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
Recent State and Local Education News
Virginia's high school system is changing. How it'll look is open to discussion.

The Virginian-Pilot
July 30, 2016

Virginia’s high school system will look different in a few years. Exactly how different is being decided now – and there is no shortage of opinions.

Legislation passed this year directs the state Board of Education to create a “Profile of a Virginia Graduate.” The aim is to better prepare students for their next step, be it college or a job.

Educators and those in the business community have said the law is valuable because the current emphasis on test-taking isn’t the best way to teach needed skills.

But turning the broad directive into a specific plan is an extensive process. If the profile were a Venn diagram, it would include four circles with themes that are generally agreed upon: career exploration, workplace skills, content knowledge and civic responsibility.

“How do we implement it is the big challenge,” said state board member Oktay Baysal, who teaches engineering at Old Dominion University.

Steven Staples, state superintendent of public instruction, said officials conducted over 20 focus groups with leaders at colleges, in the military and in the business world. In late July, Staples and a few board members attended a public hearing in Williamsburg, the second in the state that addressed topics including the profile.


BLAST introduces Virginia students to hands-on STEM education
Charlottesville Tomorrow
July 29, 2016

A group of high school students stands poised around an elaborately constructed slide, preparing to test a small gliding vehicle they have made completely out of garbage.

They release the vehicle, which carries an open container of water, and cheer as it successfully reaches the bottom of the slide without spilling a drop.

This activity, Trash Sliders, was one of the four engineering projects students took part in during the Building Leaders for Advancing Science and Technology summer program at the University of Virginia. Now in its fourth year, the BLAST program consists of three days of STEM activities and is held for two sessions at UVa, one session at Virginia Tech and one session at Old Dominion University.

“[The program] is a partnership between these universities and the commonwealth of Virginia, targeting students who might not have exposure to a STEM experience,” said program manager Tysha Sanford.

Recent National Education News
U.S. Department of Education Takes Enforcement Action Against Medtech Colleges in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.
U.S. Dept. of Education
July 26, 2016

As part of the Obama Administration's ongoing commitment to protect students, safeguard taxpayer dollars and increase accountability and transparency in higher education, the U.S. Department of Education is cutting off federal student financial aid to three Medtech College (Medtech) campuses in Falls Church, Virginia; Silver Spring, Maryland; and Washington, D.C.

Investigations conducted by Federal Student Aid's Program Compliance and Enforcement Units, uncovered egregious misrepresentation of job placement rates. The Department's investigation revealed that Medtech significantly overstated job placement rates to its institutional accreditor, the Council on Occupational Education, the Department, prospective students, and the public through its Gainful Employment disclosures. Additionally, Medtech contracted with a third-party for job placement rate verifications that did not contain adequate consumer protections and did not report the existence of the contract to the Department, in direct violation of federal regulations.

"Students should be able to trust that colleges are telling the truth—not using smoke and mirrors—about their graduates' job placement rates. Unfortunately, Medtech violated the trust of both students and taxpayers by valuing profits over the students they serve," said U.S. Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell. "When schools mislead students, accreditors or the federal government, we will take action."

As a result of these troubling findings, the Department is denying Medtech's application to be recertified to participate in the Title IV federal financial aid program, effective July 31, 2016.


Which school systems have the most students enrolled in special education services?
This past week Virginia won a top rating from the U.S. Department of Education on its IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) report card, based on performance during the 2013-14 school year.  Virginia was one of 23 states to be so recognized.  This marks the 4th straight year Virginia has earned the top ranking.  The news was reported widely - for example in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, on Community Idea Stations and in the Fre dericksburg Free Lance-Star .  

The Free Lance-Star article reported that:

VDOE said in a statement that the state earned the maximum possible points on 10 compliance indicators and on five of the 14 performance-related indicators to achieve a score of 87.5.

“This rating reflects the passion Virginia special educators have for helping students with disabilities achieve their full potential as students and as members of their communities,” said Steven R. Staples, Virginia’s superintendent of public instruction.

Such a record is both worth celebrating and also what state and local education systems should be doing. But the story also made us wonder which school systems had the most students with identified disabilities and which also had the highest and lowest proportion of students with identified disabilities.  To get a sense of this, we pull Fall Membership data for 2015-16 from the Virgina Department of Education website.

Below are two visualizations developed with Tableaux Public - one that shows how large school systems such as Fairfax County represent a large portion of the state's population of students with disabilities, a second that maps the percentage of a school systems population who have disabilities by school system.  Counties not shaded were null values in the data from VDOE, because the number of students with disabilities were less than 10 students.

