Trends in the News Archive - Page 19 of 53

Trends in the News

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The 74 Million, 10/4/18

Small charter schools among big winners in nearly $400 million in new Ed Dept grants

The Education Department has awarded nearly $400 million in grants to help start, expand, and finance new charter schools. The federal charter school grant program has seen some of the biggest funding increases of any federal Education Department grant in recent years. Congress allotted $440 million, a 10 percent increase, for fiscal 2019. Though last year’s winners included a who’s who of big-name charter school organizations like Success Academies and IDEA Public Schools, the 32 school grantees this year are smaller, like the York Academy Regional Charter School Program in York, Pennsylvania, which is expanding to a full K-12 school with an International Baccalaureate program. The grantees won a total of $29.5 million to be given over up to five years.

Charter Schools Federal Education Funding

Chalkbeat, 9/28/18

What happens when you pay students to get ready for college? One state is about to find out, with help from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has a new tactic for helping more students get ready for college: paying them money as they take small steps in that direction. CZI is helping Rhode Island try out the strategy, aimed at high-scoring students from low-income families in the state. The program, called Rhode2College and announced earlier this week, will work like this: Starting in 11th grade, students who qualified for free or reduced-price lunch and who scored well on the 10th-grade PSAT will be able to earn money by completing certain tasks. Those include creating a list of potential colleges, scoring higher on the SAT than the PSAT, submitting a federal financial aid form, and submitting college applications, according to the program’s website.

Higher Ed

Reason Foundation, 9/5/18

Beyond test scores: A central role for financial health in evaluating Arizona’s charter schools

In recent years, the charter sector has led the way in promoting greater transparency, with numerous authorizers adopting financial performance frameworks that track and report on key measures of financial health. With the recent passage of HB 2663, which allows ASBCS to close charters that fail to meet these financial standards, now is a critical time to assess how this framework is working and implement needed improvements. Several reforms can improve ASBCS’s financial performance framework in the short term. The most important areas to address are the framework’s roll-up mechanism and creating the infrastructure needed to close financially distressed charters in a manner that is fair, transparent, and accounts for local context.

Charter Schools

Education Week, 9/30/18

How do districts want to spend flexible ESSA money? It depends on where they are.

ESSA’s Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants, better known as Title IV of the law, just got a huge boost, from $400 million to $1.1 billion. So what are districts going to do with those grants? Forty-one percent of district leaders surveyed said they were interested in spending the funding on professional development. Curriculum was also a big priority…and social-emotional learning and workforce preparation were other big areas of interest. But there are some differences in regional priorities. For instance, districts in the South are more interested in college-and-career readiness than districts elsewhere.

Federal Education Funding

Education Week, 10/1/18

Tax hikes to fund schools? Once taboo, the idea is gaining momentum

Politicians on the state campaign trail this year are making some eye-popping promises for parents and educators: billions more dollars for schools, double-digit pay raises for teachers, and hundreds of millions more to replace dilapidated schoolhouses. And in some states, Democrats are going so far as to broach a topic often seen as off-limits in election season: tax increases. Drawing confidence from poll data, an uptick in successful local referendum measures, and the swell of support for thousands of teachers who went on strike this spring for increased pay, Democrats in states such as Arizona, Florida, and Oklahoma are gambling that voters are so alarmed at the financial disrepair of their local school systems that they’re willing to tax states’ corporations and wealthiest citizens to bail them out.

Local Education Funding State Education Funding

Education Week, 10/1/18

See the new Federal Education Budget signed into law by Donald Trump

In total, the bill Trump signed into law sets the department’s budget at $71.5 billion for fiscal 2019, an increase over fiscal 2018 of $581 million, although that figure doesn’t include a rescission of $500 million from Pell Grant reserves. The spending package largely ignores the push from Trump and DeVos to create new school choice programs, as well as their proposals to cut the Education Department’s overall budget. Not adjusting for inflation, the $71.5 billion budget is the largest-ever appropriation from Congress for the Education Department.

Federal Education Funding

NASBE, 9/3/18

Equipping school leaders to spend wisely

When school-level expenditure data are made public beginning with the 2018–19 school year, many in the system will be caught off guard. District and school leaders are largely unprepared to engage on the issues that the new data will raise: equity, spending trade-offs, and the link between money and school outcomes. This Q&A with Dr. Marguerite Roza shines a light on the pressing need to better support district and school leaders in their work on the spending side of the equation.

School Money and Performance

Education Resource Strategies, 9/10/18

Toolkit: What is Student-Based Budgeting and how can it drive student learning?

SBB (also known as weighted student funding or student-centered funding) has become popular as a way for districts to allocate scarce resources equitably. SBB can have far-reaching consequences for schools and students – when done strategically. To drive student success, SBB must be part of a system strategy to empower and support principals to design their schools to meet students’ needs- i.e., Strategic School Design. Education Resource Strategies’ new SBB Toolkit helps all stakeholders—including academics, school support, and HR—understand how strategic implementation of SBB addresses equity, transparency, and resource flexibility.

Brookings Institution, 9/20/18

The promise of free college (and its potential pitfalls)

This study examines one of the first randomized control trials of a program similar to many free college and promise scholarship proposals. Students in 18 randomly selected high schools were promised up to $12,000 to pay for college, at essentially any in-state institution. The Degree Project had some impact on students’ motivation, college expectations, and steps toward college, such as applying to more colleges and FAFSA completion. However, it had no effect on the performance measures and no effect on whether students went directly on to college. The most recent evidence does suggest that the scholarship may have slightly increased persistence and graduation in two-year colleges, though not in four-year colleges.

Higher Ed

The Guardian, 9/7/2018, 9/7/18

The US spends more on education than other countries. Why is it falling behind?

America’s schools are in trouble – but it’s not all about money. In 2014, the US spent an average of $16,268 a year to educate a pupil from primary through tertiary education…,well above the global average of $10,759. And – at the broad level – all that money does not appear to be translating into better results for US students. The issues are systemic, says Marc Tucker, the NCEE president, and getting worse. The problem, Tucker says, is that US schools were developed on a “factory model” – originally teachers were mainly female graduates with few other options in the workplace. The US still treats its teachers as if that were the case while the world’s most successful school systems have become “professional” and treat the recruitment and development of highly qualified teachers as integral to their education system. The solution is clear, he says. “We have to have more highly educated teachers and we need to pay them more,” he said.

Federal Education Funding School Money and Performance