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A-PLUS--a plan to restore control over education to states and localities--gains some legislative momentum.
"Our idea would allow states to enter voluntarily into a charter agreement or contract with the U.S. Department of Education, to let state and local authorities identify their education needs and priorities," Cornyn said. "A state will have the flexibility to consolidate federal education programs and funding, and redirect resources to reform initiatives developed at the state level." The House plan received an unexpectedly robust level of support?52 original sponsors, including Republican Whip Roy Blunt (R.-Mo.). Senators Sam Brownback (R.-Kan.), Mel Martinez (R.-Fla.) and Jon Kyl (R.-Ariz.) also sponsored it. That could spell bad news for Sen. Kennedy and Rep. Miller?and others hoping to continue down the path of greater federal involvement in education.
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A good quote by Senator DeMint in this Rob Bluey column on A-PLUS, a conservative alternative to continuing on the NCLB path.
"No Child Left Behind started with some good ideas, but what Congress didn't mess up, the bureaucracy has messed up," said DeMint, who voted against the law while serving in the House in 2001. "There is so much absurdity now within No Child Left Behind that it's going to be difficult to tweak it and fix it. We need to look at a way to allow states to get out of it in a way that would let them do it responsibly."
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Kudos to Del. Nancy Stocksdale for standing up for some of the most disadvantaged in the state ? foster children. The Republican from Carroll County, a former teacher, recently filed legislation in the General Assembly to make scholarships available for foster children in kindergarten through high school. They deserve them. Everything else in their lives works against them. Shuttled from home to home, the 11,000 foster children in the state ? 7,000 in Baltimore City ? lack stability in every corner of their lives. Many move into the system from sexually and physically abusive homes where surviving trumps all other goals. The least the state can do is give them a stable learning environment.
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It is interesting to see a prominent Democrat like Spitzer pushing a school choice measure. While this tax deduction is very modetst, its encouraging that Gov. Spitzer is supporting the idea of parental choice in education.
In addition to asking for a record increase in aid for public schools, Gov. Eliot Spitzer is proposing a tax break for the parents of private school students. And that's "great news" for Catholic school parents as they cope with tuition bills, said Mary Ellen Salanger, who along with her husband, Matthew, sends three children to Broome County Catholic schools. For families considering Catholic schools, the tax break could play a role in their decision, she said.
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According to a recent poll most Arizonans support school choice. There was no funny business in this poll. Prepared for the Alliance for School Choice, the poll asked if respondents supported or opposed school vouchers, and explained vouchers in plain language: vouchers are ?funded by the government, private organizations, or by some combination of both,? and provide money to parents ?to select which public or private schools they would like their children to attend.?
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Cato's Neal McCluskey makes an excellent point on federal aid to college students:
According to data from the College Board, inflation-adjusted aid per full-time equivalent student grew to $10,113 in 2005-06 from $4,108 in 1985-86, a 146 percent jump that more than doubled the rate of cost increases and greatly inflated students' purchasing power. The result: "They want tuition increases to be basically nonexistent," Tulane University president Scott S. Cowen explained in November about many parents and students, "yet they want Jacuzzis in the dorms, small classes, and a number of other things. What gets lost on them is that these things cost money."... Which brings us back to the obvious: A fundamental cause of skyrocketing college costs is that student aid has simply been far too cheap and plentiful, pushing demand ever higher and allowing colleges to charge ever-more exorbitant prices.
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Sometimes it's too easy for politicians to conflate apples with oranges unchallenged.
Furthermore, the basic idea that cutting student-loan interest rates will "make college more accessible" makes no sense. College affordability depends on family income and financial aid availability, relative to tuition and fees. The interest rate doesn't matter until after graduation when repayment begins. For a low-income student facing a $4,000 federal borrowing cap and an $8,000 tuition bill, lowering the post-graduation interest rate from 6.8 percent to 3.4 percent does nothing to help afford tuition today.
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What's more surprising is how Petrilli, a major force behind implementation of No Child Left Behind and a major supporter of it, now acknowledges it to be a failure. His solution? Let the federal government do those few things it does best and let the states handle the rest. Smart principals.
In my opinion, the way forward starts with a more realistic assessment of what the federal government can reasonably hope to achieve in education. Using sticks and carrots to tug and prod states and districts in desired directions has proven unworkable. It was worth trying, but experience has taught us that this approach suffers from too much hubris and humility at the same time. Instead of this muddle, the feds should adopt a simple, radical principle: Do it yourself, or don't do it at all. In the "Do it Yourself" category would be two major responsibilities: distributing funds to the neediest students, and collecting and publishing transparent information about the performance of U.S. schools. Redistributing funds is easy; it's what Washington does best. Still, it could do it even better by adopting weighted student funding, ensuring that dollars follow children to their school of choice, with extra cash following students with the greatest needs.
