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
Verma: Honoring dedicated public service
Richmond Times-Dispatch
(November 7, 2015)

"This year, a special posthumous award for Exemplary Lifetime Leadership is being bestowed to recognize the extraordinary career and service of Dr. William C. (Bill) Bosher Jr.
Bill Bosher was one of our own, having served as distinguished professor and director of the Commonwealth Educational Policy Institute (CEPI) in the Wilder School."

State/Local News

Virginia college enrollment projections show slower growth
Richmond Times Dispatch
November 8, 2015 

Virginia’s public colleges and universities don’t expect much enrollment growth in the next six years — and four schools anticipate their numbers will decline.


But private institutions could take up some of the slack in helping the state meet its goal for increasing the number of Virginians with college credentials.
Public four- and two-year schools expect to see a 5 percent head count increase by the 2021-22 academic year, according to projections submitted to the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.

The private, nonprofit sector could deliver a 32 percent rise in enrollment — largely from the growth of online programs of Regent and Liberty universities.

Both public and private schools are required to submit enrollment and degree estimates to the state for planning purposes. However, only the public institutions are held financially accountable if their projections are not within 5 percentage points, and therefore they generally submit conservative estimates.

Education summit outlines challenges for communities, state
The News Virginian
November 10, 2015

The changing face of K-12 public education presents its own challenges, Virginia’s superintendent of public instruction told state legislators on Monday.


The comments from Superintendent Steve Staples were made to members of the Virginia General Assembly’s House Education Committee, which gathered at the University of Virginia for a two-day education summit.

Staples said while Virginia’s K-12 student population has grown 4 percent since 2008, there are 5,000 fewer positions in K-12 education. He cautioned there could be some long-term impacts from those cuts, as well as reductions in state education funding. Professional development budgets for teachers are being cut, he said, and buses are not being replaced when they should be. Building maintenance is also being neglected, Staples said.

Another challenge the state faces is the fact that English language learners comprise almost 10 percent of Virginia’s student population.

Virginia cities and counties to pressure state for more education dollars
The Washington Post
November 5, 2015

Frustrated by the local budget battles over school funding, Virginia’s counties and cities are gearing up to pressure the state into shifting more resources toward public education.

A letter sent this week to more than 50 local jurisdictions that was co-signed by Sharon Bulova, chairman of Fairfax County’s board of supervisors, says that since 2009, state funding for K-12 education has gone down by about $1 billion.

That translates into a drop in annual amounts spent by the state on a typical student — from $4,275 in 2009 to $3,655 in 2015 — the letter says.

Federal News
A Right, Not a Luxury
U.S. News
November 6, 2015

Fifty years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson stood in the gymnasium of Texas State University, his alma mater, and signed a landmark piece of legislation that he said would "swing open a new door for the young people of America."

But even today the door to higher education still remains closed for millions of students, despite all the Higher Education Act did to level the playing field.

"[This law] means that a high school senior anywhere in this great land of ours can apply to any college or any university in any of the 50 states and not be turned away because his family is poor," he said.

Johnson, who had lived in a tiny room in the university president's garage while in college, shaved and showered at the gym down the street, and worked more than a dozen jobs to pay for tuition, knew that narrative well.

Back to the Future: What Previous HEA Reauthorizations Might Say About the Next One
Journal of Student Financial Aid
November 2, 2015

For 50 years, the Higher Education Act has been the primary vehicle for advancing federal higher education policy. Many policymakers and interested observers expect its upcoming reauthorization to address three overarching topic areas: college affordability, institutional quality, and student safety. Indeed, previous reauthorizations have addressed specific issues within each of these areas—expanded financial aid availability and process simplification, third-party (accreditors and states) oversight of institutions, and assurances that students have safe learning environments. Yet we cannot say that these are settled issues. This article describes previously implemented policies in the hope that a better understanding of the past might help policymakers craft policies that further advance the primary goal of the HEA: widespread access to quality postsecondary education opportunities.

UK Program Would Match Best Teachers, Struggling Schools
Education News
November 10, 2015

UK Education Secretary Nicky Morgan is planning to send the country’s top teachers to struggling schools in exchange for the promise of rapid promotion.

1,500 high-achieving teachers will be recruited over the course of 5 years to work in underachieving schools for at least two years each in a program called the National Teaching Service, according to Sally Weale of The Guardian. They will be rewarded with promotions in an attempt to make participation in the program a “rite of passage” for future head teachers.

Morgan said:
Too many young people aren’t being given a fair shot to succeed because of where they live. Coastal towns and rural areas struggle because they struggle to recruit and retain good teachers, they lack that vital ingredient that makes for a successful education. The National Teaching Service will play a key part in solving this problem.

Most of these teachers would be sent to known struggling areas such as coastal towns and northern cities.

NCTQ Report Looks at Teacher, Principal Evaluations Nationwide
Education News
November 9, 2015

A new report by the National Council on Teacher Quality has offered a closer look at teacher evaluation policies in place in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The report, “State of the States 2015: Evaluating Teaching, Leading and Learning,” not only looks into policies on teacher evaluations, but also examines the effectiveness of principals and efforts made by states to use these results to make decisions pertaining to consequences for teachers.
School Resource Officers and Approaches to School Safety

We assume that most of our readers have seen stories about, or the viral video of, a South Carolina police officer who was assigned to a school as a school resource officer, dragging a high school student across a classroom.  The incident has sparked a closer look by officials, media and the public at the role of what are often called "school resource officers (SRO)."

The Washington Post recently ran an article that featured photos from the day of one SRO in Baltimore who is assigned to an Elementary/Middle School.  The article noted there are currently an estimated 43,000 sworn officers working within the nations 84,000 schools. 

