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Keystone State Education Coalition
PA Ed Policy Roundup for
January 18, 2015:
Smucker will use new post in
Senate to push for funding reform
*** We are not planning to publish on
Monday January 19th ***
PA
Statewide Call-to-Action Day for Public Education Jan 21
Save the date/heads-up; details/confirmation
on this as they become available...
The next
Basic Education Funding Commission hearing will be held on January
29 in Greenville , Mercer County
Tweet from Circuit Rider Pam
Lenz January 16, 2015
Did you catch our Saturday posting?
For the first time in at least 50 years, majority of U.S.
"What is the biggest problem facing
public education?
“On the top of the list is an updated basic
education formula that would be used to dole out funding. “The Basic Education Funding Commission, on which I serve,
has been holding hearings throughout the state for almost a year now and we’ve
been getting a lot of input from the stakeholders. It’s a tough one because
there are going to be winners and losers, but I’m hopeful we’ll have a proposal
later this year.”
Smucker will use new post in
Senate to push for funding reform
Lloyd Smucker is ready for change. The West Lampeter
Township
School superintendents talk
about financial challenges
Superintendents from six school districts participated in a Franklin County
The forum was sponsored by Education Voters of Pennsylvania and
Education Matters in the Cumberland
Valley
Former Charleston Supt.
McGinley contender for top educator in Pennsylvania
Former Charleston Schools Superintendent Nancy
McGinley is up for consideration as the top educator in her home state of Pennsylvania . McGinley confirmed Friday that she met with
Pennsylvania Governor-elect Tom Wolf’s transition committee on Monday to
discuss her candidacy for Secretary of Education. A spokesman for Wolf did not
respond to an email seeking comment. McGinley said she wasn’t sure how many
candidates there may be for the appointment.
Some have said new administration could try to change
receiver role, review plan
York Daily Record By
Angie Mason amason@ydr.com @angiemason1 on Twitter UPDATED:
01/18/2015 12:09:31 AM EST
With the appointment of a York City School District
Three legislators
said city residents will see tax cut if charters are put in place.
York Daily Record By
Angie Mason amason@ydr.com @angiemason1 on Twitter UPDATED:
01/17/2015 02:47:20 PM EST
Would a conversion of all York City School District Charter
Schools USA
We're fact-checking that statement.
Dallastown teachers, school
board reach new five-year agreement
The Dallastown Area School Board and the Dallastown Area
Education Association have approved a new five-year agreement. The new contract was approved by the
Dallastown Area School Board and ratified by the Dallastown Area Education
Association Thursday and includes pay increases to be offset by concessions to
health care. The 428 teachers, guidance
counselors and other professional staff in the district will see a 1.25 percent
pay increase during the 2015-16 school year. During the following four years of
the contract, salaries will increase by 1.5 percent each year. Increases to employee contributions to health
insurance premiums and increases in deductibles are also part of the deal. The
low deductible PPO plan will rise from $100 for individuals and $200 for
families to $200 and $400 respectively, with premium contributions going from
13 percent during the first year of the contract to 15 percent in the fifth.
Four-year
high school graduation rate rises to 81% for 2012-13 school year, most states
show increases
A new Web Table reports the national high school graduation rate for 2012-13 at 81%, up from 80% in 2011-12. The adjusted cohort graduation rate measures the percent of high school students in public schools who graduate with a regular high school diploma in four or fewer years from their first time in Ninth Grade. The table includes the overall rate for the nation, each state and the
WSJ: Test Finds College
Graduates Lack Skills for White-Collar Jobs
Forty Percent of
Students Seen Ill-Prepared to Enter Work Force; Critical Thinking Key
Wall Street Journal By DOUGLAS
BELKIN Updated Jan. 16, 2015 3:24 p.m. ET
Four in 10 U.S.
college students graduate without the complex reasoning skills to manage
white-collar work, according to the results of a test of nearly 32,000
students. The test, which was
administered at 169 colleges and universities in 2013 and 2014 and released
Thursday, reveals broad variation in the intellectual development of the
nation’s students depending on the type and even location of the school they
attend. On average, students make
strides in their ability to reason, but because so many start at such a
deficit, many still graduate without the ability to read a scatterplot,
construct a cohesive argument or identify a logical fallacy.
Data and thoughts on public
and private school funding in the U.S.
Cutting through the
Stupid in the Debate over Annual Testing
School Finance 101 Blog by Bruce Baker Posted on January 14, 2015
I’ve hesitated thus far to enter into the big debate over the
usefulness or not of annual testing. It continues to blow my mind that many
engaged on the pro-annual testing side of the debate see the annual testing of
all children in all grades as the one and only method of achieving all of the
things testing, in their view, is intended to achieve, including:
·
school and local education agency accountability
(e.g. imposing “death
penalties” on those“failure
factories”!)
