Tag Archive: obama


Obama to target rising college tuition costs (AP)

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January 27, 2012

ROMULUS, Mich. – President Barack Obama wants to shift some federal dollars away from colleges and universities that aren’t controlling tuition costs to those that are. He’s also proposing competitions among higher education institutions to encourage them to run more efficiently.

Obama will spell out his plans Friday during a speech at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor focused on college affordability.

On Tuesday during his State of the Union address, Obama put colleges and universities on notice to control soaring tuition costs or face losing federal dollars.

The money Obama is targeting is what’s known as “campus based” aid given to colleges to distribute in areas such as Perkins loans or in work study programs. Of the $142 billion in federal grants and loans distributed in the last school year, about $3 billion went to these programs.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

President Barack Obama has put colleges and universities on notice to control tuition costs or face losing federal dollars. Now, schools are waiting to hear how big a stick he plans to wield to enforce his message.

Obama was expected to spell out his plan in a speech Friday at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor focused on college affordability. His plan could set a new precedent in the federal government’s role in controlling the rising costs of college — a move making people in higher education nervous. Obama’s speech will cap a three-day post-State of the Union trip by the president to promote different components of his economic agenda in politically important states.

The president hinted at what’s ahead in education during his State of the Union address Tuesday night, which coincided with the release of a White House “blueprint” that said he wants to shift federal aid away from colleges that don’t keep net tuition down and provide a good value. But it’s unclear exactly what pot of federal dollars Obama plans to target and how his plan would work.

The Obama administration already has taken a series of steps to expand the availability of grants and loans and to make loans easier to pay back, and Obama spelled out Tuesday other proposals to make college more affordable such as extending tuition tax breaks and asking Congress to keep loan interest rates from doubling on July. His administration has also targeted career college programs — primarily at for-profit institutions — with high loan default rates among graduates over multiple years by taking away their ability to participate in such programs.

But until now, it has done little to turn its attention to the rising cost of tuition at traditional colleges and universities. The average in-state tuition and fees at four-year public colleges last fall rose 8.3 percent and with room and board now exceed $17,000 a year, according to the College Board. Rising tuition costs have been blamed on a variety of factors, including a decline in state dollars, an over-reliance on federal student loan dollars and competition for the best facilities and professors.

During Tuesday’s speech, the president said he’d met with university presidents who described to him ways some universities through technology and redesigning courses were able to help students finish more quickly — efforts that helped curtail costs.

“The point is, it’s possible. So let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down. Higher education can’t be a luxury_ it’s an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford,” Obama said.

Barry Toiv, spokesman for the Association of American Universities, said some of its members participated in the meeting Obama referred to and agree that there are good examples of things that can be done to make colleges more efficient. But he said universities are concerned that any proposal by the president “doesn’t hurt students” because anything that does is “obviously counterproductive.”

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., a former education secretary, said the autonomy of U.S. higher education is what makes it the best of the world, and he questioned whether Obama could enforce any such plan without hurting students. Potentially, billions of dollars are at stake. In the 2010-2011 school year, the federal government awarded $142 billion in federal student aid — most of it directly to students in the form of grants and loans, according to the Education Department.

“It’s hard to do without hurting students and it’s not appropriate to do,” Alexander said. “The federal government has no business doing this.”

Some public institutions worry about being unfairly blamed for state cuts that led to an increase in tuition prices. Neal McCluskey, an education analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, said it’s difficult for the federal government to dictate what is a reasonable increase because some colleges and universities might have legitimate reasons to raise tuition some years, such as the need to replace buildings in disrepair.

Obama’s plan reflects that in the race between subsidizing tuition with student aid and rising tuition, student aid is going to lose, said Andrew P. Kelly, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Instead of redesigning their business model or using more online programs to save money, many colleges and universities have made small changes hoping to wait out the nation’s fiscal crisis that don’t solve the problem long term, Kelly said.

“This signals I think a sense of how acute that problem is and the fact that it can’t just be about pouring money into federal student aid programs and hoping that affordability is maintained, that there has to be some kind of way, or at least a signal sent, to the institutions that benefit, and the states, frankly … that they just can’t continue to ratchet up prices and use federal aid to fill in the gaps,” Kelly said.

Even though it’s not politically popular, McCluskey said a good way to control rising tuition costs would be to cut federal aid to students, which would force colleges and universities to keep tuition low.

This isn’t the first time a politician has sought to control tuition costs. In 2003, Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., proposed a plan to hold back aid to colleges and universities that raised tuition much faster than inflation. It met resistance from higher education and wasn’t passed.

Come Friday, “we’ll be watching and listening carefully,” said Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education.

