Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Darling-Hammond zeroes in on how new federal programs - the proposed Elementary and Secondary Education Act and Race to the Top guidelines - deal with schools in the bottom 5%. federal policy now formally redlines these schools, she concludes, just as banks have used a red line on a map to exclude some poor and minority communities from any kind of investment, mortgage or commercial loan.

A new letter from the Office for Civil Rights at the federal education department details how school districts should act on some changes to federal law regarding people with disabilities. The way I'm reading it, the letter expands the range of students to whom school districts' may have to provide special education services and accommodations, including some who in the past may have been found not to need those services.

Regarding teachers' unions with a certain distaste, maintaining the belief that they exist to champion inadequacy, is now virtually required for membership in the affluent, competitive classes, no matter an affiliation on the right or left. Over the past two weeks, as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg have aggressively pushed for phasing in a new, more rigorous teacher evaluation process - with tens of millions of dollars in state and federal aid to schools at stake - they have deployed a rhetoric of enmity, one meant to suggest that the state's teachers' unions are committed to keeping talentless hacks in jobs they can't handle. As the governor put it on Monday, "Our schools are not an employment program." What has been lost in these performances of reproach and imperiousness is the extent to which the city and state, and the related unions (the United Federation of Teachers in the first instance and New York State United Teachers in the second) are generally in agreement over how classroom evaluations ought to be held and what, in fact, constitutes sound teaching. As it happens, the state union was at work devising substantive evaluation reform more than a year before Mr. Cuomo even took office.

Eight of the 10 school districts who are receiving School Improvement Grants could lose the money if they don't meet Saturday's deadline to provide evidence they have made the necessary changes to their evaluation systems for teachers and principals, state Education Commissioner John King said in a statement today. Millions of dollars in federal funding are in jeopardy, he said.

After spending more than $80 million on a controversial online student achievement database, the NYC Department of Education's portal is about to become obsolete as the state rolls out its own nearly-identical system as part of a federal education grant, DNAinfo.com New York has learned. The city is quietly making the transition from its $81 million data system - known as ARIS, or "Achievement Reporting and Innovation System" - to a new statewide database being developed with federal education funding, according to officials and city and state documents.

EdMoney.org is a project of the Education Writers Association, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The site tracks education funds flowing to states and school districts from the federal economic-stimulus law of 2009, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA. The site, developed by Matt Waite of HotType Consulting, provides data on grants made to states and school districts. It also features a blog aimed at helping reporters cover the topic. In addition, the blog houses stories from "Education Stimulus: Gauging the Impact of a federal Windfall," a national reporting project tied to the second anniversary of the law and overseen by the Hechinger Report and EWA. Journalists and others are encouraged to contribute to EdMoney.org by uploading links to pertinent stories and blog items; commenting on the blog; and using the data to produce stories of their own.

With just weeks to go before Labor Day, the city has announced the nonprofit groups that will help 14 struggling schools get a fresh start this fall. A deal between the city and teachers union last month cleared the way for 33 low-performing schools to receive federal School Improvement Grants starting this fall. In exchange, the city must overhaul the schools in accordance with one of four federally sanctioned processes, and one of them, "restart," requires schools to turn over the reins to an approved nonprofit organization.

Federal and state laws hold schools accountable for the achievement of all students, including those who have disabilities such as Mattox. In South Carolina, that means all third- through eighth-grade students must take the state Palmetto Assessment of State Standards. Few exceptions are permitted, and Sarah Johnson, Mattox's mother, believed it would hurt her son to take an exam for which he was unprepared. School officials said that would violate state and Federal laws, but Johnson refused to do what she said amounted to putting the law before her son.

The U.S. Department of Education won't cut South Carolina's share of federal special education dollars by $36 million-at least not yet-prompting questions about whether such penalties for states that cut education spending without federal approval are meaningful.

Everyone knows that today every American's job is on the line, and that better schools mean better jobs. Schools and jobs are alike in this sense: Washington can't create good jobs, and Washington can't create good schools. What Washington can do, though, is shape an environment in which businesses and entrepreneurs can create jobs. It can do the same thing in education, by creating an environment in which teachers, parents and communities can build better schools. Last week President Obama, citing a failure by Congress to act, announced a procedure for handing out waivers for the federal mandates under the No Child Left Behind law. Unfortunately, these waivers come with a series of new federal rules, this time without congressional approval, and would make the secretary of education the equivalent of a national school board.

