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
CEPI in the News









Education Editorial: Schools, Beliefs, and Halloween
NBC 12 (WWBT)
October 26, 2014

"Halloween can be a teachable moment . . . first pretending can be fun and educational but be proud of who you are. . .  third, never do anything behind a mask that you wouldn't do with your own face."

8News Investigates: Major Problems with Richmond Schools Truancy Program
ABC 8 (WRIC)
October 23, 2014
Articles of Interest
State & Local Policy

Students test new ways of teaching and learning at Virginia Tech
Roanoke Times
October 25, 2014

After nearly four decades teaching computer science, Virginia Tech professor Dennis Kafura is not one to jump on every passing bandwagon touting change.

“I’m not much for educational fads because I’ve seen them come and go,” Kafura said.

But last year when he was teaching a junior level computer science class in the traditional way — lecture with slides and homework assignments — Kafura noticed the occasional student surfing Facebook. And attendance was sometimes low.


Virginia Joins Higher Education Distance Learning Agreement

Diverse
October 21, 2014

Virginia higher education officials are making it easier for students to take online classes and for universities to offer them.

The State Council of Higher Education for Virginia announced the joining of a multi-state reciprocity agreement on Monday that deals with authorization and payment for distance learning courses.

Colleges and universities that offer distance learning to students in other states were previously required to seek authorization from those states. Officials say that process is both costly and complex.

Education Nation: An NBC4 Special Report

NBC 4 (Washington, DC)
October 15, 2014

Schools in the D.C. metro area are getting creative. They're pushing back start times to give kids more rest. They're passing on homework and focusing on reading. They're creating new programs for students new to the country.

We took a look at some of those experiments in a NBC4 Education Nation special that aired on News4 Saturday at 10 a.m.

Federal Policy

The Science Of The Common Core: Experts Weigh In On Its Developmental Appropriateness
Forbes
October 23, 2014

Last April, comedian Louis CK fired a round of disparaging tweets about his kids’ experience in a New York City public school. His particular gripe was with the Common Core standards that have been voluntarily adopted by 45 states. Among his tweets: “My kids used to love math. Now it makes them cry. Thanks standardized testing and common core!” and “It’s this massive stressball that hangs over the whole school. The kids teachers trying to adapt to these badly written notions.” His commentary got a lot of support from other frustrated parents around the country. Of course, it received some mixed reviews from the media and educators.

Some weren’t having any of it. Alexander Nazaryan wrote a response piece in Newsweek, arguing that while testing kids “to hell and back” isn’t the solution to the U.S.’s lag in education, “introducing a set of national standards is a first step toward widespread accountability, toward the clearly worthy goal of having a teacher in Alaska teach more or less the same thing as a teacher in Alabama. And for those teachers to have to account for what their charges learned. Or didn’t, as it were.” He ends by suggesting that the kids subjected to the new standards will probably be ok, and that objecting to the Common Core is mainly a class issue anyway. “For the most part, the complaints against Common Core and the charter-school movement have come from upper-middle-class parents whose objections are largely ideological, not pedagogical. It’s fun to get angry when you’ve got nothing to lose.”

What's Behind the Falling Latino Dropout Rates?
NBC News
October 26, 2014

Something is afoot in the education of Latinos.

Consider these facts:

_ The Hispanic dropout rate, 14 percent, is the lowest it’s been in three decades and has been cut in half since 2000.

_ About a fourth of the people who took the GED test in 2013 were Latino, the largest share since 2003.

_ The graduation rate for Hispanics, different than the dropout rate, was up to 76 percent to 2012, a 15 percentage point increase from 2006.

Effects of State Higher Education Cuts on Communities of Color
Education Dive
October 20, 2014

The economic downturn and financial crisis that occurred from December 2007 to June 2009, known as the Great Recession, disrupted both domestic and world markets. In the United States, millions of Americans lost their jobs, and families saw their homes foreclosed. And in the years since this recession—and particularly when the nation’s economy began to recover—the gains made have not been evenly distributed among those who suffered economic losses. In fact, economic opportunities eroded faster for communities of color during the recession compared to non-Hispanic whites. Moreover, the opportunities that have returned during the recovery are arriving slower for communities of color.

With unemployment rates skyrocketing during the Great Recession, many unemployed Americans went back to school as nontraditional adult students in order to retool their skills and rebuild their careers. These nontraditional students primarily attended two-year, public postsecondary institutions, such as local community colleges. Simultaneously, among traditional students, community colleges saw a greater increase than four-year institutions for a variety of reasons, including the lower cost of two-year institutions, potential enrollment caps at four-year institutions, and the lowered opportunity costs of postsecondary education compared to unemployment. Since the Great Recession, community colleges have seen a 20 percent increase in enrollment, while four-year public universities have seen an increase of only 10.6 percent.
Who wants more school choice?

One of the long running debates in K-12 education is whether more publicly funded school choice is a policy that would lead to better public schools.  Informed by insights of market economics the theory is that using public funds to provide vouchers or to support charter schools would increase competition for students and lead to greater efficiency in existing public schools.  

The thinking is familiar from a range of other policy areas, including Obamacare, which subsidizes insurance consumers and allows them to pick from among a range of options.  James Courtovich, president of the Children's Scholarship Fund, highlights the new ride-sharing app Uber, as a parallel case to school choice in a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.  Courtovich points out that new technologies that increase choice often threaten established interests - he sites violent protests by French taxi drivers but a more muted debate has also taken place in Richmond, VA where Uber and Lyft began operations in August.

