Keeping tabs on Massachussets' Department of Ed.

2008-01-24T09:50:00.000-08:00

Preliminary Chapter 70 FY 09

The governor's budget has released preliminary numbers for Chapter 70. A quick review indicates the budget follows through on the third year of a five year phase-in to assure that comparable cities and towns receive comparable treatment from the state, using the guidelines and formulas established by the legislature towards that end; as well as using an uncapped price deflator at a little over 5% to realistically adjust the foundation budget, also, I believe, following the legislature's intent if not their ability to fund.

The numbers and formula spreadsheets can be found here.

While the legislature disagrees about the use of gambling revenues to close a structural budget gap, I don't see any reason for major disagreements between the legislature and the governor on this part of the budget this year. The price tag for the chapter 70 proposal is $223 million, about the same as last year.

2007-07-03T19:03:00.000-07:00

Deval Patrick proposes expanding the Board of Education

The governor has proposed expanding the board of education from 9 to 13 members, with the goal of expanding his authority over the Department of Education to match his responsibility as a governor who has chosen to make education reform one of his primary objectives.

I don't like this move as a political means to overcome an independent board, but I do support the governor's objective, and there is some historical context to support the move, both very recent (outgoing governor Romney stacked the board with two new appointees on his way out the door), and relatively recent (Governor Weld dissolved the existing board and cut the board from 17 to 9 members in 1996).

It appears that the Massachusetts Senate also supports the objective of shaking up the existing Board of Education, given that the Governor's action was at a committee hearing for an initiative sponsored by the chair of the Senate Education Committee.

A couple of letters to the editor of the Boston Globe this week shed more light on the issues.

Ed board shuffle: a lesson in irony, on how the Board of Ed was restructured in 1996, with the reconstituted board dominated by conservative think-tank appointees affiliated with the Pioneer Institute.

Schools beset by regulations, by the executive director of the Mass Association of School Committees, expressing concerns about the regulatory burden put in place by the now status-quo board of ed.

Last month's newspaper headlines blasting Deval Patrick for appointing a parent representative approved by the PTA and school committees appeared to me to be a preemptive strike in support of the existing board of education and a warning to the governor regarding the appointment of the next commissioner of education.

I think it is interesting to see the Boston Globe at least allowing letters to the editor expressing a more expansive view, rather than a followup editorial chalking up a second strike against the governor in his actions regarding the board of education. "First he appoints Ruth Kaplan, and now this!". Maybe the Globe's Pioneer delegate has gone sailing for the holiday.

2007-06-29T19:59:00.000-07:00

School Committee writes against NCLB

The Hampshire Gazette writes that the school committee of Amherst voted unanimously in support of a letter recommending changes in No Child Left Behind, to be sent to Massachusetts' senior Senator Kennedy.

I excerpt below the quotes of committee members for those who do not have a Gazettenet subscription.

Some of the recommendation in the letter include: the elimination of annual yearly progress goals for schools, calling them "arbitrary" and "unrealistic"; cutting back on the amount of testing and making the remaining testing more diverse with less of an emphasis on "high-stakes" testing; and changing the standards by which English Language Learners and students with disabilities are assessed, which the LAC called "inequitable."

Luschen said that since standards for testing vary from state to state, some states are able to show improvement in their yearly progress, but their students actually perform more poorly on national tests because their state tests have become less difficult to boost yearly progress results.

"One test is not a good indicator of someone's achievement," Luschen said.

Committee Vice Chairman Andy Churchill agreed that there was too much testing being conducted and said that fifth-grade students in Massachusetts spend four weeks of the school year taking standardized tests.

Churchill said that the data provided by those tests doesn't do anything to improve the instruction those students are receiving, because it becomes available at the end of the year after the students are moving on to sixth-grade.

Churchill said it was "autopsy data rather than biopsy data." Testing should "work for instruction, not get in the way of it," Churchill said.

The letter also recommends providing more local control in regards to school improvements rather than mandates coming from the federal level who don't have direct contact with the schools.

Committee member Michael Hussin recommended emphasizing the need for adequate funding for any mandates that are part of NCLB for the law to have any chance of success.

Luschen and Wenk said they hope to have a final copy of the letter sent to Kennedy by the end of the week.

Though the letter is a bit of a committee laundry list, I concur with most of the themes. Below, some of my thoughs. My studies of the arbitrary and unrealistic nature of AYP can be found else on this blog.

Why should the state require 5th graders to spend four weeks taking tests for state and federal mandates, rather than testing at only one or two subjects per grade except in 10th grade? If you're concerned that limited testing might encourage schools to cheat the testing schedule, assign the tested subject randomly to different schools. And why don't parents get test results within a month after their kids are tested, so the testing can do some good for individual kids, rather than getting results six months after the tests are taken?

And why should Washington and Beacon Hill be expected to have a better idea about how to improve individual school systems than local school committees? The current regulations take already limited control over schools away from school committees, and push it up the bureaucratic hierarchy.

Mass Board of Ed revised some of their restructuring regulations last spring to more or less automate restructuring choices - I suspect in part because of the overwhelming workload they anticipated facing, when several hundred schools at a time face final sanctions. But reading the board notes regarding Holyoke's schools gives me little new confidence that the Board of Ed has a clue how to fix schools one at a time, much less on a commodity outsourcing basis. They've been working for years on Holyoke; but since AYP is an extraordinarly poor measure of progress, board members couldn't even get a sense whether their prescriptions have done any good. Some want to fire management; others think management has done a good job and is respected in the community. Some think the consulting firm that has been guiding Holyoke is poorly matched to the city, though no supporting evidence was given.

Can you imagine the chaos if the Board of Ed is charged with restructuring 75% of the schools in the Massachussets at the same time, if they can't even do the job on one district at a time?

2007-06-14T14:53:00.000-07:00

Ruth Kaplan, PTA representative on the Board of Ed

Governor Deval Patrick made his first appointment to the Massachusetts Board of Education this week, filling a spot on the board authorized by the legislature two years ago but never filled by former governor Romney. The governor is instructed to select from three nominees made by the state PTA. Governor Romney was not willing to select any of the nominees offered for the past two years.

Media coverage this week was nearly unanimous, castigating the governor for selecting an "anti-MCAS zealot". A different opinion was presented by the Berkshire Eagle and by the Needham Times, which see an opportunity for a more flexible and nuanced path forward. I concur with these two op-eds.

Below is an excerpt from a June 2005 news article in the Boston Globe, when our former governor refused to select any of the PTA nominees offered.

Romney, PTA tussle over appointment

Governor unhappy with parent group's choices for education panel

By Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff June 8, 2005

The idea seemed harmless: Put a parent on the state Board of Education for the first time, so that parents' concerns would be heard.

But the naming of a parent to the Board of Education has become a surprisingly intense tug-of-war between the state Parent Teachers Association and Governor Mitt Romney. Two weeks ago, the PTA sent Romney a list of three women from which to choose, including two Democrats, and asked the governor to pick one.
Instead, an aide from the governor's office last week told the PTA that the governor wanted three additional candidates, perhaps including a man. The problem with the PTA's list, a spokeswoman for Romney said, was that the candidates opposed the MCAS and charter schools. In the governor's view, the PTA's list didn't include someone who would represent most parents.
...

2007-06-06T22:07:00.000-07:00

Deval Patrick Readiness Project Press Release

Can be found here

2007-06-05T18:52:00.000-07:00

The Readiness Project

Governor Deval Patrick's speech at the U-MASS Boston commencement was reported as the announcement of the governor's new education plan. The focus of subsequent news articles has been on a couple points made in the speech.

Free tuition to community colleges

Universal extended day and universal pre-K

I don't claim any special expertise on community colleges. It seems like a good idea to make community college affordable. I agree with most of the op-ed in today's Hampshire Gazette, which I quote in some detail at the end of this post.

