.I. Bill of Rights, and a congressional resolution on its 60th anniversary, to connect the story of Odysseus to the challenges of modern-day veterans. After eighth graders in Naples, Fla., read how Tom Sawyer duped other boys into whitewashing a fence for him, they follow it with an op-ed article on teenage unemployment.

In the Common Core era, English class looks a little different. The Common Core standards, which have been adopted by more than 40 states, mandated many changes to traditional teaching, but one of the most basic was a call for students to read more nonfiction. The rationale is that most of what students will be expected to read in college and at work will be informational, rather than literary, and that American students have not been well prepared to read those texts.
The Denver Post
June 20, 2015

In Colorado and throughout the United States, education policy has moved from the back burner to the front burner. While the education debate in the past had centered almost entirely on funding, it is now centered on such issues as Common Core, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), and requirements for federal waivers.

This change has divided the political establishment, not necessarily by party or ideology, but often by allegiances to employee organizations, and forced those who believe in local control to take positions that would appear to be anti-accountability.


The great struggle in education is between accountability as defined by the U.S. Department of Education and the concept of state and local control.

A Progress Report on Charter Schools
National Affairs
Summer 2015

Minnesota passed the nation's first charter-school law in 1991. Since then, 43 states and the District of Columbia have allowed for the existence and operation of these independent public schools. Today, some 6,700 of them serve nearly three million students, almost 6% of U.S. public-school enrollment. They are the fastest-growing school-choice option in the country. They are also as close to a "disruptive innovation" as American K-12 education has seen to date, creating a new market and alternative delivery system that affords long-neglected families access to potentially higher-quality schools than they find within the traditional district structure.

Charters now educate more than half as many children as attend private schools, which have been around for ages. Along with vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, magnet schools, virtual schools, education savings accounts, and innumerable "open-enrollment" schemes, charter schools are responsible for a major increase in the rising fraction of U.S. students attending schools that their families have chosen.  The charter approach contrasts sharply with traditional public education, which is generally still defined by more-or-less compulsory attendance at neighborhood schools determined by a family's home address and enforced by a district bureaucracy. Our 2000 book, Charter Schools in Action, foresaw this innovative education governance and delivery system as a promising path to stronger achievement and as an engine "to recreate the democratic underpinnings of public education and rejoin schools to a vigorous civil society."

Yet for all their promise, impressive growth, and visibility in the public square, charter schools remain a mystery to many Americans. Are they public or private? Who pays for them? Do they choose their pupils? Do they serve needy children or enrich plutocrats? Are they only for minority kids? Do they further segregate public education? Do they teach religion? Serious misunderstandings abound.

Philadelphia School Reform Commission OKs deal to outsource substitutes; union vows challenge
Philadelphia Inquirer
June 18, 2015


The Philadelphia School Reform Commission voted Thursday night to outsource more than 1,000 substitute-teaching jobs, awarding a $34 million contract to a Cherry Hill firm to recruit, hire, and manage the workers for two years.

The unanimous vote came over the protests of the teachers' union, which currently represents subs.

Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, vowed legal action, including a possible claim of unfair labor practices, and said the move was part of a plan to "privatize public education one position at a time."

Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. and the SRC, Jordan said in a statement, "used the shortage of substitutes as an excuse to abdicate their responsibilities to provide services to students." The union said the district had allowed substitute vacancies to go unfilled to save money.
 
How can we improve coordination between housing agencies and schools?

That question was the driving force behind the second Housing & Schools Symposium, hosted by Housing Virginia and VCU's Center for Urban and Regional Analysis (CURA), part of the Wilder School.  As Virginia Superintendent of Public Instruction, Dr. Steve Staples noted in his opening keynote at the conference, the correlation between concentrated poverty and what are often termed "failing schools" is almost 1 (meaning that one is almost synonymous with the other.)  Given the expected trendline that public schools in the commonwealth are educating more students living in poverty, Staples argued that to be successful, educators and housing authorities have to change the way we do things. 

One continuing theme throughout the day was the need to leverage the positive potential of student mobility to different zones of opportunity while mitigating the negative effects of mobility often experienced by students living in poverty. On one hand, students living in poverty may be forced to move frequently - creating difficult challenges for the student and schools in terms of maintaining continuity of learning.   One policy solution is to allow a student to stay in the same school (including providing transportation for them) regardless of where circumstances take them.

On the other hand, programs that utilize vouchers and other incentives to allow families living in poverty to move to high opportunity communities with low poverty schools can make a huge difference. A recent New York Times article cited on the Virginia Housing Education and Housing blog contains this graphic representation that shows the impact that can result from a child moving with their family to a higher opportunity neighborhood.