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Hefling reported from Washington.

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Online:

White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov/

Education Department: http://www.ed.gov/

Obama to target rising college tuition costs
(AP)

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State of the Union: What can Obama do about college tuition? (The Christian Science Monitor)

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January 25, 2012

President Obama hit hard on issues of college affordability in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, and continued to emphasize the importance of excellent teaching in K-12 education.

He called on states to raise the compulsory age of education to 18; called on Congress to extend the tuition tax credit, to stop the interest on student loans from doubling in July, and to pass the DREAM Act; and issued a threat to higher education institutions who fail to keep costs in check and keep tuition down.

“Let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down,” Obama said. “Higher education can’t be a luxury – it is an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.”

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It was unclear, however, from Obama’s speech – and in the blueprint that his administration sent out afterward – exactly how he plans to carry out this threat.

“Unlike K-12 where lots of money pours into programs, there’s much less [Federal] money pouring into higher-education programs,” says Rita Kirshstein, director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability. Most of the money that does go to schools is in the form of research funds, she says, along with Pell Grants and subsidized loans for students.

While Ms. Kirshstein says withholding student grant and loan money could be disastrous for some students, she believes withholding research dollars might cause faculty to put pressure on administrators to look hard at their costs. Kirshstein hopes the plan would be placed in a broader context, looking at how much various states have cut back their higher-ed funding, for instance.

“The devil is in the details if it’s going to be done effectively,” she says.

As for Obama’s other proposals, Kirshstein says she was glad to see him sound the dual themes of states making higher ed a higher priority in their budgets, and colleges and universities doing more with less.

These aren’t new themes for the administration, which has worked to improve student aid by increasing the maximum Pell Grant size last year and moving to a system of direct government loans, and which hosted a summit on higher education productivity and cost in December. But the ideas seem to be getting increased attention now.

“Those of us in higher education are always happy when higher ed issues are recognized because so much of the attention typically goes to K-12,” says Kirshstein. Obama, she believes, “is indeed serious about this issue.”

Not that he neglected K-12 topics in his speech.

Some themes that he has hit before, like calling on Congress to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (sometimes better known in its current incarnation as No Child Left Behind), were notably absent – perhaps a reflection of the impossibility of getting such a bill passed in an election year.

But in his speech Obama continued to preach the importance of teaching and accountability. His education agenda so far has defied typical partisan lines: Some of its most frequent critics are loyal Democrats, including the teachers’ unions, while some Republicans have praised it.

In fact, in Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’s response to the State of the Union Tuesday night, he praised just two aspects of Obama’s tenure as president: killing Osama bin Laden and “bravely backing long overdue changes in public education.”

Obama was particularly diplomatic in how he handled his remarks on teachers, who have, in many cases, sharply rebelled against his administration’s agenda of increased accountability, more data, and evaluations linked to student achievement.

“Teachers matter,” Obama said. “So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones.”

In return, he said, he wants to “grant schools flexibility:  to teach with creativity and passion, to stop teaching to the test, and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.”

Teachers’ unions seized on the message, in particular the line about “teaching to the test.” A common complaint about the direction of education reform – including Obama’s Race to the Top initiative – is that it encourages instruction driven only by standardized tests.

Obama “made clear tonight what America’s teachers have long understood,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, in a statement. “We can’t test our way to a middle class; we must educate our way to a middle class. The overemphasis on testing has led to narrowing of the curriculum, rather than creating a path to critical thinking and problem solving.”

But nothing in Obama’s comments, or the blueprint his administration released, indicated he was backing off from his controversial education reform goals.

While he didn’t mention Race to the Top by name, he lauded what it has accomplished, in terms of pushing states to enact tough reforms. “For less than 1 percent of what our nation spends on education each year, we’ve convinced nearly every state in the country to raise their standards for teaching and learning,” he said.

And he continues to tout teacher quality, both recognizing the best and replacing ineffective teachers. “We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000,” he said.

In his blueprint, Obama particularly emphasized the need to reform the teaching profession, including pushing to make teacher education schools more effective and selective, to improve professional development, and to reshape tenure and evaluation systems.

Obama didn't clarify the means by which he wants to achieve these goals, though an existing federal program, the Teacher Incentive Fund, is already being used to improve teacher effectiveness and reform the teacher pay system, among other goals.

“It’s notable that the president will continue to aggressively promote this new federal priority in education,” including teacher effectiveness, data systems, teacher evaluations, and school turnarounds, says David DeSchryver, vice president of education policy for Whiteboard Advisors, an education consulting group.

While he offered conciliatory rhetoric to teachers’ unions, Mr. DeSchryver notes, Obama still holds that teacher evaluations should be used for both hiring and firing teachers.