I do note that the summaries printed in the news reports appear to be tangential or perhaps even at odds with the speeches a few weeks ago at annual meeting of school committees and in Framingham. Those speeches focused on the other talking point, "the property tax is not working". The summaries of this speech point to new and expensive long term initiatives but do not say anything about measuring the true cost of K-12 ed or addressing the problem of paying for too much of it with property tax revenues.

Reading the details of the governor's speech, there was more to the speech than was reported, but I paraphrase a news quote from Lexington, it seems impractical to contemplate expensive new initiatives at a time when resources to cover existing needs are scarce. A meaningful shift of K-12 funding away from the property tax would require something near a $Billion of new state funds, which would bring Mass closer to the national average in terms of local/state funding split. The governor's new initiatives appear at least on the same order of magnitude, and no source of new funds has been mentioned yet by the governor, left to a task force to identify. Double or nothing?

Gazette quote:

The governor has no price tag for the plan but said it was workable and dismissed, in advance, any naysayers. The governor makes a bold statement about the importance of education, but the financial realties need to be understood in order to fully gauge its impact.

A study last fall by the state Board of Higher Education estimated it would cost between $25 million and $40 million in the first year to offer two years of free community college to high school graduates who met the qualifications. At a time when many state college facilities are in need of upgrades, free tuition could put physical plant improvements on hold.

If the state has jobs that require a two-year degree, do the colleges have the programs to develop the right skills for those jobs? Developing new academic programs will also cost money.

In an interview with the Gazette, GCC President Robert Pura said cost is the commonwealth's "single biggest barrier" to higher education. No doubt cost keeps eligible individuals from attending college, but others can afford it. Is a tuition-free community college the best way to serve the neediest, or does a big boost in scholarships and financial aid work better?

Other states have experimented with free community colleges - California most notably - only to abandon the idea. A special study group being set up by the governor to examine the idea should certainly look at the experiences of other states.

Gov. Patrick has offered an appealing vision, but right now that's all it is. We look forward to a vigorous discussion of the merits and affordability of the plan.

2007-05-31T20:29:00.000-07:00

Patrick to lay out Education Roadmap to 2015

WRPI has an AP report that says Deval Patrick will roll out his ed plan at a UMASS-Boston commencement speech tomorrow, June 1st.

A Berkshire Eagle report a few days ago was titled Tight Lid on School Plan.

2007-05-28T22:35:00.000-07:00

Nix Casinos

State Senator Dan Bosley gives a very credible economic argument against casinos over at Blue Mass Group.

A few details. Mass Lottery is among the most successful in the country, at $952 Million of revenues to towns. Connecticutt casinos only generate about $400 million, and the margin to the state for casinos is considerably slimmer than for the lottery, meaning about $7 of casino revenue would need to be generated for each $1 of lottery sales lost due to a casino.

As a math focused guy, I have to concur, if these numbers are close to correct. Mass Casinos would not create significant new state revenues.

2007-05-25T08:30:00.000-07:00

Casinos

A proposal from the state treasurer, probably acting with some leeway by the governor. The Wampanoags will be able to open a casino, Connecticutt already collects $1 Billion a year from Mass residents.

The legislature has opposed casinos, for a variety of reasons (moral, fiscal,economic).

Mass State Lottery generates a bit less than $1B a year, and is considered a slow-growth revenue source now.

An earlier op-ed by Derrick Jackson was titled "No Jackpot with Casino Gambling".

No comments from here, except that it fits in with the idea of the governor exploring all revenue options.

2007-05-23T08:17:00.000-07:00

A series of columns about a rural school district in Massachusetts

The superintendent of the Gateway regional school has run a remarkable series of columns focusing on the squeeze on rural school districts, both financially and in terms of accountability.

The state budget issues are addressed in the following columns.

March 5
March 26
April 2nd
April 16
April 23
April 30
May 7
May 14th

And a couple on accountability issues, and the related budget issues.

March 12th
March 19th
April 9th
May 21 (current issue)

And a school committee appeal for the "R.E.D" circuit breaker, plus the proposed budget including consolidation of elementary schools.

I can't improve on Superintendent David Hopson's commentary on either budgets or accountability, and I recommend the whole series for anyone interested in the issues. Clearly, Gateway is a well administered district, in spite of its fiscal difficulties.

In terms of target local share, the Gateway Regional district will receive $244K below its target aid share next year, or 2.1% of its foundation budget less than the state says is equitable. This puts Gateway in the bottom 11 regional school districts in the state as far as aid shortfall; not as bad as Franklin County (2.6% of foundation), Wachusett (4.3%) Hampshire (4.7%), Hampden Wilbraham (7.6%). But two-thirds of the amount that could be saved by shuttering a couple town's elementary schools.

Three of the seven towns in the Gateway Regional pay required minimum contributions far above their target local share, one paying 32.4% over, and another paying 24.6% over, and a third pays 15.7% over. For all this overpaying, the required contributions plus state aid only amounts to 101.1% of foundation this year.

2007-05-21T07:34:00.000-07:00

Rural Schools

Two articles today. One from The Republican, titled "Rural Schools Fighting Trend', can be found with a google search on that title. I haven't linked to the article because it's in Masslive's paid archives now.

Much of the article focuses on the Mohawk Regional, where a budget recommendation calls for closing three out of four elementary schools in an eight-town, 250 square mile district.

There is a big hitch to the consolidation plan. Closure of the three schools would only be viable if the state Legislature agrees to let towns that receive 75 percent reimbursement on bonds used to pay for school improvements off the hook over a provision that requires towns to pay the full payments if the schools are closed.

Buoniconti, a former technology teacher who took over the district in June 2005, is lobbying legislators to make that happen.

Buoniconti calls the financial situation at Mohawk and other districts like it "a death spiral."

The districts are rural, many residents have low incomes, and the population is declining. The enrollment in the Mohawk District has declined 22 percent in the last five years, mirroring population loss in that area.

"Mohawk has somehow managed to stay right under the edge, being able to sustain some pretty good educational performance while doing it on a shoestring. That can't go on forever," he said.

...

It becomes an education problem when you close a school and it causes a student to be on the bus for more than an hour. We're looking at an average 1½-hour bus ride for the average student from the most remote communities (Plainfield and Heath)," Buoniconti said.

Key point: there is a limit to consolidation. I think two towns is about the limit for a viable and sustaining elementary school, depending on local factors; lower than that, and the towns will be fighting a downward spiral simply to maintain their population and economic base.

The state's current policies on school choice and the foundation budget are not working well for rural areas. If nothing else, the state should be considering its own stranded costs for capital assets - the Sanderson Academy is a brand new school building - as well as the full extent of current and projected regional transportation costs. Are children who spend an average of an hour and a half a day on a bus getting an equal education? The state's current opinion seems to be that these areas simply are not self-sustaining and it isn't the state's problem, but perhaps it is time to figure out how to apply very small scale local schooling in an economical way; or until that can be achieved, at least apply a different scale factor on administrative costs and overhead in the foundation budget that is inversely proportional to feasible transportation times & costs.

The choice formula, also, isn't working for these declining population rural districts. Geography doesn't make these places attractive for choice schools - charter schools are located where the geography lends itself to inflow, and public choice goes the same direction. Not every place with favorable geography is a school choice nexus, but there are very few choice schools located in unfavorable places. Some of the kids living in the Mohawk district can attend choice schools that are more favorably located, but the cost to the kids left behind, and the local taxpayers and other local stakeholders, for following the state model exceeds the benefits to those opting out.

The state's mandate is to offer an equal education for all, even those in towns with unfavorable geography combined with unfavorable demographics.