Breakout sessions on potential positive policies for both high and low opportunity communities were the subject of breakout sessions in the afternoon.  (See the full schedule below).  In another breakout session and in a concluding plenary, transformational strategies were discussed - an effort that brings significant resources from local government, non-profits, businesses and faith communities to bear on one specific neighborhood.  Purpose Built Communities, a national network of such initiatives, shared insights from the effort to transform one East Lake neighborhood in Atlanta (see a recent PBS newshour story on the effort). 


Low Poverty Schools in High Opportunity Communities
One breakout session addressed inclusionary housing strategies designed to offer children of lower income families an opportunity to live and attend school in communities with higher opportunities and high-performing public school systems. Entitled “Low Poverty Schools in High Opportunity Communities,” presenters at this session included Heather Crislip from Housing Opportunities Made Equal (HOME) and Ashley Montgomery from Housing and Community Development in Fairfax County.

Ms. Crislip from HOME discussed the Housing Choice Voucher Program, often referred to as Section 8 of the Housing Act of 1937. 42 U.S.C. § 1437(f). Section 8 authorizes “tenant-based” and “project-based” rental assistance programs. A major part of the program provides for individuals to use the monthly vouchers for purchasing a home in higher income areas. Another part of the program provides for owners to set aside a portion of a building’s units specifically for low-income housing, and the government, in return for their participation, will make up the monetary difference. Though landlords are required to meet fair housing laws, they are not required to participate in the Section 8 programs. Virginia’s General Assembly, however, offers landlords tax incentives for accepting housing vouchers for lower income families.


Fairfax County’s Housing and County Development office has had major success with the Affordable Dwelling Units Program. This program offered developers the option to reserve 12.5% of units for low-income housing, and in return, they would receive 20% additional market-rate units. Through March 2015, 2,591 ADU units have been produced. This has greatly helped Fairfax County avoid concentration of poverty and given lower- and medium-income families access to job centers, good schools and public transportation.

High Poverty Schools in Low Opportunity Communities
Another breakout session highlighted options for improving outcomes for students in poverty, including by attracting middle-class students to schools located in low-opportunity neighborhoods.  Adria Scharf of the Richmond Peace Education Center spoke as a parent of a child in a high poverty school in Richmond City and noted that moving towards equality requires intentionality by leadership, building relationships and skills (often especially for white middle-class families who need to learn alternate ways of doing things) and that city-wide initiatives like "futures centers" in each high school to encourage students to pursue college hold promise. 

Phil Tegeler of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council suggested three types of initiatives that should be tried:
  • reducing student churn (missed days of school, needing to switch schools in mid-year) which research has shown has negative impacts on both the individual and classroom environments. 
  • approaching "turn-around" efforts with attention to supporting changes in the surrounding community rather than simply replacing leadership and staff and expecting different results.
  • draft rules that require applicants for federal funding to impact high-poverty areas to look at levels of segregation and answer questions about how housing changes will impact local schools.
Amaya Garcia of the New America Foundation also spoke about the potential of dual language programs (teaching and learning in English and another language in about equal ratio) which research has shown can nearly eliminate achievement gaps between low-income and middle-class students while also improving executive control, persistence and task switching abilities for all students.  Because these programs are very in demand by middle-class families, developing dual language programs in schools that are located in low-opportunity neighborhoods often attracts middle-class students to enroll there.  Over 458 such programs exist in the U.S. (including 118 in Utah and with Houston city schools adding 21 programs next year.)

In line with these topics, we also excerpt below an Education Law Newsletter from this past January that reviews the parameters public schools work within when setting attendance and student assignment policies.  These legal frameworks affect options like magnet and charter schools and open-enrollment policies, all ways that increased school choice holds potential for delinking geography from which school one attends.  Also noted at the conference, however, was the reality that attendance zones and discretionary power of housing officials often contributes to negative outcomes in the form of increased concentration of students living in poverty.    

Because of this potential for socioeconomic sorting with increased school choice, in this week's poll snapshot we look back to our 2002 poll where we asked whether the public thought implementation of school vouchers could result in government funds being used for discrimination.
  

Sincerely,
CEPI

Poll Snapshot:  Would school vouchers result in taxpayer funds being used for discrimination?

In 2002, we asked the following question:

“Vouchers would give parents education tax credits to pay for their child's tuition at a private or parochial school of their choice.  There are many different ideas about what vouchers would do.  Do you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree or strongly disagree with the following statement:  Vouchers could result in government funds being used for discriminiation because private schools can select which students they want to admit." 

The chart below summarizes the responses:


Several interesting differences are worth pointing out.  First, a definitive majority (57%) agreed strongly or somewhat that vouchers could be used for discrimination.  But the differences between whites and blacks, as well as between party identifiers, are striking.  Whites were less likely to strongly agree (24%) than were blacks (40%), perhaps indicating a difference of experience with government funded discrimination. 