“And given that we’re heading into an election season, it’s notable that he’s willing to stand behind that,” DeSchryver says. 

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State of the Union: What can Obama do about college tuition?
(The Christian Science Monitor)

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School lunches to have more veggies, whole grains (AP)

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January 25, 2012

WASHINGTON – Schoolchildren’s favorite lunch — the ubiquitous frozen pizza — is about to get healthier.

First lady Michelle Obama and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack are expected to announce Wednesday that most school meals, including pizza, will have less sodium, more whole grains and more fruits and vegetables as sides. The popular pizzas will still be on school lunch lines but made with healthier ingredients.

Mrs. Obama and Vilsack were making the announcement at an elementary school in Alexandria, Va., with celebrity chef Rachael Ray.

The new rules, the first major nutritional overhaul of school meals in 15 years, won’t be as aggressive as the Obama administration had hoped. Congress last year blocked the Agriculture Department from making some of the changes the department had sought, including limiting french fries and pizzas.

A bill passed in November would require USDA to allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. The initial draft of the department’s guidelines, released a year ago, would have prevented that. Congress also blocked USDA from limiting servings of potatoes to two servings a week. The final rule to be announced Wednesday will have to incorporate those directions from Congress.

The congressional changes had been requested by potato growers and food companies that produce frozen pizzas for schools, among others in the food industry. Conservatives in Congress called the guidelines an overreach, saying the government shouldn’t be telling children what to eat. School districts had also objected to some of the requirements, saying they go too far and would cost too much.

The new guidelines would apply to lunches subsidized by the federal government, and a child nutrition bill signed by President Barack Obama in 2010 would help school districts pay for some of the increased costs. Some of the changes could take place as soon as the next school year, while others would be phased in over time.

The guidelines are also expected to limit the total number of calories in an individual meal and require that milk be low in fat. Flavored milks would have to be nonfat.

While many schools are improving meals already, others are still serving children meals high in fat, salt and calories. The guidelines are designed to combat growing childhood obesity and are based on 2009 recommendations by the Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences.

The subsidized meals that would fall under the guidelines are served as free and low-cost meals to low-income children and long have been subject to government nutrition standards. The 2010 law for the first time will extend nutrition standards to other foods sold in schools that aren’t subsidized by the federal government, including “a la carte” foods on the lunch line and snacks in vending machines.

Those standards, while expected to be similar, will be written separately and have not yet been proposed by USDA.

School lunches to have more veggies, whole grains
(AP)

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Obama education reforms advance as Congress falters (Reuters)

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January 18, 2012

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama's administration is moving ahead in reforming U.S. education without the help of the Congress, and will soon announce which states can opt out of the national education law known as “No Child Left Behind.”

There are two bills currently in Congress to re-authorize the decade-old law that radically changed U.S. public schools.

“I don't think either one of those is going to move forward anytime soon, but I think the waiver process that we're doing now is going to be the only game in town,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan told a meeting of U.S. mayors in the U.S. capital.

“We hope to say 'yes' to the first set of waivers in the next couple of weeks, probably by the end of the month. We'll just do this on a rolling basis,” he added.

In September, Obama announced that states could seek waivers from many of No Child Left Behind's key requirements, including one that identified certain schools as “failing.”

But they had to agree to establish standards to help students prepare for college, administer tests to gauge student readiness, and reform schools with low graduation rates.

Eleven states have already applied for waivers.

Since No Child Left Behind nominally expired four years ago, Obama has been quietly revising federal education programs under its aegis.

Obama and Duncan have promoted learning standards and testing, cornerstones of the contentious legislation championed by former President George W. Bush and passed by members of both parties. But through grant programs such as the “Race to the Top,” they have sought to redefine the benchmarks students must meet, as well as the consequences of missing standards and the tests of schools' performance.

With a national election now 11 months away, Obama will likely roll out more education policies important to Democrats' supporters.

Duncan told the mayors that the next round of Race to the Top grants, $550 million, would go directly to school districts and bypass states. The grant program was created in the 2009 economic stimulus plan to help states create uniform learning standards and foster the spread of charter schools.

Recently, a federal auditor said states had struggled to find enough staff to carry out all of the goals included in their grant applications and were generally lagging.

States contribute nearly half of funding for primary and secondary education, while the U.S. government pitches in about 8 percent. Federal support, however, has become more precious to school districts since the recession and housing bust ravaged their primary source of revenue – property taxes.

Duncan pointed to the strong demand for dollars in his meeting with mayors from across the country.