2007-05-18T05:40:00.000-07:00

Worcester Telegram Property taxes spark dissent

This one is a local article about a Republican at-large candidate running for city council, running on opposition to a property tax hike. But, as the article says, this taps into the same thread Deval Patrick tapped in the race for Governor last year, and which Patrick has put forward as a primary reason for reforming school funding - "The property tax is not working".

This Telegram article is not school focused, and does not touch on the state .vs. local tax issue; but I think it raises an important point. The property tax is again elevated in concern as it was prior to Prop 2.5, and the governor has framed this issue as one the governor should work to resolve.

I think this raises a conundrum. Voters want taxes cut across the board - state taxes, local taxes, federal taxes.

The governor's only concrete proposal on the table, local option taxes, are not big enough in scale to make a serious dent in this issue. They could help, but the median telephone pole tax, I calculate, is eight-tenths of one percent of local required minimums for schools. For about 50 towns, the telephone pole tax would be above 2% of school spending. A nice addition to local revenue, but not something I would call a bold and sweeping reform.

For Boston, my estimate is that the combination of telephone tax plus a 1% meal tax could amount to 7% of the local school bill, using the Globe's $20 million figure for a 1% sales tax on meals. That's enough to be worth Tom Menino's serious attention. But that's near the top of the list across the state.

But for a counter example, in Amherst, I think the numbers would come in at about one-fifth of the size of the property tax override that was defeated a couple weeks ago - with the small margin in the vote likely swayed by the governor's message that "the property tax isn't working". Amherst could certainly use the revenue diversification, but the governor's proposal won't solve their budget problems.

Or neighboring Granby, where the $1,305 for telephone pole property taxes compares with their $4 million local funding for schools. Granby is awaiting $442 thousand a year of additional Chapter 70 aid, when target local share is completed.

2007-05-16T09:08:00.000-07:00

Waltham Times Op-Ed on Charter Schools

The Herald's op-ed yesterday was essentially cheerleading for charters. This one takes a more balanced view, and probes what charters should be trying to do, while also stating the editors consider charters are an education reform success.

2007-05-16T08:37:00.000-07:00

Talking Stoneham blog comments

on the Governor's Education Task Forces.

This is a serious blog focusing on Stoneham issues from a local government perspective. The blog entry focuses on process for the task forces.

2007-05-15T06:44:00.000-07:00

Boston Herald Op-Ed on New Ed Plan

This one reporting on a charter school study by charter school proponents claiming charter schools test scores are higher than scores overall for the sending district, for subgroups.

I don't regularly read the paper copies of either the Globe or the Herald, and I'm relying on google searches to ferret out these news reports. I was curious why I had not found any Globe editorials or stories on Patrick's ed plan. I saw one story that references Winchester's struggles to maintain funding, using a private foundation to pay teacher's salaries, which Patrick has apparently pointed to as an example of over-reliance on the property tax for ed funding; plus a couple articles about the meals tax (I don't see the meals tax as a panacea for rural Mass, and think whatever new tax is proposed should be broadly based, statewide, and less regressive than sales & property taxes - but those are personal opinions that I see as tangential to the purpose of this blog).

Ah, here is a Globe report on Patrick's visit to Framingham.

Here's the simple fix for Framingham: accelerate target local share reform. The news article says Framingham is trying to close a $2 million funding gap. But the state's shortfall from Framingham's target local share is $7.9 million. Framingham will receive 20% of its foundation budget in state aid, but has a target aid share of 31%.

If the state simply equalized aid to comparable school districts, Framingham's budget problem would be resolved. Framingham's problem is on the same scale as Pelham's, Whately's, Westhampton's, and Lee's - that is, these districts have been shortchanged about as much as any municipality in the state for years, and continue to be shortchanged primarily because the main determining factor for this year's aid allocation is how much you got last year. Target local share establishes an "ideal" level of state support based on a town's aggregate wealth and school burden, but target local share is being phased in slowly, and relies on the continuing support of the legislature and the governor.

Patrick could make good on property tax relief for about half of the state's municipalities simply by following through on target share reform. Add in Winchester, Greenfield, Chicopee, Pittsfield, Chelmsford, Hatfield, Ludlow, Holden, Norwood, ...

2007-05-14T22:33:00.000-07:00

Op Ed, Attleboro Sun Chronicle

An opinion piece from a mostly Republican slice of far-suburban southern Mass, speaking about a possible realigning deal on property taxes and state school funding appealing to the middle (Attleboro) rather than to the low end (Lawrence) or the high (Dover). Excerpts below.

Massachusetts politics: You've got to love it, like lately, when sources on both right and left are saying that Gov. Deval Patrick's property tax remedy plan won't work.

What's lovable about this - in the sense that you've got to love the absurdity of it, as the reality would be too much to bear - is that Patrick hasn't made his plan public yet. He has merely dropped a few hints that one is coming. The Sun Chronicle area's Republican lawmakers, as well as an array of sources on Beacon Hill, seem to be saying "whatever it is, it won't work."

...

We also believe an education funding shift is possible. There is a precedent in the area of public welfare, burdens of which the state relieved cities and towns in the early 1960s. And we believe that if Patrick and the Legislature don't act on their own, there will eventually be court action to force their hands. Other states have been forced into school funding reform when lawsuits demonstrated that students in different cities and towns received educations that were inequitable in quality. Massachusetts has made many adjustments, but it appears very much open to charges of inequity when the state has paid as much as 100 percent of the education costs in a Lawrence and only 10 percent in a Dover.

2007-05-10T21:35:00.000-07:00

Governor Deval Patrick speaks about education in Framingham

Education reform. Patrick said the traditional structure of combining state aid and local property taxes to fund school systems is ineffective because it creates "disparate" and "unintended outcomes" from community to community. He said school boards should consider long-term planning through budgets lasting three to five years, instead of annual ones.

This is a different message, and one that appears to me more in line with the legislature's intention in target local share reform. One of the main reasons school boards can't plan three to five years ahead is that the state changes course, typically more than once each year, with changes coming as late as three months AFTER locales have to pass budget proposals. For a three year plan to work, the state would have to commit up front to three years of funding - both the aggregate amount, as well as what each school district could expect.

But target local share at least takes a step in that direction, if the governor and the legislature stick to that plan. Target share seeks to correct disparate and unintended outcomes from community to community.

Caveat; Framingham has been far on the short end of disparate outcomes in local aid, so, the governor was speaking to the local audience.

2007-05-09T08:13:00.000-07:00

School Funding 2.0

Our new governor, Deval Patrick, created a buzz about fixing the way Massachusetts pays for public schools. The only thing definite is the governor's opinion about property taxes, which was clearly articulated during the campaign, and repeated at the Mass Association of School Committees annual meeting:

"The property tax is not working."

I found a couple of analytic opinion pieces on this subject that are worth a look.
One appeared in the Montague Reporter, entitled Ed Reform Creates a Wrecking Ball for Local Government, by the chair of the Montague finance committee. I concur with much of this article, though I think the author's conclusion that the state's wrecking ball falls hardest on places that already receive the most state aid only captures part of the picture. A couple other points, summarized in my words; the state should assure that its contributions keep up with the real rate of ed inflation, and cost containment should be part of any reform.

Another is an op-ed in the Boston Herald, written by Edward Moscovitch of Cape Ann Economics. I disagree with Moscovitch's headline premise - that a statewide prop tax is the solution, to raise $4.7 billion of new state funds for education. But I respect Moscovitch's credentials, as the author of a study that I've quoted on other blogs before regarding No Child Left Behind and its impossible proficiency goals.

Moscovitch offers a statewide property tax over other taxes available at the state level as being a more effective means of raising the required revenues, offering an exemption on the first $100,000 of valuation to make the tax more progressive, and another exemption for seniors. I think this is dancing around the problem of raising taxes at the state level, and there would be just as much or more revolt against a statewide property tax as against higher income tax rates. Patrick is not likely to be seen as fixing the problem he set out to fix if he replaces local property tax revenue with local property tax revenue collected from other towns. Particularly not in places like Gloucester, with very high property values but a perception that working class incomes are not matching those valuations. I think the only thing going for a statewide property tax is that property tax revenues are more consistent from year to year than the income tax, which is more cyclical. But I think there are other ways to solve that problem.