Vox also put out an article recently that summarized some of the data on which schools tend to have at least one SRO (higher poverty, higher minority) and noted that the largest impact seems to be a sharp increase in students being criminally charged for disorderly conduct rather than, or in addition to, being disciplined under school policy.  

Attention to this issue is not new, nor solely the result of the incident in South Carolina.  Back in April, Harvard Law Review published an article on recent developments in laws related to Fourth Amendment (right to privacy/search and seizure) issues.  Likewise, a 2013 article in the New York Times highlighted the increase in the number of minors entering the court system because of charges from school-related incidents.  A similar 2013 article by The Youth Project asked whether SROs were related to the "school-to-prison pipeline" phenomenon that has also drawn increased attention in recent years.

We wanted to see what variation exists in the number of school resource officers across Virginia.  The most recent data we were able to locate was from a 2007 report by the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services (VDCJS) on the "Status of Virginia's School Resource Officers."  (If anyone can point us toward more current numbers, please e-mail us.)  

Below is a map of the number of SROs placed within each school system.  In general, the distribution is not that interesting - as one might expect, larger school systems utilize larger numbers of SROs.  Fairfax tops the list at 53. 

Number of School Resource Officers (2006)
This second map visualizes the number of SROs per 1000 students in the school system. Here the pattern looks a bit different, with some school systems that aren't particularly large having a higher ratio of SROs to students than others.  For example, Dickenson County tops the list with 2.84 SROs per 1000 students. Instead, the pattern that emerges is of greater use of SROs, relative to the total population, in more rural areas of the state.

SROs per 1000 students
Finally, we visualize the share of SRO officers state-wide, while also shading the area based on the ratio of SROs per 1000 students. 

A couple notes on method.  First, the number of SROs were reported by VDCJS based on information by law enforcement departments rather than by school systems - in appropriate cases we've aggregated numbers from different departments that send SROs to the same school system.  Second, our calculation of SROs per 1000 students uses the fall enrollment figures for the 2006-2007 school year available from the Virginia Department of Education

Of course SROs are only one potential strategy for promoting campus safety in public K-12 schools.  The annual  School Climate and Safety reports published by the VDCJS are a rich resource for understanding campus safety across a number of dimensions including student's sense of safety, the prevalence of bullying, theft and the tenor (permissive, authoritative) of the school when it comes to discipline.

In light of this debate, our poll snapshot this week looks back at public preferences in 2014 between two general policy responses to the potential of violence in schools - more security measures or improved mental health systems.  We'll be including the question again in our 2016 Commonwealth Education poll, so stay tuned for the release of the 2016 poll in early January.

We also revisit Dr. Vacca's April 2014 review of education law elements important to search and seizure decisions by school personnel. 

Sincerely,
CEPI
Poll Snapshot:  Approaches to School Safety
In 2014, we asked a representative sample of Virginians which approach to school safety they most agree with, even if neither is exactly right - "additional security measures" or "through the mental health system."  The chart below shows the responses for the state as a whole, as well as broken down by regions.

Clearly a majority prefer the "additional security measures" approach while only about a quarter of the responses preferred a mental health approach.  Significantly, 10% of respondents volunteered that both were important.  But in general, one can see why the use of School Resource Officers may have grown.  An officer in uniform is certainly a visible "additional security measure."

There were significant differences among regions with the preference for the security measures approach reaching a high of 64% in Northwest and West regions of Virginia.  Only in Northern Virginia did security measures not receive a majority response.  This seems to align with the mapping of SROs per 1000 students noted above.
























Perhaps unsurprisingly, Republicans had a stronger preference for security measures (61%) than Independents (54%) or Democrats (47%).  Independents were slightly more likely (15%) to volunteer that both were best than were the two party-affiliated groups (9-10%). 

Support for security measures was also higher among lower income respondents and respondents with less years of formal education.  Among respondents from households making less than $50,000, 63% supported additional security measures while only 41% of respondents from households making more than $100,000 annually said the same.  Sixty-nine percent of respondents with high school or less education favored security measures while only 41% of respondents with a college degree or more said the same. 

(To read the full results of the poll, visit our website. Question 17 is the question cited above on school safety approaches - topline results are on page 33; crosstabs are on pages 62.)

Search and Seizure in Educational Settings
Excerpted from Dr. Vacca's April 2014 Ed Law Newsletter on legal and policy issues related to search and seizure

"Beginning in the mid-1970s and moving through the mid-1980s public school administrators across this country were being called upon “to search students and their property, principally for harboring or dealing in drugs.” (Vacca and Bosher, 2012) Because a growing number of these searches raised a question regarding the applicability of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution they found their way into court where, as a general rule, final decisions were inconsistent. A uniform judicial standard was needed to specifically address public school administrator- not police- initiated searches. This was accomplished when the United States Supreme Court handed down New Jersey v. T.L.O. (1985)—its first public school student-related search decision.

The T.L.O Standard. Emphasizing that students do not forfeit their Fourth Amendment protections or waive their privacy interests and expectations simply because they enter school property, Justice White also made it clear that student privacy interests and expectations must be balanced against the fact that school officials (as government agents) possess a “legitimate need to maintain an environment in which learning can take place.” In his view, while “[m]aintaining order in the classroom has never been easy…. in recent years, school disorder has often taken particularly ugly forms: drug use and violent crime in schools have become major problems….” Because school officials are different from the police they need “a certain degree of flexibility in school disciplinary procedures….” To enable this the standard created by the Court to apply in school administrator-initiated searches poses the following questions: (1) At its inception do school administrators have reasonable suspicion (different from and lesser than the police standard of probable cause) to suspect that a violation of school policy, or school rules, or the law is present? (2) Is the search, as conducted (i.e., its scope), reasonably related to the purpose for the search?"

To read the full brief, visit our website.