For the “Promise Neighborhood” program, the Department of Education received 300 applications, when it only had money for 20 communities, he said. Another grant program, Invest in Innovation, with enough funding to cover 49 projects, received 1,700 applications.

“This is frankly a challenge on both sides of the aisle,” he said. “We absolutely want to maintain our traditional formula funding… but we want to maintain some flexibility to reward excellence.”

(Reporting By Lisa Lambert; Editing by Eric Walsh)

Obama education reforms advance as Congress falters
(Reuters)

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New sex education standards released (AP)

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January 9, 2012

WASHINGTON – Young elementary school students should use the proper names for body parts and, by the end of fifth grade, know that sexual orientation is “the romantic attraction of an individual to someone of the same gender or a different gender,” according to new sexual education guidelines released Monday by a coalition of health and education groups.

The non-binding recommendations to states and school districts seek to encourage age-appropriate discussions about sex, bullying and healthy relationships — starting with a foundation even before second grade.

By presenting minimum standards that schools can use to formulate school curriculums for each age level, the groups hope that schools can build a sequential foundation that in the long term will better help teens as they grow into adults.

Experts say schools across America are inconsistent in how they address such sensitive topics.

Despite awareness of bullying, for example, Debra Hauser, president of Advocates for Youth, one of the groups involved with creating the standards, said some schools don’t address it — or at least not in relation to sexual orientation or gender identity, which is where she said a lot of the bullying occurs.

“They should tackle it head on,” Hauser said.

Other organizations involved with the release include the American Association of Health Education, the American School Health Association, the National Education Association – Health Information Network, the Society of State Leaders of Health and Physical Education, and the Future of Sex Education Initiative. The latest suggestions were already drawing less enthusiastic reactions from some.

By the end of second grade, the guidelines say students should use the correct body part names for the male and female anatomy, and also understand that all living things reproduce and that all people have the right to not be touched if they don’t want to be. They also say young elementary school kids should be able to identity different kinds of family structures and explain why bullying and teasing are wrong.

Beyond lessons about puberty by the end of fifth grade, the guidelines say students should be able to define sexual harassment and abuse.

When they leave middle school, they should be able to differentiate between gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation, according to the guidelines. And the say they should be able to explain why a rape victim is not at fault, know about bullying and dating violence and describe the signs and impacts of sexually transmitted diseases.

It calls for those leaving eighth grade to also be able to evaluate the effectiveness of abstinence, condoms and other “safer sex methods” and know how emergency contraception works. Many of these issues the groups encouraged to be further addressed in high school as well.

It’s unclear how much influence the recommendations will have among educators.

Cora Collette Breuner, a pediatrics professor at the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital and a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on adolescence who was not involved in the creation of the standards, praised the approach of encouraging discussions at an early age.

“The data points that trying to cover this stuff when kids have already formulated their own opinions and biases by the time they’re in middle and high school, it’s too late,” Breuner said.

Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Education Abstinence Association, said she does not agree with the topics and goals of the standards. Like the anti-smoking campaign of the last few decades that has had success, abstinence should be the focus of such programs, she said.

“This should be a program about health, rather than agendas that have nothing to do with optimal sexual health decision-making,” Huber said. “Controversial topics are best reserved for conversations between parent and child, not in the classroom.”

Federal funding for abstinence-centered education funded by a Republican Congress in the late 1990s and later under President George W. Bush has largely gone by the wayside under the Obama administration, which has had a shift in focus to teen pregnancy prevention programs.

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Kimberly Hefling can be followed at http://twitter.com/khefling

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National Sexuality Education Standards Core Content and Skills, K-12: http://www.ashaweb.org/files/public/Sexuality%20Education/JOSH-FoSE-Standards.pdf

New sex education standards released
(AP)

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Education law’s promise falls short after 10 years (AP)

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January 7, 2012

WASHINGTON – The No Child Left Behind education law was cast as a symbol of possibility, offering the promise of improved schools for the nation’s poor and minority children and better prepared students in a competitive world.

Yet after a decade on the books, President George W. Bush’s most hyped domestic accomplishment has become a symbol to many of federal overreach and Congress’ inability to fix something that’s clearly flawed.

The law forced schools to confront the uncomfortable reality that many kids simply weren’t learning, but it’s primarily known for its emphasis on standardized tests and the labeling of thousands of schools as “failures.”

Sunday marks the 10-year anniversary of the day Bush signed it into law in Hamilton, Ohio. By his side were the leaders of the education committees in Congress, Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. The bipartisanship that made the achievement possible in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks is long gone.

The same Senate committee approved a revamped education bill last year, but deep-rooted partisanship stalled the measure in the full Congress. In this election year, there appears little political will for compromise despite widespread agreement that changes are needed.