Larger divides, however, existed between Republicans (only 9% strongly agreed) and Democrats (43% strongly agreed).  Independents were about midway between the two on that measure.  About the same proportion of all three party identification groups somewhat agreed.  But the gap in strong agreement (or conversely strong disagreement) points potentially to a different paradigm used by significant portions of each party when it comes to the dangers of government policy leading to discrimination.  

(To read the full results of the poll, visit our website. Question 25 is cited above  - topline results are on page 17 of the 2002 poll with demographic breakouts on page 43.)

Student Admission and School Assignment

Excerpted from 's January Ed Law Newsletter on the same topic.

In the face of changing demographics, schools often need to make choices about redrawing attendance boundaries and restricting or loosening policies that may allow students to go to a school different than their "neighborhood" school.  Here is an excerpt from Dr. Vacca's review of the legal parameters within which these decisions need to be made.

"Overview

Suffice it to say, today’s public elementary and secondary school enrollments are far different from those in existence in the days of Horace Mann and the early days of his notion of the “common school.” Beginning in the late 1850s and moving through the early 1900s, mainly as a result of the immigration of people from Europe, this country’s public school enrollments grew and changed in composition. Almost a century later, following the United States Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), public school enrollments once again became more socially and ethnically diverse as the desegregation movement moved forward. In the mid-1970s public school enrollments once again experienced significant change as federal statutory law and court decisions required equal access to a free and appropriate education for all children with educational disabilities. Beginning in the mid-1970s and up to the present, public school enrollments have experienced another period of rapid social change as increasing numbers of families from Asia and Latin America immigrated to the United States and moved into communities across this country.

While over the past several years local school system policies dealing with student eligibility to attend local public schools and the criteria for assignment to individual schools have experienced major reevaluation, what has not changed?

Student Eligibility Requirements and School Assignment Criteria
As the United States Supreme Court opined in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), “Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments….Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.” However, almost two decades later, in San Antonio I.S.D. v. Rodriquez (1973), the Supreme Court narrowed the scope of that right when it added that education “is not among the rights afforded explicit protection under the Federal Constitution. Nor do we find any basis for saying it is implicitly so protected.” The constitutional analysis turned toward the specific language contained in each state’s constitution and education code. (Vacca and Bosher, 2012)

Public Education as a Right. While today’s public school enrollments (elementary and secondary schools) are more diverse than ever before in race, ethnicity, and nationality, the right to attend a public school is not absolute. As a matter of state law, local school boards retain legal authority to decide what children are legally eligible to attend the schools in their school district. As a general rule, and subject to reasonable requirements and regulations such as school age, bona fide residence requirements and valid immunizations, all children have a conditional right to attend public schools in the community where they live.

Policy Implications
Suffice it to say, the student population (elementary and secondary) in our nation’s local public school systems (rural, suburban, and urban) is now and continues to grow in diversity. In many communities, what was once the majority student population is now the minority population, while in other communities what was once the predominant minority population is being replaced by a new and growing minority. At the same time a corollary phenomenon involves public school student enrollments shrinking in some communities and growing in others—leaving some school buildings empty while others are beyond capacity. Thus, the policy implications involving all aspects of today’s local school system maintenance and operation continue to grow in complexity.

Over the years following the Supreme Court’s decisions in Lau (1974), Plyler (1982), and Martinez (1982), local school boards realized that policies once appropriate and applicable to students, especially (but not limited to) student attendance eligibility and school assignment, had to be reexamined and new policies developed and implemented. What follows are some changes in policy implemented over the past four decades that are still in effect.

In the 2014-2015 school year, local school boards must continue to make it clear that:

  • All school age children (as defined in state statutory law), who reside within the boundaries of the school system, are eligible to enroll in and attend a public school located within the boundaries of the school system where they live.
  • Parents, guardians, or other persons having control or charge of a school age child shall be responsible for enrolling their child in a public school or another educational setting meeting the requirements specified in state statutory law.
  • The Board and its administrative staff, in concert with other appropriate community agencies, shall endeavor to provide community outreach programs in an effort to disseminate information covering such matters as student eligibility criteria, school enrollment and assignment procedures, school building locations, curricular and program options, educational services (e.g., ESL classes), and programs for parents and guardians—especially parents and guardians moving into the community from other countries.
  • The Board and its administrative staff, with the assistance and cooperation of appropriate community agencies and local media outlets, shall strive to communicate all information (e.g., student enrollment requirements, curriculum options, student academic expectations and progress) in the native language of parents and guardians.
  • Parental involvement in their child’s education and progress in school shall be encouraged.
  • The school curriculum, including all supplemental services and extra-curricular activities, and student disciplinary policies, shall be the subject of continuous review to keep pace with changes in the community’s multicultural demographics.
  • The Board will continue to provide professional development programs in multicultural awareness for all administrators, teachers, and other staff."
To read the full brief, visit our website.