A caveat to the broad application of economic theory to school choice is the observation that different social groups may have a greater ability or tendency to know about and utilize choices.  The graphic below from the Quick and the Ed blog notes the differentials between different groups in parents moving to a neighborhood specifically for the schools.  The non-poor do so at greater rates, as do people living in suburban settings.  Whites are also more likely to move to a neighborhood for schools. 


Because states play a critical role in education, the amount of school choice available varies by state (see map below - the 23 states in blue have enacted school choice programs that provide support and incentives for parents to choose private schools in place of public schools. Options include traditional school vouchers, scholarship tax credits, and personal tax credits and deductions.)  The National Conference of State Legislatures, from which we borrowed the map, has a Comprehensive School Choice Policy Guide for Legislators.

While this says something about where choice policies have been tried, it says little about rates of success.  Like figuring out which foods or behaviours might help you live longer, the research on school choice impacts is mixed.  The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) published a 2009 report that found charter schools tended to underperform public schools.  A 2013 update found that charter middle and elementary schools perform slightly better than traditional schools.  But as the Quick and the Ed blog points out, there were large variations between states:

"Of the 27 states included in this study, charter students experienced greater learning gains than their traditional district peers in 16 states. And variations in charter performance between states are large: Charter students in the District of Columbia gain a whopping 72 more days of learning in reading and 101 days in math relative to their traditional district peers, while charter students in Nevada lose 115 days in reading and 137 days in math comparatively. Charter students in Tennessee, Rhode Island, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey also posted impressive gains relative to their traditional school peers, while charter students in Arizona, Arkansas, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Texas all lost more than two weeks of learning in both subjects relative to their peers."

We're not going to solve the debate, but our poll snapshot this week takes a look at several aspects of school choice, both in our 2014 Poll, which asked where people would send their children for the best education, and in our 2001-2003 polls where we asked more direct questions about school choice.   

Dr. Bosher's weekly editorial notes the challenges faced by schools in deciding how much or how little to get into the Halloween spirit and provides some advice. 

Finally, we share another excerpt from Dr. Vacca's most recent Ed Law newsletter which looks at the limits of a teacher's free speech in classroom settings. 

Sincerely,
CEPI
Poll Snapshot:  School Choice
This past year, we asked our representative sample of Virginians "regardless of whether you have children or not . . . if it were your decision and you could select any type of school, what type of school would you select to obtain the best education for your child?  


























A slight majority (51%) chose "regular public school" while a significant chunk (32%) selected private school.  Charters, home schooling and virtual schools were significantly smaller.   The popularity of public school was slightly higher in Virginia than in a 2012 national Friedman Foundation poll that asked the same question.

Regionally, regular public schools were more popular in Northern Virginia and the West (59% would choose them) than in the Northwest (49%), Tidewater (44%) or Southcentral (38%). 

There was no clear difference based on age or gender.  Minority respondents were more likely than whites to choose regular public schools (57% vs. 48%) and private schools (34% vs. 32%).  Though still small segments, whites were more likely to chose charter schools (9% vs. 5%) and home school (8% vs. 2%) compared to minority respondents.   

These results provide and interesting contrast to responses we recieved in the early 2000's when we asked questions about school choice in terms of policy ideals.  From 2001-2003 we asked "Do you favor or oppose giving parents vouchers to pay for their child's tuition at a private or parochial school of their choice?"




















Here we see that support for vouchers was highly variable from year to year.   The percent of support among blacks was higher than that of whites in the first two years, but lower in 2003.  Generally, younger respondents were more supportive of giving vouchers and the type of community (urban, suburban, rural) didn't make a huge difference in support levels. 

(To read the full results of all the polls, visit our website. In 2014, question 15 is the question reported above - topline results are on page 32; crosstabs are on page 60.)

Ed Law: Teacher Methods and Classrooms Discussions - Policy Issues

Excerpted from Dr. Vacca's October Education Law Newsletter

"School Boards, Teachers, and the Curriculum
It is a basic tenet of public school law that local school boards make curricular decisions. (Vacca and Bosher, 2012) As the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has held “school officials and not classroom teachers should make curricular decisions.” Boring v. Buncombe County (4th Cir. 1998) However, local school boards and administrators do not possess unlimited discretion regarding the school curriculum (e.g., state law may require that certain subjects be taught). Teachers as professionals have considerable discretion in organizing and conducting their classes, incorporating subject matter into the syllabus, selecting class materials, and planning lessons. This is especially important at a time when the impact of technology has opened up a vast highway of information available to teachers and their students, and has taken the notion of “instructional materials” far beyond traditional paper sources such as textbooks, newspapers, and magazines. In fact, today’s teachers are able to develop and use their personally prepared course materials and not depend on traditional publishing houses. Thus, the traditional meanings of such age worn classroom terms as “textbooks,” “blackboards,” “discussions,” and “research” have radically changed.

Classroom Instruction. As a general rule teacher discretion is constrained by: (1) what “good practice” dictates, (2) research based methods and procedures, (3) state law and state board of education mandates, and (4) local school board policy. It also is expected that classroom teachers will take into consideration such matters as age, maturity, and grade level of students, and the relevance of all materials, student research, and class discussions to the subject matter being taught. Moreover, community standards likely will have an impact on a teacher’s freedom (i.e., academic freedom) to conduct his/her courses. However, the problem is one of balance between the legal prerogatives of the school board, the discretion of teachers as professionals, and local community standards —all with the goal of providing what is in best interests of students. (Vacca and Bosher, 2012) "

To read the full newsletter, visit our website.