Critics say the law carries rigid and unrealistic expectations that put too much of an emphasis on tests for reading and math at the expense of a more well-rounded education.

Frustrated by the congressional inaction, President Barack Obama told states last fall they could seek a waiver around unpopular proficiency requirements in exchange for actions his administration favors. A vast majority of states have said they will go that route, seen as a temporary fix until lawmakers do act.

Like Obama, Republican presidential candidates have criticized the law. One, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, even saying he regrets voting for it.

“If you called a rally to keep No Child Left Behind as it is, not a single person would show up,” said Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, Denver’s former school superintendent.

The view was drastically different 10 years ago, when Bush took what was an uncommon stance for a conservative in seeking an aggressive federal role in forcing states and districts to tackle abysmal achievement gaps in schools.

He was able to get fellow Republicans such as Boehner, the current House speaker, and Democratic leaders on education such as Kennedy, who died in 2009, and Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., to join him. The mandate was that all students read and perform math on grade level by 2014.

“No longer is it acceptable to hide poor performance. No longer is it acceptable to keep results from parents,” Bush said when he signed the legislation. “We’re never going to give up on a school that’s performing poorly; that when we find poor performance, a school will be given time and incentives and resources to correct their problems.”

The law requires annual testing. Districts must keep and publish data showing how subgroups of students perform. Schools that don’t meet requirements for two years or longer face increasingly tough consequences, from busing children to higher performing schools to offering tutoring and replacing staff.

The test results were eye-opening, recalled Miller, the top Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee.

“People were stunned because they were always led to believe that things were going fine in this particular school. And the fact of the matter was, for huge numbers of students that was not the case,” Miller said. “That led to a lot of anger, disappointment. That led to embarrassment. In many instances, the schools were being held out as exceeding in their mission, when it fact they were failing many, many of the children in those schools.”

Under the law, watching movies and assigning irrelevant or no homework was no longer acceptable because suddenly someone was paying attention, said Charles Barone, a former aide to Miller who is director of federal policy with Democrats for Education Reform.

In low-performing urban schools, where teachers and principals once might have thrown up their hands and not known what to do, there was a new attitude along the lines of “we might not know what to do, but we’ve got to do something,” said Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow in education at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Both spoke at a recent forum on the law at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

But m

any teachers and principals started to believe they were being judged on factors out of their control and in ways that were unfair.

Jennifer Ochoa, an eighth-grade literacy teacher in New York who works with low-performing students, said the law has hurt morale among educators as well as students, who feel they have to do well on a standardized test or are failures, no matter how much progress they make.

“Afterward, it didn’t matter how far you came if you didn’t make this outside goal,” Ochoa said. “We started talking about kids in very different ways. We started talking about kids in statistical ways instead of human being terms.”

How successful the law has been academically remains under debate.

Scores on a national assessment show significant gains in math among the fourth- and eighth-graders, with Hispanic and African-American fourth-graders performing approximately two grade levels higher today than when the law was passed, said Mark Schneider, the former U.S. commissioner of education statistics who now serves as vice president at the American Institutes for Research.

“You cannot dismiss these gains, and I think … people just aren’t willing to credit NCLB or accountability in general because of ideological and political preferences,” Schneider said.

As the years went by, however, the growth has largely plateaued, Schneider said. Similar large gains were not shown in reading, and some experts say more progress was made in reading before the law was passed. There are still huge differences in the performance of African-American and Hispanic students compared with white students.

As the 2014 deadline draws closer, more schools are failing to meet federal standards, with nearly half not doing so last year, according to the Center on Education Policy. Center officials said that’s because some states today have harder tests or have high numbers of immigrant and low-income children, but it’s also because the law requires states to raise the bar each year for how many children must pass the test.

Some states had long put off the largest increases to avoid penalties.

In Washington, much of the political debate over the law centers on how much federal control the government should have. Some Republicans want to go so far as to close the Education Department and end federally-imposed annual testing.

Even among Democrats there’s been some dissension. The Obama administration, for example, opposed the Senate bill passed in committee under the leadership of Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, because it said the measure didn’t go far enough on accountability; Harkin said it wasn’t a perfect bill, but compromise was necessary.

Many educators

are now looking to other factors such as online learning, an increased trend toward teacher evaluations tied to student performance, the federal Race to the Top competition that states have competed in, and the common core standards adopted in the vast majority of states as factors that could provide the next boost in education.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, a former education secretary, said he’s hopeful Congress will do what’s right and update No Child Left Behind, which became due for renewal in 2007.

