FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
CONTACT:
Eleanor D'Ambrosio
Thursday, June 9,
2011
512-463-0631
or 512-799-8681
FARRAR/HOWARD AMENDMENT TO FUND ENROLLMENT GROWTH FOR SCHOOL DISTRICTS
AUSTIN - Today, Rep. Donna Howard added language to an amendment to SB 2 by Rep.
Jessica Farrar to make funding for public education a priority. The
Farrar/Howard amendment would appropriate any new money that comes into the
state's Rainy Day Fund to school districts to help cover the cost of enrollment
growth in 2012 and 2013.
The budget passed during the regular session includes a $4 billion cut to public
education and does not provide money for any new students coming into a
district. Texas' student population grows at a rate of about 80,000 students
per year - roughly the size of the Austin Independent School District - and an
additional $2.2 billion is needed to fund this critical item.
The Comptroller's biennial revenue estimate as revised in May of this year,
projects a balance of $9.6 billion in the Rainy Day Fund at the end of the next
biennium. If you subtract the roughly $3.2 billion appropriated in HB 275, you
are left with a balance of $6.4 billion. The Farrar/Howard amendment would
protect that $6.4 billion and appropriate any additional money that comes into
the fund to school districts up to the amount needed to cover enrollment
growth.
"I crafted my amendment as a compromise to address the concerns of those members
who believe we need to save a portion of the Rainy Day Fund for use next
session, but who care about public education," Howard said. "This session the
make-up of the Legislature has resulted in missed opportunities for compromise
on a host of issues. Supporting public education is too important to me to have
let another opportunity go by."
Rep Howard's proposal could likely result in the full $2.2 billion needed to
cover the entire cost of enrollment growth. In April 2011, Senate Finance
Chairman Steve Ogden and Legislative Budget Board Executive Director John
O'Brien agreed that the Rainy Day Fund could "easily" rise above $12 billion in
this biennium. (Source: KXAN, Bloomberg). If the Rainy Day Fund reached $12
billion, it would exceed the latest projections by the Comptroller by $2.5
billion, and the Farrar/Howard amendment will ensure that Texas students will be
the first to benefit from this money.
The Conference Committee report on SB 2 will have to receive a two thirds vote
in the House in order for the Farrar/Howard amendment to take effect. If that
happens, the Commissioner of Education will allocate the monies available
through the amendment to proportionately modify the regular program adjustment
factor and the target revenue reduction percentage. For example, if a district
lost 1% of the total statewide loss of $2 billion, they would get about 1% of
the additional revenue caused by the amendment.
"We still have a few hurdles to get through before this amendment becomes law,
but I will continue to fight to keep this language in SB 2. My constituents
have sent a clear message that we need to protect the investment we have made in
public education, and I am listening," said Howard.
###
Eleanor D'Ambrosio
Chief Of Staff, State Rep. Donna Howard
House District 48
Room E2.418
512-463-0631
512-463-0901 fax
Friday, June 10, 2011
Wednesday, June 08, 2011
Analysis Finds Graduation Rates Moving Up
Strong signs of improvement on graduation
By Christopher B. Swanson | Ed Week
May 31, 2011
For more than two years, average Americans have followed reports on unemployment, the housing market, commodity prices, consumer confidence, and the daily fluctuations of the markets for signals that the economy has finally, and firmly, entered a period of renewed growth and stability. So too have education-watchers been on the lookout, for the better part of a decade, for signs of an educational recovery.
At the heart of the reform agenda lie commitments to combat the U.S. dropout crisis and propel the nation’s schools and its economy at full speed into the 21st century, by ensuring that all students have a chance to earn a meaningful diploma that prepares them for further education and training and a successful adult life. The administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama have espoused such goals, as have major philanthropies, leading nonprofit organizations, prominent business leaders, and state and district policymakers from coast to coast. Even with this high-profile attention and a host of new policy efforts, gaining traction on graduation has been frustratingly difficult.
Read on...
By Christopher B. Swanson | Ed Week
May 31, 2011
For more than two years, average Americans have followed reports on unemployment, the housing market, commodity prices, consumer confidence, and the daily fluctuations of the markets for signals that the economy has finally, and firmly, entered a period of renewed growth and stability. So too have education-watchers been on the lookout, for the better part of a decade, for signs of an educational recovery.