Moscovitch also touches the subjects of the foundation budget actually reflecting education costs, and the subject of cost control:

We should change the inflation adjustment factor to reflect actual Massachusetts health care and other costs (the current factor is based on national data) and raise the foundation budget to fit more closely what schools actually spend. When the extra costs this implies become a state responsibility, there would be a stronger incentive to address the problem - certainly by making sure that teachers received their health coverage through the more efficient state plan.

My two cents on Patrick's likely direction: I suspect he wants to reevaluate the foundation budget, perhaps raising the foundation by about 10% and perhaps doing that in a way that better reflects No Child Left Behind mandates for subgroups; and he'd like to shift funding away from property taxes to state revenues. He's also said the charter school funding formula should be fixed, and presumably a comprehensive plan would include something to reduce the impact on local budgets there, as well.

As far as my advocacy, I'd like the governor to make sure the existing commitment to equalize aid and burdens, particularly for regional school members, in the form of target share reform, is completed. About 100 towns that are members of regional schools face high property tax burdens for schools primarily because of errors in the existing state formulas, and regulations that propagate those errors into regional school "required minimum" contributions. In terms of the numbers, the state can accelerate the regulatory portion of target share reform, while reducing both the short term and the long term demands on state tax revenues, by focusing effort reduction on required contributions that are truly excessive next year.

For example, if the governor's goal is to increase the foundation budget by 10%, then effort reduction could wipe out ALL excess effort above 110% of the current target local share, in a much more cost-effective way than following next year's proposed effort reduction. And the governor would have 100 more towns where he fixed the problem of excessive property tax burdens.

2007-04-08T09:24:00.000-07:00

Chapter 70 - Joint Resolution Spreadsheet

DOE has posted the joint resolution spreadsheet for Chapter 70 this year. That is an improvement over last year, because it allows the details to be reviewed before, rather than after, the legislation is finalized.

The result has a couple surprises. One is that the legislature raised property taxes and nobody noticed, in two different ways, totaling several tens of millions. One moves towards taxpayer equity, by $20 million; the other moves away from it. Here's the one that moves towards equity, as quoted by the website:

Effort increase for low effort communities. In FY07, municipalities whose required contribution was below their target had their requirement increased by their municipal revenue growth factor. For FY08, House 1 retained this requirement. The Joint Resolution provides for a small additional increase, above the municipal revenue growth factor, for those communities significantly below their target. This change, which results in about $20 million in increased requirements statewide, is intended to slow the growing gap between their target and required contributions. Even with the change, the excess deficit for low effort communities remains $322 million, about the same as in FY07. It should also be noted that actual spending in many of these municipalities already exceeds their requirement; for these communities, increases in the requirement will not require increases in local appropriations.

The one that moves away from equity is that the legislature scaled back the governor's 30% effort reduction to 25%. The governor had already scaled back the legislature's preannounced intention to apply 40% effort reduction.

For towns that are members of regional schools, effort reduction means bringing comparable towns to comparable required spending levels. So, unless the Senate chooses to revisit the issue of fairness of regional school allocations, it looks like another year of arbitrary and capricious demands by the state. This is unfortunate, because there are several ways the legislature could have begun to restore equity on the spending regulation side of the equations, at little or no cost to the state.

The cynical might imagine, if this is indeed all the help that overburdened localities that have been unfairly singled out to pay effective surtaxes get in a year when the governor was elected with a message of flexibility to ease property tax burdens, that there is little interest among elected officials in allowing any town to reduce state mandated spending that results in unequal burdens for comparable locales, even if the legislator's formulas and white papers say that is a goal.

Back to the spreadsheet, the net changes are that last year's downpayment and growth formulas were both fully restored (no prorating on the growth formula either). And the legislature made one smart fiscal move, applying downpayment aid at 30% even though effort reduction was applied at only a 25% rate. This means less locales will show up in the baseline aid figures next year before "discretionary" increases begin, I suspect from my two-year models on the order of about $10 million. I don't know if this was an intended consequence, but it is a reasonable one.

Summarizing the locales that "lost out" from the governor’s aid numbers to the legislatures', several were among those making the "effort increase for low effort communities". The rest where the artificial winners using the House1 downpayment/growth aid formula.

But the biggest losers, in terms of fraction of budget, were among regional school members whose property taxes were raised by the legislature, which the press didn't even notice. I haven't tallied up these totals yet, but it's a noticeable fraction of local property tax revenues for several towns, in a year when the legislature had promised relief, rather than increased burdens.

Message from several towns to the legislature - please spend your money, rather than ours. If you need to spend our money, make sure you're doing it fairly, and take credit for raising our property taxes when you do it.

2007-04-04T19:51:00.000-07:00

Chapter 70 - Legislature's numbers

The legislature released its target numbers for Chapter 70 aid today. I can't tell if they have done anything about fixing the surtax on "high effort" members of regional schools or not, but they do appear to have improved the distribution of aid, as shown in their plot for locales awaiting target share aid to the right.

Chart reading guide at bottom of message ; click on either chart to expand)

Compare this plot with the plot from House1.

These two plots sort the 180 or so locales waiting for additional school aid , ordered by the fraction of their foundation budget of shortfall. The darker line in each plot represents the target, while the red dots (or purple dots) represent actual aid allocations in the Legislatures, and the House1, preliminary numbers.

The main point of interest in the two plots is that a number of locales awaiting significant increases of aid were stuck in minimum $50 increment cellar in the House1 plot, while in the legislature's numbers, the dominant trend line of the red dots is a 30% phase-in towards the target. The legislature much more uniformly brings locales towards their target.

Kudos to the legislature for not leaving 86 cities, towns, and regional school districts behind.

2007-03-25T20:31:00.000-07:00

A minor quibble

The Mass Budget and Policy Center is a fine organization that gives generally sound analysis of Massachusetts budget issues.

I'd like to quibble over a detail in their analysis of the the governor's budget for FY08.

The new cost in FY 2008 of paying for inflation and enrollment changes is $127 million. That is the number that our analysis uses as the baseline education cost increase.

$127 million is indeed the number that the spreadsheet spits out if every method of aid allocation other than mandatory increases to fill in every town and regional school district from required local contributions up to the foundation budget level is disabled.

However, looking at the "Comparison to FY07" table, zooming over to the change of aid from last year column, we find that only 143 out of 328 districts receive any increase at all, while 181 are unchanged.

Summing the foundation budgets for the districts that do receive an automatic aid increase this year, I calculate that as $4.5 Billion, or about 55% of the total. Implying that a comparable percentage increase for the other 181 towns and regional schools would bring the inflation-only baseline up to $232 million, or about $32 million more than Patrick's proposal.

The legislator's preliminary announced goal was for a $255 million increase over last year, including 2nd year committments to fund target local share reform.

Neither my corrrection nor the Mass Budget Center's is really a good estimate of inflation, for that we should compare foundation budget costs between last year and this, and there, I find a 4.8% increase, compared with a $3.63% figure corresponding to the baseline increase of $127 million. So we could estimate a $169 million increase as the inflation cost. That implies that the foundation budget has indeed been truly adjusted for school cost inflation; some suspect that the foundation budget has not really been keeping up with the minimal cost of an acceptable school, because doing so would force the state to make significant additional "baseline" foundation aid allocations.

I'd go with a number closer to $232 million, if we want to give the 181 towns that did not automatically receive additional aid an increase comparable to the 143 that did in the baseline budget.