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A tough, but fair take, on No Child Left Behind.
This new federal power comes at a large cost to local school districts, beyond the loss of control. According to the Office of Management and Budget, No Child Left Behind costs state and local communities an additional 6,688,814 hours, or $140 million, to fill out paperwork and ensure compliance. Thousands of state and local workers across the country spend their days on this task, instead of teaching students or otherwise contributing to their education.
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If the time has come to acknowledge NCLB as joining the large ash-heap of failed education reforms, the question arises: What now? Ultimately, accountability needs to come from the bottom up, not the top down. NCLB was a well-intentioned but ultimately quixotic attempt at improving public schooling through a convoluted combination of testing and public-sector targeting. Assuming the continuing absence of a renaissance of enlightenment on education policy and federalism, a decent exit strategy to me seems to be to allow states to design their own accountability and sanction regimes through a charter state provision but to require public schools to deliver national norm referenced exams to students in return for federal funds. Bottom-up accountability--parental choice--ultimately represents a far more promising reform strategy: not a magic bullet, but a linchpin reform. Higher education provides a chilling cautionary tale of non-transparent markets in education. Give me (reliable) data, or give me death.
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Two facts, one on college tuition and one on financial aid. How come we read about the former so much more than the latter? Aren't the important numbers what families are actually paying, as opposed to a college's advertised price?
Tuition and room and board at private four-year colleges now add up to more than $30,000 a year on average, and rose by 81 percent, more than double the inflation rate, between 1993 and 2004. Financial aid provided by private institutions, even to the upper middle class, has grown more than tuition -- by 135 percent over the same period -- and some universities provide substantial assistance to low-income students.
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t's been eight years since California voters decided overwhelmingly to dismantle the state's bilingual-education system and replace it with English language immersion. Although English learners have made enormous strides since then, success has remained elusive for several California school districts. In the past, many educators and administrators have attributed the lagging performance of these schools to three main factors, regardless of each district's response to the 1998 mandate: large classes; low per-pupil spending; and neighborhood poverty. But do these factors fully account for the striking differences in performance between some schools? Not according to the latest data.
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The ACLU and People for the American Way are challenging two Arizona school choice programs that allow disabled and foster-care children to go to schools best equipped to meet their needs. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday with the Arizona Supreme Court, argues the voucher programs violate the state's constitutional mandate for a uniform education system and prohibition against using public funds to support religious institutions. This follows a separate lawsuit brought by the ACLU in September against the state's business donation tax credit, which allows businesses to donate money to organizations that provide scholarships to low-income children. The outcome of these two cases will reveal the future of school choice policy. Although the two voucher programs might fall in battle, education tax credits are likely to survive and continue to advance school choice. Arizona is the center of school choice politics, with one of the strongest charter school laws, both personal and business tax credits, and two voucher programs ? by far the largest range of effective school choice programs in the country. Arizona has also pushed the three choice programs under attack through a democratic Governor, Janet Napolitano. Opponents of school choice have chosen to attack their biggest and fastest-growing threat, trying to stop the snowball from rolling on in Arizona. And since the legal issues at play are largely the same across much of the country, one can say that as goes Arizona, so goes the country.
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NCLB's choice provisions have gone nearly unimplemented while the federal government and states focused on its funding provisions (natch) and its ridiculously complicated and top-heavy "accountability" standards. The result? Much accountability, perhaps, but little improvement. Perhaps it's time for a new approach that helps those who are most at risk escape the schools that aren't doing them much good.
"The gaps between African-Americans and whites are showing very few signs of closing," Michael T. Nettles, a senior vice president at the Educational Testing Service, said in a paper he presented recently at Columbia University.
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ow did our public school system get into this mess? Today's system of training and compensating teachers is one reason. Our colleges of education produce too few high-quality instructors. And because teachers are not paid based on performance, we lose many quality instructors to other fields. William Sanders, the nation's leading expert in teacher quality research, has examined the impact of teacher quality on learning. He compared teachers on a "value-added basis," measuring how much students learned over the course of a year with a given teacher. He found that students learning from teachers in the top 20 percent of effectiveness for three years in a row learn 50 percent more than students with teachers in the bottom 20 percent. Sanders also found that given the same quality of instruction, the Black-White achievement gap almost disappears. Far from egalitarian institutions, public schools today incubate inequality. If we tried to design a system that would covertly but systematically discriminate against the disadvantaged, we would have a hard time coming up with something better. Much can be done to improve this situation. Expanding school choice would give disadvantaged students greater opportunity to learn from high-quality teachers. And, liberalizing teacher certification requirements could transform schools.
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