At the heart of the reform agenda lie commitments to combat the U.S. dropout crisis and propel the nation’s schools and its economy at full speed into the 21st century, by ensuring that all students have a chance to earn a meaningful diploma that prepares them for further education and training and a successful adult life. The administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama have espoused such goals, as have major philanthropies, leading nonprofit organizations, prominent business leaders, and state and district policymakers from coast to coast. Even with this high-profile attention and a host of new policy efforts, gaining traction on graduation has been frustratingly difficult.
Read on...
Tuesday, June 07, 2011
The State of Education in Chicago: A Community Response
If you're in and around the Chicago area please join us for this important community event. This is one of many planned gatherings that responds to the Chicago Public Schools' attempts to convert "failing" community schools to charters. Under HB 363 (a direct outgrowth of community action) CPS cannot make reform decisions w/out community input. Accordingly, on 6/16, the Humbolt Park community will begin dialogues and exercise their right to propose a research-based solution for turning around Roberto Clemente HS.
We are proud that this community is a part of the NLERAP family!
-Patricia
Monday, June 06, 2011
Switch to Outcomes-Based Higher Ed Funding Taking Time
by Reeve Hamilton | Texas Tribune
June 6, 2011
During the regular session, Gov. Rick Perry’s top legislative priority for higher education was the implementation of a new funding system that rewards universities for graduating more students, not just for getting students into classes. To reach its 2015 goals, Texas needs to increase the number of degrees awarded by 46,000 each year.
A financing system that includes more “outcomes-based funding” has strong support, including from Raymund Paredes, the Texas Higher Education Commissioner, and business leaders such as Woody Hunt of El Paso, who chairs the Governor’s Business Council. But policy makers have struggled to agree on which outcomes to measure, how to encourage them and if they should alter the funding formulas while budgets are being slashed.
House Higher Education Chairman Dan Branch, R-Dallas, passed a major bill on the subject this session. The final version approved by the full Legislature, however, stops short of actually implementing an outcomes-based system, and instead provides guidelines for the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and instructs the board to return next session with new proposals.
With the session over, Senate Higher Education Chairwoman Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, said the question was still “if, not when,” Texas might adopt such a system. The state’s current financing formula is based on course enrollment.
Even getting to this point has been difficult. Lawmakers rebuffed Paredes’ initial proposals for failing to target the right outcomes. His plan focused on course completions instead of graduations. After a new proposal was drawn, Branch had to convince House leaders that the approach was not related to controversial strategies pushed by Perry and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative research group.
“This is serious higher education reform that a lot of folks have had input on,” Branch said. Some lawmakers concerns were also diminished by including requirements in the bill that reports be submitted to a new higher education oversight committee created in response to the controversy.
The Coordinating Board’s last proposal would tie financing to total degrees awarded, as well as to degrees awarded to at-risk students and in critical fields. It also would reward each institution for surpassing predicted graduation levels or penalize them for falling short. Under this proposal, some of the institutions that produce the most graduates, including the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University, appear to lose funding.
“How is it that an outcomes-based approach ends up diverting money away from the two most productive institutions in the state? That’s a puzzle,” said UT President Bill Powers.
Paredes says the coordinating has analyzed the changes universities could make to improve their results under this system, and he said, “Everything institutions need to do is good for Texas.”
The proposal was part of the original House version of the budget, but was omitted from the final product. Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston, who chairs a key subcommittee, said it was included to express support for the idea — not for the methodology. “It’s such a mess — it’s sort of a black box,” he said. “I know the equations have been all laid out, but it’s hard to know what they all mean.”
Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, concerned about pitting universities against each other in a “zero-sum game” during a time when budgets are shrinking, was among those who pushed for taking more time to find a better formula. “We want to do the appropriate, correct, visionary things to increase positive outcomes,” he said.
Watson emphasized the need for the Coordinating Board to offer options that rewarded outcomes without altering the baseline funding for universities, as well as options — like the one Paredes has pushed — that do make such changes. Other guidelines ultimately included in the bill were that no more than 10 percent of funding can be outcomes-based, and the coordinating board must ensure that it does not have a negative affect on graduate education.
Still, Paredes considers passage of the bill a success, and looks forward to strengthening his case for the most recent proposal and giving universities time to make necessary changes over the next two years. “We’ve essentially come to a concurrence that outcomes-based funding is something that we ought to do,” he said.
Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for Perry, said, “If it doesn’t accomplish what he wanted to, he’ll look forward to continuing to pursue that in the future.”
Meanwhile, referencing the public school finance debate that threw a wrench in the end of the regular session and is now continuing in a special session, Hochberg added, “It’s interesting to see that small variations in funding at the university are perceived to drive significant performance change, and large variations in funding at the K-12 level get written off as ‘Oh, stop griping, you’re just jealous.’”