2007-03-20T22:33:00.000-07:00

An example

The Cape Cod regional school has twelve member towns, and each of them fits into the 17.5% target local share category. That is to say, they are all fairly wealthy and judged by target local share capable of making equal contributions for the schools.

The governor's preliminary numbers for this year assesses Provincetown $16,440 per student, which is 54.7% above its target of $10,631 per student.

Not to be outdone, Chatham is assessed $16,479, with the same $10,631 judged as the target local share.

Yarmouth is the lucky winner at this regional school, assessed exactly at its target local share of $10,223.

Overall, the state forces $916,319 of excess payments, unequally spread among ten of the member towns ranging from 11.7% overpayment to 55% overpayment, with two lucky towns paying at their target share.

Presumably, if this group of twelve towns were all given the correct and roughly equal minimum assessments exactly at their target share, at least seven of the member towns would vote to continue supporting the school generously. The mutually agreeable burden, beyond the foundation level, would be split equally and fairly among the towns. It's quite likely accommodations would even be made to acknowledge the difficulty for the towns which are currently subsidized to come immediately up to an equal assessment

And this is, in fact, the goal of the target local share reform, but the problem is, in this the second year of phasing in towards target local share, these towns still have a disparity of state-mandated spending of 55% between top and bottom, though all of the towns are judged equally capable of supporting the school.

And how about that $16,479 required assessment for Chatham? Why should the state mandate any town to spend that much money per student, when most other towns across the state spend half that much on their schools?

This is the most extreme example in the state, and my apologies to the folks on the Cape if this posting inflames any simmering disputes between these towns.

The purpose of this post is to illustrate the importance of finding a way to quickly resolve these absurd unjustifiable disparities between comparable towns participating in regional schools.

Given that the state is in a fiscal crunch, it seems the smartest way to approach this is with regulatory relief that seeks to minimize the required new spending at the state level. The governor's proposal slows down reform to save money, but putting a cap on the excess spending requirements in a way that avoids allocations of additional local school aid from the state can keep the reform on the five year schedule, or even accelerate it so that most of the reform occurs on the "gradual" four year schedule originally proposed by the Department of Ed.

2007-03-15T18:32:00.000-07:00

Background on the concept of Target Local Share

A paper can be found here describing a reform currently underway in Massachusetts' education funding formulas for allocating state aid and spending burden.

The basic goal of this reform is to assure that required spending and aid allocations are based on communities' ability to pay. I agree and believe this is an overdue reform.

I quote below the timetable and methodology this paper advocates for the reform.

Above-effort cities and towns should be given some relief on an annual basis. This is the group that should be most aggrieved, and whose relief should be easiest to accomplish. These communities should no longer be required to raise their annual contributions by the MRGF. Furthermore, their requirements should be lowered by a certain percentage of the amount that they currently exceed their effort goal. This proposal uses 25 percent, resulting in a drop of $91 million in FY06. Phasing in this relief over four years would accomplish big improvements in disparity at relatively little cost in additional state aid. In the second year of implementation, 50 percent of the excess would be eliminated, and in the third year 75 percent. In the fourth year and thereafter, no city or town would be required to make more than its effort goal.

The actual methodolgy implemented by the legislature starting last year calls for a five-year phase-in period, but also continues to grow annual contributions by their MRGF prior to reducing effort - and this has meant the first two years of reform are considerably below the gradual target that this paper set.

As for where I disagree with this paper:

It is important to have a quantifiable goal for taxpayer equity, but it is neither reasonable nor necessary to make a radical change from the existing system. As long as there is a goal, it can serve as a target, which can be approached gradually over time.

This paper was written during the second year for phase-in of a different reform with the Orwellian name of "disparity reduction". Since that time, "disparity reduction" has forced many locales to make radical redistributions of their local contributions - that is, of the property tax revenues towns raise - and this shift has often resulted in shifts of 20% or more of budgets from one school district to another, typically from a local elementary school to a regional upper school.

Because disparity reduction has been performed on unequalized contributions, existing errors have often been propagated and amplified. If target local share had been implemented prior to or in conjunction with disparity reduction, I think the outcome would have been reasonable, but the status quo is unacceptable.

I agree with the concept that the burden of regional schools should reflect ability to pay (many people do not, and believe the contract under which regional schools were formed should govern assessments). But I vehemently, rabidly protest having an unfair formula wrench away local school funds to subsidize other communities of comparable ability to pay, or to allow the state to withhold aid that is calculated as due.

Thus I disagree with the commissioner of education's expression that gradually phasing in taxpaper equity is reasonable, particularly given that "disparity reduction" has not been gradual and has often moved away from, rather than towards, taxpaper equity.

The governor's proposed budget for this year scales back the 2nd year goal for target local share reform from the the 40% target established by the legislature to 30%. Recall, that 40% target was below this paper's proposed 50% target for the second year. At 30%, regional assessments for many towns continue to move away from, rather than towards, equity for FY08.

If this reform is going to be slowed down because the state cannot afford to pay the full freight, I think it is time for the state to explore regulatory changes that would release some of the extremes but which would have relatively small cost of actual aid dollars. One such reform option is to limit the maximum required contribution for all towns to something like 110% of their target share. A limit at that level would:

- Lop off about 55% of the excess effort - about $270 Million
- Cost about the same as the governor's scaled back 30% proposal.
- Benefit about 154 communities which currently have mandated spending above 110% of target share.

The reason it would cost so little in aid dollars is that aid allocation is non-linear, and most of these corrections don't push communities beyond the threshold where additional aid would kick in. For the few locales where aid does kick in, it is aid that the formulas acknowledge is due, and these locales are among the furthest from target aid levels in the state. Aid would also kick in for some regional schools where spending is currently at or just above foundation; but the amount of aid required to correct for the locales which are currently being punished by the formulas is relatively small potatoes. The aggrieved locales are typically small or medium-sized towns, and only about one out of every three or four towns in each regional has a very large difference from target. Meaning, again, a large bang for the buck in restoring equity at very little cost to the state - and all of the cost is something the state acknowledges it ought to be bearing sooner if not later.

I think a cap is appropriate even if it is as part of the legislature's 40% plan. A cap at 120% of foundation would add only $10 million of additional current year cost, and would quell much of the riot over excessive regional allocations. And $10 Million is the sort of aid that would otherwise likely be allocated as "foundation reserve" funds that ought to be going to the same locales. A 120% cap is enough to get most errant regional allocations to make meaningful movement in the correct direction, something not apparent in the preliminary governor's spreadsheet.

2007-03-14T07:46:00.000-07:00

Review of the logic of NCLB, reality check

Assume for a moment that the reality check from today's Washington Post is correct - 100% proficiency is not a realistic expectation and it will leave most schools labelled as inadequate and subject to NCLB sanctions - what does this imply of the logic for NCLB sanctions?

The logic, if this assumption is correct, is that the sanctions prescribed are appropriate reforms for most schools, regardless of their academic performance. That is, these reforms in and of themselves are good for schools, whether or not the schools make adequate progress.

Here are the allowed sanctions. My review of each prescribed sanction suggests that none of them appear appropriate school reforms in and of themselves. Your mileage may vary, but it seems worth asking whether support for NCLB correlates with different player's opinions on each of these sanctions as stand-alone reforms.

Requirements for Corrective Action

The district must take one of the following ...

replace school staff relevant to the failure
institute and implement a new curriculum
significantly decrease management authority in the school
appoint outside experts to advise the school
extend school year or school day
restructure internal organization of the school.

Requirements for a Restructuring Plan
School plan must include one of the following alternative governance arrangements --

Reopen school as a public charter school
Replace all or most of school staff, including the principal
Enter into a contract with an entity, such as a private management company, with a demonstrated record of effectiveness to operate the school
Any other major restructuring of the school's governance arrangement

2007-03-14T06:44:00.000-07:00

WP: 'No Child' Target Is Called Out of Reach

The Washington Post has often toed to inside-the-beltway line that NCLB mandates and sanctions are both achieveable and working. Today's article gives reality a passing nod, by pointing out a couple of the things I've said here.