“One of the things we ought to be able to do is fix No Child Left Behind,” said Alexander, R-Tenn. “What we ought to do is set new realistic goals for it so that schools and schools can have those kinds of goals, and most importantly we need to move out of Washington and back to states and local communities decisions about whether schools and teachers are succeeding or failing.”

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Associated Press writer Dorie Turner in Atlanta contributed to this report.

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Kimberly Hefling can be followed at http://twitter.com/khefling

___

Online:

Background on the law: http://www2.ed.gov/nclb/landing.jhtml

Education law’s promise falls short after 10 years
(AP)

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7 states win federal education competition (AP)

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December 23, 2011

WASHINGTON – Seven states won a share of $200 million in federal “Race to the Top” money to improve K-12 education programs, the Education Department announced Thursday.

The winners are Arizona, $25.1 million; Colorado, $17.9 million; Illinois, $42.8 million; Kentucky, $17 million; Louisiana, $17.5 million; Pennsylvania, $41.3 million; and New Jersey, $37.9 million.

The Obama administration has awarded billions of dollars in such competitions to encourage changes in education that it favors. The seven states competing in this round were all runners-up last year, and the Education Department has said it wants to encourage them to finish and carry out many of the changes proposed in their earlier applications.

Competing states committed to make changes such as improving principal and teacher evaluation systems and turning around under-performing schools. They also were asked to show specifically how they would improve science, technology, engineering and math instruction.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the money was driving dramatic improvements.

“We’ve had broken teacher-evaluation systems in many places, unfortunately for five, or six or seven decades,” Duncan said. “You’ve seen more effort there and more movement in a short amount of time than in a long time prior to that, and many states are using Race to the Top resources to do that.”

Two other states, South Carolina and California, were also eligible. South Carolina opted not to compete, while California submitted an incomplete application, the Education Department said.

Last week, nine states were announced as winners of a share of $500 million in grants under a similar competition focused on improving early learning programs.

Duncan also said federal officials are monitoring states to ensure that they follow through on their plans to improve schools with Race to the Top money. For example, he said he has warned Hawaii that it’s in danger of losing funding.

“We’re going to look for some pretty significant improvements early in the new year,” Duncan said. “There’s not a hard-and-fast date. If we see things turning around, that would be fantastic. If we don’t see things turning around, then we’ve got some tough decisions to make.”

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Online: Education Department http://www.ed.gov/

7 states win federal education competition
(AP)

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Ed Dept. chides Hawaii for use of grant dollars (AP)

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December 22, 2011

WASHINGTON – An Education Department official on Wednesday admonished Hawaii for its “unsatisfactory” performance under a $75 million federal grant the state won last year in a high profile competition and said it was placing it under “high risk” status. That means the state is in danger of losing the money if it doesn’t make improvements.

This is the first time the department has placed under such a status a state that won dollars distributed in the competition known as “Race to the Top.” The contest is a signature education initiative under the Obama administration, which has used it to encourage states to enact changes it supports.

Hawaii was one of 11 states and the District of Columbia to win more than $4 billion in Race to the Top grants last year. The Hawaii Department of Education is the nation’s 10th largest school system and the only statewide district in the country.

The education community has been watching closely to see how aggressively the department will enforce the terms of the competition.

Hawaii still has about $72 million of its four-year, $75 million grant left to spend. The state has been well over a year behind in implementing many aspects of its plan to improve low-performing schools, and has struggled to roll out a teacher evaluation system tied to teacher performance that it promised.

“The department is concerned about the state’s ability to fulfill its commitments within the grant period,” Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie was told in a letter dated Wednesday and signed by Education Department official Ann Whalen.

Because the state is now a high-risk grantee, it will be required to get pre-approval before funds are spent and will be subjected to a thorough on-site review, the letter said.

“Please note that failure to comply with the high-risk conditions may constitute a material failure to comply with the requirements of the grant,” the letter said.

Abercrombie said he found the implications of the letter “disturbing.”

“I am willing to do everything that’s necessary to proceed with Race to the Top and am calling on the responsible parties to immediately address the areas that need resolution,” he said in an emailed statement late Wednesday.

“It’s really apparent from the letter that everyone involved in education in Hawaii is going to have to step up,” Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi said in a separate statement. “We acknowledge there’s work to be done.”

Stephen Schatz, Hawaii’s assistant superintendent for strategic reform who is overseeing the Race to the Top effort, last week told The Associated Press that the state was making progress on reforms it promised, although he said there have been roadblocks.

Schatz said the state’s ability to move forward has been slowed down by complications with the Hawaii State Teachers Association, the union representing public school teachers across the islands.