University of Texas faculty workloads vary widely
By Richard Vedder | SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Saturday, June 4, 2011
The release of data on University of Texas faculty teaching loads, research grants and compensation has led to a firestorm of commentary, fanned in part by a Center for College Affordability and Productivity study by two of my colleagues, Jonathan Robe and Christopher Matgouranis, and myself, doing a preliminary analysis of some of the data. In that study, we argue that a reconfiguration of what faculty do at UT-Austin has great promise as a means of containing costs to both students and taxpayers.
The UT data reveal a dirty little secret that academics are loath to disclose: A relatively small portion of the faculty does most of the work. Twenty percent of them teach 57 percent of the students, for example, and the same proportion, 20 percent, generate an astonishing 99.8 percent of the external research funding received. But what about the other 60 percent of faculty (actually more, since some of the top researchers also have surprisingly high teaching loads)? They teach relatively modest numbers of students and receive little or no research money.
Professors in the humanities correctly argue that their disciplines generate little external research support. Yet a recent study by Canadian scholar Jeffrey Litwin suggests, after examining research at more than 70 top universities (including Texas A&M), that the average cost of producing a single published academic paper exceeds $72,000 (the figure for Texas A&M of more than $128,000 is the second highest of all universities examined). My guess is the typical article is read by perhaps 300 people, since a large portion of academic journals have a circulation of less than 1,000, so the average cost of producing an article runs more than $240 for every single reader. In short, we are producing a lot of marginal research at great cost but of dubious value.
The law of diminishing returns has reached higher education — Mark Bauerlein of Emory University tells us that we have published over 21,000 papers on William Shakespeare from 1980 to 2006. Wouldn't 5,000 papers have been enough? Are we really extending our knowledge and strengthening Western civilization by publishing those extra 16,000 papers?
If the 20 percent of faculty at UT teaching the most students were told to "keep doing what you are doing," and the rest were told to "teach half as much as those teaching the most," the number of faculty needed would be drastically reduced, potentially allowing tuition to be cut in half, state appropriations to be cut by an even greater percentage, or some combination of both (roughly 30 percent reductions in both tuition and appropriations).
Is that unreasonable? What is suggested is that the bulk of the faculty teaches on average around 450 credit hours a year, or roughly 150 students. A professor could do this by teaching a survey course to 100 students, two advanced undergraduate or graduate classes to 20 students each, and a graduate seminar to 10 students, being in the classroom six hours weekly for 32 weeks of the year. Some might be asked to teach a bit more to allow for reduced loads for those shouldering administrative duties like serving as department chair.
I managed to teach more than that over an active professional career and still published a number of books and scores of academic journal articles, and served as a visiting professor at schools rated higher than UT in magazine college rankings, etc. I did it by doing what other professionals (such as accountants, lawyers and physicians) do: I went to work at 8 or 9 in the morning and went home at 5:30 or so each evening, and I worked all but three or four weeks a year.
On a recent 10 a.m. Tuesday stroll past 24 offices in my department, I found three occupied. To be sure, two or three more colleagues probably were in class, meetings, or giving a paper elsewhere. Nonetheless, professors do not have the same work discipline as other professionals, and the slack is a major reason why faculty costs are so high.
I am not alone in believing this. Commenting in the American-Statesman on April 17, John Silber, a former dean of arts and sciences at UT and, at Boston University, one of the most esteemed university presidents of modern times, said: "I think the cost of education is largely a function of the reduction of productivity in the faculty and also the huge engorgement of administration. Today — in a typical university like Boston University — professors will teach one or two courses per semester. Well, that's not enough." He is absolutely right.
Changing teaching loads can be done in a way that adds to both efficiency and fairness. In some cases, the desired results can be obtained by the use of "carrots" (financial rewards) rather than "sticks" (compulsion). Some savings from reconfiguring teaching loads can be used to reward those who teach a lot and/or teach well.
One thing that the controversy over the data release and our interpretation of it has demonstrated is the radical disconnect between the views of people in the academy and other residents. A recent Pew Research Center poll showed 57 percent of respondents surveyed thought colleges delivered only poor or fair value to students, while 76 percent of university presidents thought these schools delivered excellent or good value. While we want to allow universities some independence to allow unpopular, diverse ideas to flourish, a big cost of this is the increasing divergence between what colleges do and what the public thinks they should be doing.