Two items in particular:

But testing experts say there are vast academic differences among children of the same racial or socioeconomic background. Countries with far less racial diversity than the United States still find wide variations in student performance. Even in relatively homogenous Singapore, for example, a world leader in science and math tests, a quarter of the students tested are not proficient in math, and 49 percent fall short in science.

and

Although no major school system is known to have reached 100 percent proficiency, Education Department officials pointed to individual schools across the country that have reached the standard as evidence that it is possible. In Virginia, schools have achieved universal proficiency on reading and math tests 45 times since 2002, officials said.

The only school they cited in the Washington region as having met that mark was the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, a regional school with selective admissions. Principal Evan M. Glazer said his school, which has an elite reputation, was hardly a representative example. On whether the nation can replicate that success, Glazer said: "I don't think it's very realistic."

I doubt that inconvenient truths will change the zeitgeist inside the beltway, where rhetorical flourish trumps reality, but who knows?

On the home front in Massachusetts, the policy issue relevant to this article regards Massachusetts' position having the most stringent proficiency standard in the nation. Which pre-ordains about 98% of schools as failing, even if they beat Singapore's achievements in math performance. As I pointed out here, only Boston Latin Academy - an exam school - currently comes close to meeting the 100% proficiency standard that will soon be required of all schools in Massachusetts.

This blog is going to focus on problems in the funding formulas, also overseen by the MASS DOE, in the coming months, rather than on the testing and sanctions side of schools. We'll probably be back to focusing on testing again next fall, once this spring's MCAS test scores start making headlines about failing schools again, but for the time being, we'll focus on inequities in the highly-regulated spending and aid allocation formulas in MASS.

2007-03-04T16:18:00.000-08:00

What happened since 1993

Last post I gave a brief background of how Ed Reform financing has had to wrestle with Massachusett's Prop 2.5, with the suprising unintended consequence that some locales with a stingy history have had windfalls of state aide t0 assure their childen have equal education funding.

To make this clear, I support the idea of progressive financing for schools, but not the idea that town with a history of underfunding its schools because of tax aversion should receive more state support for their schools that a town with similar wealth but with greater support for education.

At the time ed reform began, in 1993, the legislature had to come up with a mechanism to assure that towns increase their funding of schools in line with their Prop-2.5 limited tax base. What they came up with was a factor called "Municipal Revenue Growth Factor", and the formula was quite simple - a town's required spending for education had to rise by its MRGF, and the state would generally continue to support it either at the level of the previous year or bring it up to the calculated "foundation budget" level.

After 13 years, this led to even wilder disparities between seemingly similar locales. Some cities, such as Cambridge, with skyrocketing housing prices and a declining public school population, were forced to pay well above "foundation" spending, as much as double the foundation level - upwards of $20,000 per student per year in some cases; while some other locales of quite average ability to pay were subsidized far beyond their need and never forced to pay a cent above the foundation level.

Last year, after discussing the problem for a number of years, the governor and legislature chose to phase in a correction to the problem. Over a five year period, they would allow towns that had been forced to pay beyond their calculated means to reduce their schools spending and receive additional state assistance to fill in the gap - assuring that spending would remain at or above the foundation level.

I'll save the special case of regional schools for another post, along with the current political dilemmas of this reform.

2007-03-02T14:06:00.000-08:00

Massachusetts Ed Reform funding, as constrained by Prop 2.5

In Massachusetts, property taxes are limited by a ballot initiative call proposition 2.5. Basicly, a town's total property tax levy cannot rise by more than 2.5% each year unless the town votes to approve a larger increase. The baseline is set at whatever a town's tax levy was in 1980 when the initiative passed.

Education reform was initiated in 1993, with the goal of assuring that every municipality spends at least a "foundation" amount of money for its schools. State funds are allocated to towns to increase their total spending to at least the "foundation" level.

Now, you might notice that these two laws are at odds. The state has limited ability to force towns to increase spending because of the Prop 2.5 limitations. But comparable towns were spending wildly different amounts of money for schools when Ed Reform began. And, no suprise, 14 years later - towns STILL are treated quite differently in terms of education funding equity.

Simply put, Prop 2.5's limits on funds that a town can raise, combined with the goal of equalizing financial resources for schools in different towns, means some tax-averse towns have been getting a windfall, while some other towns that historically supported their schools more than comparable wealth towns have been shortchanged in the allocation of state education and regional school funds.

There's the background.

Last year, the legislature began to phase in a correction seeking to achieve greater equity of state support for schools based on a town's school burden and ability to pay. The intention was to bring shortchanged towns up to appropriate funding levels in five years. This could have been achieved immediately by reducing state funds to locales receiving more than equitable funding, but that approach was never even contemplated - and thus, the reform requires additional state revenues.

Now we've got a new governor with his own priorities, and the state budget is tighter than anticipated. And one of the ways he's proposed for saving money is to slow down the correction for state funding.

To be continued ...

2006-11-20T05:54:00.000-08:00

Proficiency for All - an Oxymoron

Courtesy of AFT NCLBlog, this report on NBLB's proficiency mandate discusses reasonable targets for proficiency goals.

An example in the paper illustrates illustrating the absurdity of an 100% proficiency mandate.

Singapore's 13 year olds scored first in the world in math in 2003, with an average scale score of 605, compared with 504 among US 8th graders. But one-quarter of the students in Singapore scored below the NAEP proficient level in math. In other words, a nation that trounces the USA in math still only gets about 75% proficiency.

They're still more than a standard deviation away from even 98% proficiency.

For the USA, it would be far easier to achieve "best in the world" performance than to achieve a 100% proficient mandate.

2006-10-31T20:06:00.000-08:00

Play the Accountability Game!

This is a real hoot!

2006-10-29T13:38:00.000-08:00

The Problems with Too High a Standard

So why not set the highest standards in the nation?

Suppose your kids go to a low-performing school; that school scored 40 on the math test.

In order to be declared as making "adequate yearly progress", this school would need to improve its score by 5 points every year. After two years, it would be up to 50. Four years, 60. Six years, 70. Eight years, 80. Ten years, 90. Twelve Years, 100.

Bingo, isn't that what we want?

Well, let's see what happens under AYP. Last year was a good year for Hispanic kids on the math tests; they gained, on average, 3 points, faster than any other subgroup and twice as fast as White kids. Suppose they managed that level of phenomenal gains for twelve years.

In the first year, they would miss AYP, because they would need to reach a score of 45, but they would only reach 43.

Second year, they'd miss, hitting 46, but needing 50. Hmm. Now they are four points down. The school is listed in the newspaper as failing to make adequate progress.

Third year, hit 49, need 55. Down by six points - they will need to advance by 11 points next year to avoid going into 4th year sanctions, where the principal can be fired.

Fourth year, they hit 52, but too bad; the state starts to assume control of their school, because they needed to hit 60. And the situation is looking really dire; next year, to avoid going into the terminal stage of sanctions, they will need to improve by a whopping 13 points.

Fifth year, they hit 55. They've improved by about as much as anyone in the state over five years, but the school goes to the final stage of restructuring, because they would have to hit 65 to avoid seeing "all or most of the staff fired", and have the school reopen either as a charter school, or under an approved private management firm, or under the control of the state.

Now, the situation is much worse than this, because these have been historically high gains for this group of special ed kids. Last year, on average, saw English Language Arts scores DECLINE by three tenths of a point across the state. It was a good year for math, with an average 1.5 point gain.

But guess what? The average "improvement target" last year for English was 5.3, and for math was 8.6. For subgroups, the improvement required to avoid making "inadequate progress" was 17.9 for Special Ed Math, 14.0 for Limited English Speakers on English Language.