The two sides had reached a conceptual agreement before Hawaii was announced as a winner to tie half of a teacher’s evaluation to education gains made by students. But the union currently is embroiled in a prohibited practice complaint it lodged with the state labor relations board against the state. The union claims the state violated members’ rights by implementing its “last, best and final” contract offer over the summer.

“We’re still wholeheartedly committed to the reforms in the race. Whatever impediments that we may face we intend to get through them,” Schatz said. “We’re making progress on every project in our scope of work.”

Abercrombie said he would ask the labor relations board to expedite its process. He also plans to appeal to the Legislature for support and ask the superintendent, Board of Education and those working on Race to the Top to address the changes noted by the Education Department.

“It is clear on what actions need to take place and it is time to get this done now,” he said.

Union President Wil Okabe said Wednesday he’s not surprised Hawaii has been placed on high risk status, but that state officials should have recognized the risk to the grant when imposing the contract offer on teachers.

“Once they implemented this thing, it had ramifications on everything,” he said, adding that it’s unfair to blame the union for the position the state is in.

The letter to Abercrombie comes as President Barack Obama attempts to leave for Hawaii for his family’s annual Christmas vacation. The president’s wife and daughters are already in Hawaii, but his travel plans are up in the air because Congress has been unable to reach agreement over extending payroll tax cuts and unemployment benefits due to expire at the end of the year.

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Kimberly Hefling can be followed at http://twitter.com/khefling

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Kelleher reported from Honolulu.

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Online:

Education Department: http://www.ed.gov/

Hawaii Public Schools: http://doe.k12.hi.us/

Ed Dept. chides Hawaii for use of grant dollars
(AP)

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Report: half of schools fail federal standards (AP)

Filed Under: News by Thomas Botelho — Comments Off
December 15, 2011

ATLANTA – Nearly half of America’s public schools didn’t meet federal achievement standards this year, marking the largest failure rate since the much-criticized No Child Left Behind Law took effect a decade ago, according to a national report released Thursday.

The Center on Education Policy report shows more than 43,000 schools — or 48 percent — did not make “adequate yearly progress” this year. The failure rates range from a low of 11 percent in Wisconsin to a high of 89 percent in Florida.

The findings are far below the 82 percent failure rate that Education Secretary Arne Duncan predicted earlier this year but still indicate an alarming trend that Duncan hopes to address by granting states relief from the federal law. The law requires states to have every student performing at grade level in math and reading by 2014, which most educators agree is an impossible goal.

“Whether it’s 50 percent, 80 percent or 100 percent of schools being incorrectly labeled as failing, one thing is clear: No Child Left Behind is broken,” Duncan said in a statement Wednesday. “That’s why we’re moving forward with giving states flexibility from the law in exchange for reforms that protect children and drive student success.”

State’s scores varied wildly. For example, in Georgia, 27 percent of schools did not meet targets, compared to 81 percent in Massachusetts and 16 percent in Kansas.

That’s because some states have harder tests or have high numbers of immigrant and low-income children, center officials said. It’s also because the law requires states to raise the bar each year for how many children must pass the test, and some states put off the largest increase until this year to avoid sanctions.

The numbers indicate what federal officials have been saying for more than a year — that the law, which is four years overdue for a rewrite, is “too crude a measure” to accurately depict what’s happening in schools, said Jack Jennings, president of the Washington, D.C.-based center. An overhaul of the law has become mired in the partisan atmosphere in Congress, with lawmakers disagreeing over how to fix it.

“No Child Left Behind is defective,” Jennings told The Associated Press. “It needs to be changed. If Congress can’t do it, then the administration is right to move ahead with waivers.”

Waivers fix the immediate problem but likely will make it much more difficult for parents to understand how schools are rated because progress will no longer be based on just one test score.

Under the 11 waivers already filed, states are asking to use a variety of factors to determine whether they pass muster and to choose how schools will be punished if they don’t improve.

Those factors range from including college-entrance exam scores to adding the performance of students on Advanced Placement tests.

At least 39 states, plus Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, have said they will file waivers, though it is unclear how many will get approved.

Republicans in Congress say Duncan and President Barack Obama are using the waivers to push a “backdoor education agenda” that will ultimately let schools off the hook.

“The law needs to be fixed and it needs to be fixed in Congress and not by executive action,” House education committee Chairman John Kline, a Republican from Minnesota, said in September after Obama announced the waivers.

Under No Child Left Behind, states that have tough standards are punished and schools that make progress but don’t hit benchmarks get treated the same as schools that see performance dip, Jennings said.

“A lot of educators saw the weaknesses in No Child Left Behind even when it was rolled out — that this day and time would come,” said Georgia schools Superintendent John Barge. “It’s kind of a train wreck that we all see happening.”