·
individual student accountability (e.g. making
sure that kid who
missed on additional question on the state test doesn’t graduate)
·
teacher accountability (e.g. firing those teachers who
don’t show year over year gains on test scores, as estimated with
value-added models)
·
school level “data driven” leadership (e.g.
leveraging “cage busting” leadership to achieve the pinnacle of awesomeness)
The presumption is that a single method of testing – testing
everyone every year in every subject – is the appropriate – the only method to
accomplish all of these tasks, simultaneously.
Diane Ravitch's Blog By dianeravitch January
17, 2015 //
The minority leader of the state Senate Education Committee is
proposing legislation to stop using a standardized test as a graduation test.
Standardized tests are designed to produce a bell curve. A set proportion of
students will fail, by design.
“WEST CHESTER (January 16) – State Senator Andy Dinniman said
the lack of resources in Pennsylvania’s financially distressed public schools
is so stark that the use of the Keystone Exams as graduate requirements must be
stopped before they exacerbate an already dire situation. “It’s clear to me
that there are two systems of public education in Pennsylvania : separate and unequal,” said
Dinniman, who serves as minority chair of the Senate Education Committee.
“Until we resolve that discrepancy, how can we, in good conscience, stamp
‘failure’ on the backs of kids who lack the teachers, resources and classes to
pass such standardized tests? To continue down this path without addressing
such basic issues is beyond the pale. It’s downright shameful.” Dinniman announced
that he will introduce legislation to end passage of the Keystone Exams as high
school graduation requirements because they will only widen the growing gap
between financially distressed and more affluent high schools.”
"Can nudges help younger children?
Susanna Loeb and Benjamin N. York, both also at Stanford, developed a literacy
program for preschool children in San Francisco University of Toronto
Helping the Poor in
Education: The Power of a Simple Nudge
There are enormous inequalities in education in the United States .
A child born into a poor family has only a 9
percent chance of getting a college degree, but the odds are 54 percent for
a child in a high-income family. These gaps open early, with poor children less
prepared than their kindergarten classmates.
How can we close these gaps? Contentious, ambitious reforms of the
education system crowd the headlines: the Common Core, the elimination of
teacher tenure, charter schools. The debate is
heated and sometimes impolite (a recent book about education is called “The Teacher Wars”). Yet as these debates rage, researchers have
been quietly finding small, effective ways to improve education. They have
identified behavioral “nudges”
that prod students and their families to take small steps that can make big
differences in learning. These measures are cheap, so schools or nonprofits
could use them immediately.
A New Majority Research
Bulletin: Low Income Students Now a Majority in the Nation's Public Schools
Southern Education Foundation 2015
Low income students are now a majority of the schoolchildren
attending the nation’s public schools, according to this research bulletin. The
latest data collected from the states by the National Center Mississippi
led the nation with the highest rate: 71 percent, almost three out of every
four public school children in Mississippi ,
were low-income. The nation’s second highest rate was found in New Mexico , where 68
percent of all public school students were low income in 2013.
The key factor driving
academic performance is poverty…
Wait What? Blog by Jonathan Pelto Jan 17, 2015
And a new study from the Southern
Education Foundation reports that low income students are now a
majority of the schoolchildren attending the nation’s public schools.
Using data from the 2012-2013 school year, the study determined
that 51 percent of all students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade
were eligible under the federal program for free and reduced-price lunch, a
standard measure of the number of children living in poverty. The Southern Education Foundation also
reported that, “In 40 of the 50 states, low income students comprised no less
than 40 percent of all public schoolchildren. In 21 states, children eligible
for free or reduced-price lunches were a majority of the students in 2013.” According to the report, even in Connecticut , the state
with the highest per capita income in the nation, more than one in three public
school students come from homes in poverty. That number of public school
students coming from poor households skyrockets in many of Connecticut ’s poorer cities and towns where
more than 8 in 10 students qualifying for free or reduced school lunches.
"In 1989, fewer than 32 percent of
students were low-income using the report's definition. By 2000, the rate
climbed to 38 percent. But the organization, which has tracked the pattern for
years, is sounding the alarm now that poor students are in the majority."