Distribution of students with disabilities among school systems.  ( Click here for interactive graphic)

Represented here is a visual breakdown by school division of the total student with disabilities population in the commonwealth of Virginia, based on 2015-16 fall membership counts available from the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE). The squares are labeled by Division Name, the number of students with disabilities in the division and the percentage of total student population in that division that have disabilities. Color shading is based on that percentage of total population with disabilities figure - those in blue are above the state average of 12.4% and those in orange are below the state average. The darker the shading, the further from the average the division is.

One takeaway from this is that many of the larger school systems are below the state average of 12.4% in terms of the percentage of students with disabilities in their total population.  Among the 13 school systems that represent about half of the state's students with disabilities population, only two (Richmond City and Chesapeake City) are a darker blue, indicating a significantly higher proportion of students with disabilities than the state average.  (Richmond City is 5.3 percentage points higher and Chesapeake City is 3.7 percentage points higher).

Proportion of students with disabilities mapped by school system. ( Click here for interactive map)   
  








Represented here is a mapped visualization of the percentage of total student population in that division that have disabilities, based on 2015-16 fall membership counts available from the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE). Color shading is based on that percentage of total population with disabilities figure - those in blue are above the state average of 12.4% and those in orange are below the state average. The darker the shading, the further from the average the division is.

One takeaway from this is that a number of far western localities have a greater percentage of their students identified with disabilities than is true of the state average.  Also, city school systems often seem to have a higher rate than those in surrounding counties.  (See, for example, Charlottesville City, Richmond City and Staunton.)  Yet the highest percentage of students with an identified disability is Craig County, where 1 in 5 students were so identified. 

In keeping with this theme of educational opportunities for students with disabilities, we also excerpt a portion of Mark Weber's April Education Law newsletter below, which reviews developments regarding FAPE (Free, Appropriate Public Education).   

We hope you have a great week!

 

Sincerely,
CEPI
Education Law Newsletter - New Developments in Free, Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) for Students with Disabilities

Excerpted from the April 2016 edition of CEPI's Education Law Newsletter, written by noted legal scholar Mark Weber, Vincent DePaul Professor of Law at DePaul University.  Read the full newsletter on our website.

Free, Appropriate Public Education
The basic obligation that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) imposes on states and local school districts is to provide “free, appropriate public education” (FAPE) to all children with disabilities in their jurisdiction. Since passage of the original version of the law in 1975, millions of children with disabling conditions have been brought into school and given educational opportunities. But issues still exist over the scope of schools’ obligations under IDEA to provide FAPE.

The Rowley Case
What does “appropriate education” mean? The drafters of the statute that is now IDEA apparently drew the term from a consent decree in one of the early class action cases that had relied on the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause to challenge exclusion of children with intellectual disabilities from public education, PARC v. Pennsylvania. That decree required the state to provide “access to a free public program of education and training appropriate to [the] capacities” of each child in the plaintiff class. The federal act used the same term.

But neither the statutory language nor the regulations gave much guidance about what education was appropriate, apart from being special education and related services conforming to the standards of the state educational agency and furnished in accordance with an individualized education plan (IEP). In an effort to develop a standard, some courts looked to a regulation promulgated under an earlier law, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which forbids disability discrimination by federal grantees. This regulation said that grantees operating public elementary and secondary schools systems had to meet the needs of children with disabilities as adequately as the needs of other children were met. Hence, schools had to offer services that would give children with disabilities the opportunity to achieve their full potential, commensurate with the opportunity afforded children without disabilities.

In Board of Education v. Rowley, the Supreme Court rejected that interpretation as applied to the law that is now IDEA. It overturned a lower court decision that had required a school district to provide a sign language interpreter to a first-grader with a severe hearing impairment. Although the child could understand less than sixty percent of what was being said in class, she was performing better than the average child in her class and was advancing from grade to grade. The Supreme Court said that cases like PARC that had influenced Congress in writing the law had imposed no requirement greater than access to education, and that a commensurate opportunity standard was unworkable. It noted that the special education law was designed to ensure equal protection of the law for children with disabilities and pointed out that in cases concerning equal protection in education, the Court had not required equal opportunity, but only equal access. The Court also stressed the law’s emphasis on procedure and the importance of allowing deference to states’ and localities’ views of educational methods.

The Supreme Court said that in exchange for the provision of federal money, Congress did expect that states and school districts would provide services that would confer some benefit on students with disabilities. At one point it described the standard as a floor of opportunity; at another it said that it was not greater than what would make access meaningful.
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Read the rest of the newletter on our website