Any further determinations of "adequate progress" are simply meaningless when the required gains in a year reach than a few points. A school could have top 10% performance in the state for three years running and still reach fifth year sanctions - firing all or most of the staff, turn over control to the state.

Look at it another way. A school that started at 90 is expected to go from 90 to 100 in 12 years. A school that started at 40 is expected to go from 90 to 100 in 2 years, after they have already gone from 40 to 90 in ten years.

Unrealistic expectations to meet a seemingly noble goal can do as much harm as good. They can be used to justify a sense of urgency for questionable, untested, or perhaps even counter-productive reforms. And they sap any sense of achievement along the way.

We must have realistic goals and timeframes as a starting point for serious education reform.

2006-10-24T19:42:00.000-07:00

A National Hero

Copy of a letter to the editor in the Orlando Sentinel.

October 15, 2006

Surprisingly, it's sanction time at our little FCAT A school here at R.J. Longstreet Elementary in Daytona Beach.

After having received five A's in a row on the FCAT, but simultaneously having failed the annual progress goal of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, we are under a sanction called "corrective action."

We are now being visited by district level "support personnel" who will monitor how we are teaching writing and math. Of course, we are teaching writing quite well, because more than 80 percent of our students got a 3.5 grade-point average or better on the writing section of the FCAT.

And our math scores were high enough to help us earn the five consecutive A grades. The problem for Longstreet originated in our district's response to the federal request for us to set up an annual progress goal.

The goal we set was one we haven't reached yet. In hindsight, knowing what we know now, we could have set a lower goal and been fine. But we didn't.

So now come the sanctions. One sanction option was to reconstitute our entire school, which would have meant getting rid of the teachers who were responsible for teaching more than 80 percent of our kids to do wonderfully on the FCAT.

When you consider that more than half our school's students come from backgrounds of poverty, our teachers performed a miracle. They were able to successfully teach the majority of our students despite these dismal odds.

I guess it didn't make good political sense to get rid of great teachers, so now we are receiving scrutiny by people who may not have the skills of those teachers over whose shoulders they are assigned to look.

What is happening is pandemic across the nation. Public education is under siege from state and federal politicos who are transforming what was once an arena of pure educational learning into a corporate state of testing.

This allowed well-connected publishing companies to gorge themselves on public school dollars in a frenzied testing environment that has been sold as "accountability" to the unsuspecting public.

Local administrators are intimidated and fearful of losing money for their districts, maybe even losing their jobs if they resist.

You can hear them saying submissively, "We just have to play along."

R.J. Longstreet Elementary School is so much better than the A repeatedly assigned to it by evaluation processes that can't meet minimal standards of reliability and validity in the real world of accountability.

It is a safe school, a community-involvement award winner, a place where kids enjoy coming to learn, socialize and play each day.

Its parents are supportive and caring.

Its biggest enemies are these tests and those behind these predatory programs that starve those in need and lavish the money saved on their corporate accomplices.

This current administration is working hard to change the face of the world into its own corrupt image, and it is succeeding in public education, the only place where a defense could have been mounted to defeat it.

R.J. Longstreet Elementary is fighting to maintain its right to educate rather than become of victim of the testing craze.

We wear our badge of sanctions proudly, knowing we are succeeding despite misguided actions.

Bill Archer is a school counselor at R.J. Longstreet Elementary. He lives in Daytona Beach.
Copyright © 2006, Orlando Sentinel | Get home delivery - up to 50% off

2006-10-24T08:42:00.000-07:00

Accountability standards for corporations

Read this Bloomberg article about accountability standards for corporations.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said he is considering recommending changes to the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance law because its restrictions have overwhelmed some American companies.

While the ``net result'' of stricter reporting standards for executives has been positive, Sarbanes-Oxley has also contributed to ``an atmosphere that has made it more burdensome for companies to operate,'' Paulson said in an interview today from Washington.

``We're going to need to look at how we can address some of these issues,'' Paulson said. ``This is something we're giving a lot of thought to.''

The remarkable thing is, you could substitute NCLB for Sarbanes Oxley, and American companies for American public schools, and arrive at the same dialog. Except, in the case of Sarbanes Oxley, our federal government is siding with corporations, and with NCLB, they think they got that right and it is the parents and teachers who've expressed concerns who are wrong.

2006-10-23T00:21:00.000-07:00

Central Planning Mainframe Mindset

Standardized testing harks back to the 1950s, in the days of punch cards and mainframe computers. You'd submit a request for processor time, carefully punch out all the cards, submit them, and wait. Some time later, an operator would put the cards in the queue, and report results back. Programmers would hope the result wasn't that they had gotten one card out of order and they had to start over.

All that changed beginning in the late 1970s for computers. By the time I started programming computers, we could run Basic programs on a teletype. Before Jimmy Carter left office, I had a computer with 64K of RAM, a color display, a hard drive, and a printer. These days, you can get more computer power on your desktop than was available to all of NASA in the early days of Apollo. And for your home computer, you can get education software that gives your kids instant feedback on their learning process.

But not so for standardized tests. Kids fill out computer forms that have hardly evolved since the days of punch cards. They do long comprehensive tests that give little opportunity to help the child that took the test, rather than short quizzes on material they are currently learning. And then, they wait. The tests are gathered with the same level of security and reliability that we get at the voting booth, and carted off to a central bureaucracy, where they are tabulated.

And then the kids go home for the summer.

By September, some of the results come back to the school. Here in Massachusetts, the AYP Press Release of failed schools goes out in mid-September, or roughly four months too late for a school to make effective use of the data for high level planning purposes for the year.

Our principle says they think they can make good use of some of the disaggregated data from the test results they got back from central planning.

I bet they could have gotten a lot more use out of that if they'd just had a series of micro-tests during the course of instruction.

Meanwhile, here we are, at year 2.5 - we just found out that our school missed AYP this fall, a half a year after the tests that could have told us, and four months after the school could have used the information to adapt curriculum or classroom configurations for this year. So we'll be going into the third year before the principle has a lot of options for adjusting things.

In the fourth year, the principle can get fired, so I suspect we will see some changes next year.

High on the list, if the Principle is desperate to hold onto his job, will be retention of a few third-graders who appear headed for failure in 4th grade MCAS testing. One of the dirty secrets of No Child Left Behind is that the easiest way to improve test scores is to identify kids likely not to hit the proficient threshold, and hold them back.

I remember back when I went into 7th grade, there were a couple kids who'd been held back a year or two. They had a hard time fitting in the desks, and were always in trouble for disrupting the classroom. I was about a foot shorter than they were.

I read in today's Washington Post that as many as 14% of Florida 3rd graders have been held back a year.

If they're holding back third graders in Florida, I bet Florida's test results are coming back a couple months sooner than Massachusett's test results do.

2006-10-18T20:58:00.000-07:00

Dissonance: The Broad Prize .vs. Massachusetts AYP

( And the answer is - the Broad Prize got it right, and Massachusetts AYP formula requires arbitrarily high performance gains for a school to be labeled "adequate")

A couple other blogs have posted about the Broad Prize.

Boston won the Broad Prize this year, but 65% of schools in Boston were identified by the state as failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress.

I've demonstrated that only a handful of schools in Massachusetts matched the scores that will eventually be mandated by the state to avoid being labeled as inadequate schools and subjected to No Child Left Behind sanctions.

Today, I decided to ferret out why 65% of Boston's schools have failed AYP, while only about a quarter of schools across the state have failed.

To do this, I looked closer at Massachusett's improvement_targets.xls spreadsheet. This spreadsheet shows CPI scores for each subgroup in each school across the state, as well as "Improvement Targets". The improvement targets for each subgroup are (I am told - the actual formulas are not included in the spreadsheet - only current year data is included. Wonder why?) require that subgroup to improve from the baseline scores to 100% proficient by 2014.