The "publish or perish" nature of the modern research university is revealed in the data. Salaries are far higher at research-intensive UT-Austin than at more teaching-oriented schools like UT-El Paso or UT-San Antonio. Beyond that, there are huge variations within UT-Austin, partly because of differences in research efforts but also partly because of huge pay differentials between disciplines (the typical accounting faculty member makes well over twice as much as the typical English professor, for example).
One result of the intense research orientation arising from huge financial incentives for research is that young faculty seem disengaged from teaching — the average teaching load of tenure-track faculty who have not yet been awarded tenure (most young assistant professors) is actually lower than that of tenured (and mostly older) faculty. The National Survey of Student Engagement data for UT-Austin suggest only 38 percent of students feel the faculty are "available, helpful and sympathetic"; students at UT-Austin rate their relationships with faculty at a lower level than students at some of the less research-oriented schools within the system.
Undergraduate students are being asked to shoulder a larger share of the cost of college, but they still are on average relatively neglected by faculty who shower attention on graduate students helping them with their research.
The most deplorable thing that has struck me, however, is not the evidence that many faculty seem to work at less than full capacity. Rather it is the attitude of the UT administration. Universities are in the business of transmitting and creating knowledge, but the UT administration has bitterly fought the release of data rightfully requested by the regents. For the school to put on every page of the 821-page compendium of data this — "The attached data spreadsheet in its current draft form are incomplete and have not yet been fully verified or cross referenced (and in) its present raw form it cannot yield accurate analysis, interpretations or conclusions" — is an affront to transparency and disclosure.
The statement of UT President William Powers Jr. that the study by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity was "inappropriate" is revealing in that it shows with crystal clarity the real problem, namely that the university leadership is either clueless or indifferent to the feelings and financial pressures faced by the people of the Lone Star State.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
The release of data on University of Texas faculty teaching loads, research grants and compensation has led to a firestorm of commentary, fanned in part by a Center for College Affordability and Productivity study by two of my colleagues, Jonathan Robe and Christopher Matgouranis, and myself, doing a preliminary analysis of some of the data. In that study, we argue that a reconfiguration of what faculty do at UT-Austin has great promise as a means of containing costs to both students and taxpayers.
The UT data reveal a dirty little secret that academics are loath to disclose: A relatively small portion of the faculty does most of the work. Twenty percent of them teach 57 percent of the students, for example, and the same proportion, 20 percent, generate an astonishing 99.8 percent of the external research funding received. But what about the other 60 percent of faculty (actually more, since some of the top researchers also have surprisingly high teaching loads)? They teach relatively modest numbers of students and receive little or no research money.
Professors in the humanities correctly argue that their disciplines generate little external research support. Yet a recent study by Canadian scholar Jeffrey Litwin suggests, after examining research at more than 70 top universities (including Texas A&M), that the average cost of producing a single published academic paper exceeds $72,000 (the figure for Texas A&M of more than $128,000 is the second highest of all universities examined). My guess is the typical article is read by perhaps 300 people, since a large portion of academic journals have a circulation of less than 1,000, so the average cost of producing an article runs more than $240 for every single reader. In short, we are producing a lot of marginal research at great cost but of dubious value.
The law of diminishing returns has reached higher education — Mark Bauerlein of Emory University tells us that we have published over 21,000 papers on William Shakespeare from 1980 to 2006. Wouldn't 5,000 papers have been enough? Are we really extending our knowledge and strengthening Western civilization by publishing those extra 16,000 papers?
If the 20 percent of faculty at UT teaching the most students were told to "keep doing what you are doing," and the rest were told to "teach half as much as those teaching the most," the number of faculty needed would be drastically reduced, potentially allowing tuition to be cut in half, state appropriations to be cut by an even greater percentage, or some combination of both (roughly 30 percent reductions in both tuition and appropriations).
Is that unreasonable? What is suggested is that the bulk of the faculty teaches on average around 450 credit hours a year, or roughly 150 students. A professor could do this by teaching a survey course to 100 students, two advanced undergraduate or graduate classes to 20 students each, and a graduate seminar to 10 students, being in the classroom six hours weekly for 32 weeks of the year. Some might be asked to teach a bit more to allow for reduced loads for those shouldering administrative duties like serving as department chair.
I managed to teach more than that over an active professional career and still published a number of books and scores of academic journal articles, and served as a visiting professor at schools rated higher than UT in magazine college rankings, etc. I did it by doing what other professionals (such as accountants, lawyers and physicians) do: I went to work at 8 or 9 in the morning and went home at 5:30 or so each evening, and I worked all but three or four weeks a year.