The charter bill is modeled almost entirely on the House's just-passed charter bill, except that it will also allow charter management organizations to compete directly for federal funds. Right now, only states or districts can compete for those funds; under this provision, a CMO like KIPP could compete for direct federal grants.

For months-no, years-the ESEA discussion has been nothing short of maddening. While many pundits decry the lack of a "clear route to reauthorization," an obvious bipartisan solution has been sitting there, ready for the picking. It goes something like this: Step away from federal heavy-handedness around states' accountability and teacher credentialing systems; keep plenty of transparency of results in place, especially test scores disaggregated by racial and other subgroups; offer incentives for embracing promising reforms instead of mandates; and give school districts a lot more flexibility to move their federal dollars around as they see fit.

For a generation, there has been loose bipartisan agreement in Washington that the federal government has a necessary role to play in the nation's 13,600 school districts, primarily by using money to compel states to raise standards. But the field of Republican presidential candidates has promised to unwind this legacy, arguing that education responsibilities should devolve to states and local districts, which will do a better job than Washington.

For five years running, the District of Columbia has failed to uphold parts of the federal law that governs the education of students with disabilities, according to the federal Department of Education's ratings of the district and other states and territories.

Charter schools across Oregon learned three weeks before school started that they would not receive up to $225,000 each in grants from the state. From Portland to Bandon, school directors scrambled to fill the void, cutting supplies, counselors, computers, library materials and turning to parents for more donations. In a few cases, the loss of start-up funds may postpone schools opening until next year. Charter school leaders want to know why they lost the expected funds and why they weren't told sooner. The state says the federal government is at fault; the federal government put the onus back on the state. Either way, it could have a long-lasting impact on the schools.

While on Wall Street many protesters decry economic inequality, and in Washington, D.C. debates continue over federal education policy, teachers across the country are occupying their classrooms. In the eyes of the president of the second-largest teachers' union, the two issues of inequality and education are closely related. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has been a frequent visitor to New York's OWS protests. The AFT recently revised its "working document" -- a sort of mission statement -- to include language referring to the richest 1 percent.

As education lawyers who work with states and school districts on federal education programs, part of our job is to advise clients on those programs' fiscal and administrative compliance rules. For the most part these compliance rules are largely unknown and rarely discussed among the education policy crowd and other important stakeholders, like parents and teachers. federal compliance requirements like supplement not supplant or time distribution (also known as time and effort) are not exactly hot topics of conversation. They should be.

"Republicans are hatching an ambitious plan to rewrite No Child Left Behind this year - one that could end up dramatically rolling back the federal role in education and trigger national blowouts over standardized tests and teacher training. NCLB cleared Congress in 2002 with massive bipartisan support but has since become a political catastrophe: The law's strategy for prodding and shaming schools into improvement proved deeply flawed over time, and its unintended failures have eclipsed its bright spots. Today, NCLB is despised by some parents who blame it for schools "teaching to the test," protested by some on the left for promoting education reform and reviled by Republicans in Congress who say the law represents aggressive federal overreach."

Over the past three years, more than $75 million in federal education funding has been diverted to just a handful of private, pro-voucher advocacy groups. This torrent of public funding appears to benefit and strengthen the advocacy infrastructure created by a network of right-wing foundations dedicated to the privatization of public education.  

"In 1954 the Supreme Court declared that public education is "a right which must be made available to all on equal terms."That landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education stood for the proposition that the federal government would no longer allow states and municipalities to deny equal educational opportunity to a historically oppressed racial minority. Ruling unanimously, the justices overturned the noxious concept that "separate" education could ever be "equal." Yet today, nearly 60 years later, our schools remain separate and unequal. Almost 40 percent of black and Hispanic students attend schools where more than 90 percent of students are nonwhite. The average white student attends a school where 77 percent of his or her peers are also white. Schools today are "as segregated as they were in the 1960s before busing began." We are living in a world in which schools are patently separate."