That means, for example, if baseline score in 2002 was 60, then the school is mandated to improve by 40 points over 12 years, or 3.3 points each year.

OK, so we are told about 25% of schools across the state failed to make AYP. But if you calculate whether a school actually made it's improvement target, I find that 1216 subgroups out of 5054 made it for English Language Arts; and 1287 out of 5054 made it for math. 522 out of 5054 made BOTH.

So about one out of ten subgroups made it across the state. That is, NINETY PERCENT OF SUBGROUPS FAILED TO MAKE THE PROGRESS MANDATED BY THE FORMULA.

So how come only 25% of schools are identified for improvement? After all, a school is supposed to be identified for improvement if any subgroup fails either math or ELA.

And the secret is that in addition to the individual school's improvement target, there is also a state threshold. If your CPI beats either, your school is called "adequate" for that year. The state thresholds started at 53.0 for math, and 70.7 for english, in 2002. Both hit 100 in 2014. So, as of spring 2006, the state cut scores were 68.7 for math, 80.5 for english.

What this effectively says is that any school that scored above the state average in 2002 has been given a "get out of AYP Free" card for a few years. These schools can be deemed as making adequate progress even if their test scores don't improve - for the time being. But meanwhile, schools that started at or below the state average have to improve by leaps and bounds every year.

So - there you have it. Why do 65% of Boston's schools fail AYP while only 25% fail statewide? The answer is that 90% fail statewide, if you use the calculation that actually requires the school to make progress.

Without any knowledge about the Broad Prize's selection criteria, we can say that it is more likely that the Broad Prize uses a more rational and more accurate means of evaluating excellence and improvement of urban public school systems than No Child Left Behind does.

2006-10-16T17:55:00.000-07:00

Loss of local control

One of the biggest advantages of small town schools is the autonomy they have enjoyed. All the parents know all the teachers - they can talk with the teachers every day. The principal comes out to the parking lot to talk every day at pick-up time. Our school has been accountable to parents since before the newfangled idea of accountability was invented. The school shares a regional high school with several other towns, but the district superintendent has traditionally delegated responsibility to the principle and to local control.

No Child Left Behind shifts accountability. Administrators must comply with federal mandates as interepreted by state bureaucrats, and if they don't, they can be fired. This goes for staffing, for curriculum, and for complying with mandated standardized test scores. In particular, if a district fails to make "adequate yearly progress", as most schools in Massachustts inevitably will, any administrators that haven't following the mandates of state and federal bureaucrats are likely to lose their jobs in the 4th or 5th year. Same goes for teachers.

So, now the superintendent is actively intervening in local affairs - saying the state made him do it - out of fear of losing his job.

We want the state and federal government to get out of the way and let our local school continue to do its job. Local accountability is more important than accountability to federal and state bureaucrats.

2006-10-16T05:26:00.000-07:00

Explaining No Child Left Behind to Totalitarians

Just as the People’s Republic of China has its nine-year Compulsory Education Law of 1985, the United States has a pre-eminent law as well. The U.S. law is known as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB).

NCLB has significantly impacted state educational systems and local school districts. The law’s requirement for standards, assessments, corrective actions, public report cards and adequate yearly progress has altered many state testing programs.

This is in a report written by Harcourt Assessment. Later in the report, we find the explanation of sanctions:

Consequences

Perhaps the most significant part of NCLB is that schools must help each group and the aggregate make progress or face the consequences. Schools not making adequate yearly progress have to take corrective steps ranging from offering parents public school choice to restructuring schools. If schools are able to intervene and achieve adequate yearly progress for two consecutive years, they can have the sanctions removed.
The consequences for not meeting adequate yearly progress for two consecutive years are that schools must go through the following steps of corrective action for school improvement:

Public school choice

If a school does not make adequate yearly progress for two consecutive years, parents can choose to have their child attend a different school.

Supplemental services
If a school does not make adequate yearly progress for three consecutive years, the district must provide public school choice and provide supplemental services (e.g., tutoring) to low-achieving students, disadvantaged students, students with disabilities and English language learners.

Corrective action
If a school fails to make adequate yearly progress for four consecutive years, the district must implement certain actions such as changing the curriculum, getting a new principal or replacing staff.

Restructuring
If a school fails to make adequate yearly progress for five consecutive years, it must restructure the school (e.g., state takeover, hire a private company).
Once a school makes adequate yearly progress for two consecutive years, it is considered improved.

American public schools have traditionally been locally controlled. In towns like ours, we used to have accountability - just a conversation with teachers and the principal away. No Child Left Behind puts state and federal bureaucrats ahead of parents and school committees.

2006-10-12T09:09:00.000-07:00

Adequate Yearly Progress mandate: every public school in Massachusetts must match Boston Latin's MCAS scores

Boston Latin is an exceptional school. It screens potential students with an exam and only accepts the highest scoring kids from across Boston.

Boston Latin is also one of the few schools in Massachusetts to approach the "100% proficient" level mandated by No Child Left Behind. All schools must reach 100% "proficiency" by 2014, or they are subjected to sanctions.

I asked the Department of Education how many schools across the state had reached the test scores mandated for 2014, and did not get a reply. So I decided to review the data myself, looking at the state's spreadsheet , and following the advice the DOE gave me, to read this document to learn how Massachussetts implements its AYP

I sorted schools based on their Math and English Language Arts (ELA) CPI data - this is the score that has to eventually reach "100%". And there, at the top of the list, was Boston Latin - one of a handful of schools across the state to come close to 100% proficient in both English Language Arts and Math scores.

The state allows an "error band" that means schools will only need to achieve proficiency somewhere between 95.5% and 97.5% proficient, but even allowing for that error band, only about two out of every 100 subgroups tested scored as high as 95.5% proficient for either Math or ELA. A school can fail if any subgroup does not reach the mandated proficiency level - subgroups include low income, special ed, black, hispanic, white, and asian. I didn't bother to try to calculate how many schools could pass the whole gamut of subgroups, but I'd say a reasonable first approximation is to guess that each group cuts the odds of making the grade in half. So if a school is over the 95th percentile for one of Math or English in aggregate, and it has three subgroups, guess something like 2% divided by 2 to the 4th, or say 2/16th of one percent of schools that the state would label as "adequate", if the standards that will be mandated in 2014 were applied to 2005 test data.

Oops. Boston Latin composite for ELA was 98.4, and their group size was big enough for the 2.5% error band. I guess even Boston Latin is an inadequate school, according to the state and federal mandates.

The state and federal government mandate that every school across the state of Massachusetts must achieve standardized test scores that will be difficult even for the best schools in the state, and applies sanctions to any schools that fail to do so.

Everyone would like that to be possible, and to strive towards that goal, but as a mandate that labels any school that fails to do so "inadequate" and applies radical sanctions - transferring control over local schools to state and federal bureaucrats - Houston, we have a problem.

2006-10-09T19:46:00.000-07:00

I live in a small, median town pretty far away from Beacon Hill and Washington, or at least so we thought when we moved out here. But in the past year, our local public school has taken a beating, all inflicted by bureaucrats in Boston and Washington.

We've suffered a perfect storm of budget cuts and mandated changes in curriculum, and on top of that, the federal government, with the encouragement of our state Department of Education, says our school is "inadequate", even though our school has above average standardized test scores.

Our school has been an attractive "choice" school drawing kids from surrounding towns; but it seems this sort of "choice" is out of favor in the rarified atmosphere of Beacon Hill and Washington, where "public" schools are supposed to become lowest common denomimator drill factories (preferably run by corporate managers), and "Choice" means either a charter school or a private school.

We want the Department of Education to be more responsive to parents, more respectful of teachers, and more critical & independent of the federal government.

We want our school back.