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Follow Dorie Turner on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/dorieturner.

Report: half of schools fail federal standards
(AP)

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Number of students attending charter schools soars (AP)

Filed Under: News by Thomas Botelho — Comments Off
December 7, 2011

MIAMI – The number of students attending charter schools has soared to more than 2 million as states pass laws lifting caps and encouraging their expansion, according to figures released Wednesday.

The growth represents the largest increase in enrollment over a single year since charter schools were founded nearly two decades ago. In all, more than 500 new charter schools were opened in the 2011-12 school year. And about 200,000 more students are enrolled now than a year before, an increase of 13 percent nationwide.

“This 2 million student mark is quite significant,” said Ursula Wright, interim CEO of the nonprofit National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which released the study. “It demonstrates increased demand by families who want to see more high quality education options for their children.”

Wright and others attribute the boom in large part to the Obama administration’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition, which rewarded states for taking on ambitious education changes that included expanding charter schools. In order to qualify, many states changed laws to encourage the growth. Sixteen states have lifted caps on the number of them and student enrollment over the last three years, according to the National Council of State Legislatures.

State Sen. Garrett Mason, who sponsored a charter school bill passed in Maine this summer, said after 17 years of attempts by lawmakers to permit the publicly funded, independently run schools in the state, the time was right.

“We had seen a movement for new ideas at the state level and we were able to articulate the message appropriately,” Mason said.

The growth comes even as states have severely cut education budgets. They are helped by continued support from private foundations and the U.S. Department of Education, which announced $25 million in grants for high achieving charter schools in September. Still, charter operators said those sources do not come close to compensating for the huge losses they have experienced in state school funding.

James Willcox, CEO of Aspire Public Schools, California’s largest charter school operator, said $20 million in state funding has been lost annually since 2007. After school and academic intervention programs have been cut, class sizes expanded and teachers haven’t received a cost of living increase in four years.

“We have banded together and done everything we possibly can to keep them on track,” Willcox said in an interview Tuesday. “Our results have gotten better even as the situation has gotten worse. But it’s not sustainable.”

The largest growth in charter schools over the last year was in California, which added 47,000 new students; Florida, with 23,500 new students; Texas, with an extra 22,000; and Ohio, which brought in some 12,000 more.

“Parents have become savvy education consumers,” said Lynn Norman-Teck, spokeswoman for the Florida Consortium of Public Charter Schools.

Overall, about 4.5 percent of all public school students now attend a charter school, and about 5 percent of all public schools are charters.

Charter schools are funded by taxpayers but operate independently of many of the laws and regulations that govern traditional public schools. Advocates praise smaller class sizes and the breadth of curricular options.

But their performance so far has been mixed; a 2009 Stanford University study found only 17 percent performed better than regular public schools while more than twice as many — 37 percent — performed worse. Another 46 percent were about the same.

“There’s a bell curve, if you will, a mixed bag,” Wright said. “We’ve got some that are just performing out of the park, really educating students at the very, very highest levels, creating gains that not too far in the past people questioned if they were even possible. We’ve got some, unfortunately, at the other end of the spectrum.”

Robin Lake, associate director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, said the big expansion has come at the right time: Charter schools have matured and are paying more attention to effectively surveying and addressing the needs of special education, English language learners and other students. At the same time, the traditional public school system seems to have become more accepting of charters, seeing them as part of the fabric of education.

She said there’s also an increased focus on quality rather than quantity.

“Early on people defined a strong law as one that was expansive, let new schools open,” Lake said. “Now people recognize a strong law as one that creates autonomy to start up and do things differently, but are equally strong on accountability and oversight.”

In Florida, for example, a charter school law was passed this spring making it easier for charters deemed as “high performing” to expand. About 57 percent of Florida’s charter schools were given an “A” by the state last school year. Six percent were given an “F,” including a new KIPP charter school in Jacksonville. KIPP, or the Knowledge is Power Program, has schools nationwide and is frequently cited as an example of a successful charter schools network, highlighting the difficulty of replicating good results.

There are also concerns that charter schools could be exacerbating segregation in public schools. Some charters may not be truly accessible to the most disadvantaged kids, depending on transportation and proximity to the highest need areas, said Peter Weitzel, co-editor of the book “The Charter School Experiment.”

Weitzel said charter schools have not lived up to their expectation of being hotbeds for innovation in the classroom either.

“Charter schools are frequently innovative outside the classroom,” he said. “But once you get into the classroom, we’re not really seeing the extent of innovation that people had hoped to see.”

Number of students attending charter schools soars
(AP)

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