New Milestone: Majority of
Public School Students Now Considered Low-Income
For the first time in recent history, a
majority of students in U.S. public schools are low-income, according to an
analysis of federal data by the Southern Education Foundation released Friday. In 2013, 51 percent of public school students
qualified for free and reduced-price meals, a common indicator of poverty in
education, according to the most recent data from The National Center
for Education Statistics. It's a
continuation of a trend that's been building for years and a "defining
moment" for the U.S.
education system, which must find ways to confront the barriers poverty creates
for academic achievement in order to thrive, the analysis says.
"No longer can we consider the problems and needs of low
income students simply a matter of fairness," the report said, quoting
from a previous analysis. "Their success or failure in the public schools
will determine the entire body of human capital and educational potential
that the nation will possess in the future."
Building a Better School
A new report focuses
on how schools are using federal incentives to add more learning time.
The Atlantic by EMILY RICHMOND JAN 17
2015, 9:00 AM ET
In a union vote Wednesday, Boston teachers approved the school district’s plan to
add 40 minutes to each instructional day for kids in grades kindergarten
through eight at more than 50 campuses. It's a move experts say could help
improve the quality of classroom teaching, boost student learning, and yield
long-term benefits to the wider community.
But the plan, which goes next to the Boston school board for approval, isn’t
without controversy. Earlier in the week The Boston Globe published
its own review of a pilot program in the city that expanded learning time at
about 40 campuses, finding mixed results. From the Globe’s story:
For many schools, a longer day has failed to dramatically boost
academic achievement or did so only temporarily. The uneven results prompted
school district officials to scrap the extra minutes at some schools and the
state to pull funding or pursue receiverships at others.
But other schools have successfully used an extended day to
boost MCAS scores or expand offerings in the arts and other electives. "I
think there are lessons to be learned," said John McDonough, interim
superintendent. "We know time matters, but it only matters if it is used
well."
Education Voters Statewide
Call to Action for Public Education Day, Wed. Jan 21st
Education Voters of PA Facebook page
We want to kick off this legislative session right and make
sure the phones in the Capitol are ringing off the hook all day with calls from
voters throughout the Commonwealth! Join
thousands of Pennsylvanians as we take 5-10 minutes on January 21st to call our
new governor and our legislators to send a message that Harrisburg’s top
priority this year must be implementing a fair and adequate education funding
formula for our public schools that provides all children with an opportunity
to learn.
Mark Your Calendars. The next Twitter Chat on PA School Funding is
Tuesday, January 27, 2015 at 8:00 p.m.
Join us #paedfunding
Tweet from Circuit Rider Kathleen Kelley
PILCOP Special Education
Seminar: Dyslexia and Other Learning Disabilities
United Way Building 1709 Benjamin Franklin Parkway,
Philadelphia, 19103
Tickets: Attorneys $200
General Public $100 Webinar
$50
"Pay What You Can" tickets are also
available
Speakers: Sonja Kerr; Kathleen Carlsen (Children’s
Dyslexia Center of Philadelphia)
This session is designed to provide the audience with
information about how to address 1) eligibility issues for children with
learning disabilities, including dyslexia and ADHD, 2) encourage self-advocacy
and 3) write and implement meaningful IEPS (what does Orton-Gillingham really
look like?) This session is
co-sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania School of Policy and Practice.
The University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice is a
Pre-approved Provider of Continuing Education for Pennsylvania licensed social workers.
Questions? Email jfortenberry@pilcop.org or call 267-546-1316.
January 23rd–25th, 2015 at The Science Leadership
Academy , Philadelphia
EduCon is both a conversation and a conference.
It is an innovation conference where we can come together, both
in person and virtually, to discuss the future of schools. Every session will
be an opportunity to discuss and debate ideas — from the very practical to the
big dreams.
NPE 2015 Annual Conference – Chicago
January 4, 2015 NPE 2015 Annual Conference, NPE National Conference
Early-bird discounted Registration for the Network for
Public Education’s Second Annual Conference is now available at this address:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/network-for-public-education-2015-annual-conference-tickets-15118560020
These low rates will last for the month of January.
The event is being held at the Drake Hotel in downtown Chicago
There will be a welcoming social event 7 pm Friday night,
at or near the Drake Hotel — details coming soon. Featured speakers will be:
§
Jitu Brown, National Director – Journey
for Justice, Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, Network for Public
Education Board of Directors
§
Tanaisa Brown, High School Senior, with
the Newark
Student Union
§
Yong Zhao, Author, “Who’s Afraid of
the Big Bad Dragon?“
§
Diane Ravitch in conversation with
§
Lily Eskelsen Garcia, NEA President and
§
Randi Weingarten, AFT President
§
Karen Lewis, President, Chicago
Teachers Union
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