On a recent 10 a.m. Tuesday stroll past 24 offices in my department, I found three occupied. To be sure, two or three more colleagues probably were in class, meetings, or giving a paper elsewhere. Nonetheless, professors do not have the same work discipline as other professionals, and the slack is a major reason why faculty costs are so high.
I am not alone in believing this. Commenting in the American-Statesman on April 17, John Silber, a former dean of arts and sciences at UT and, at Boston University, one of the most esteemed university presidents of modern times, said: "I think the cost of education is largely a function of the reduction of productivity in the faculty and also the huge engorgement of administration. Today — in a typical university like Boston University — professors will teach one or two courses per semester. Well, that's not enough." He is absolutely right.
Changing teaching loads can be done in a way that adds to both efficiency and fairness. In some cases, the desired results can be obtained by the use of "carrots" (financial rewards) rather than "sticks" (compulsion). Some savings from reconfiguring teaching loads can be used to reward those who teach a lot and/or teach well.
One thing that the controversy over the data release and our interpretation of it has demonstrated is the radical disconnect between the views of people in the academy and other residents. A recent Pew Research Center poll showed 57 percent of respondents surveyed thought colleges delivered only poor or fair value to students, while 76 percent of university presidents thought these schools delivered excellent or good value. While we want to allow universities some independence to allow unpopular, diverse ideas to flourish, a big cost of this is the increasing divergence between what colleges do and what the public thinks they should be doing.
The "publish or perish" nature of the modern research university is revealed in the data. Salaries are far higher at research-intensive UT-Austin than at more teaching-oriented schools like UT-El Paso or UT-San Antonio. Beyond that, there are huge variations within UT-Austin, partly because of differences in research efforts but also partly because of huge pay differentials between disciplines (the typical accounting faculty member makes well over twice as much as the typical English professor, for example).
One result of the intense research orientation arising from huge financial incentives for research is that young faculty seem disengaged from teaching — the average teaching load of tenure-track faculty who have not yet been awarded tenure (most young assistant professors) is actually lower than that of tenured (and mostly older) faculty. The National Survey of Student Engagement data for UT-Austin suggest only 38 percent of students feel the faculty are "available, helpful and sympathetic"; students at UT-Austin rate their relationships with faculty at a lower level than students at some of the less research-oriented schools within the system.
Undergraduate students are being asked to shoulder a larger share of the cost of college, but they still are on average relatively neglected by faculty who shower attention on graduate students helping them with their research.
The most deplorable thing that has struck me, however, is not the evidence that many faculty seem to work at less than full capacity. Rather it is the attitude of the UT administration. Universities are in the business of transmitting and creating knowledge, but the UT administration has bitterly fought the release of data rightfully requested by the regents. For the school to put on every page of the 821-page compendium of data this — "The attached data spreadsheet in its current draft form are incomplete and have not yet been fully verified or cross referenced (and in) its present raw form it cannot yield accurate analysis, interpretations or conclusions" — is an affront to transparency and disclosure.
The statement of UT President William Powers Jr. that the study by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity was "inappropriate" is revealing in that it shows with crystal clarity the real problem, namely that the university leadership is either clueless or indifferent to the feelings and financial pressures faced by the people of the Lone Star State.
Our schools: Officials say TAKS-based school ratings mislead
Excellent, research-based quote by Superintendent Dow:
-Patricia
by Caylor Ballinger \ El Paso Times
06/05/2011
El Paso school officials are stuck in a riddle.
Their schools are seen as failing, thanks to a confusing ratings system that bases performance on "exemplary or not."
This performance is determined by the results of the administered Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test.
The reality is that area schools are doing well, in some cases, performing at a very high level. The problem resides in the fact that TAKS doesn't grade on the commonly understood standard of pass or fail.
Administrators view the current system as complicated and confusing, and they believe the scores and the ratings can be misleading to the public, further damaging the image of the educator in the eyes of the taxpayers.
One school that has suffered the consequences is Tippin Elementary School.
Gina Rodriguez-Nunez, principal of the El Paso Independent School District school, said that despite passable scores above the 90 percent mark, Tippin did not reach "exemplary status" for the third straight year. Though there is no financial incentive tied to a school's rating, that mark is important to the community's residents.
"I think it's the recognition of it all," she said. "Teachers aren't given huge salaries and are going on the second year in a row without a raise. To them, it's the recognition. It's overall a sense of pride."
But for some, hope for a more understandable system is on the horizon. Starting in Spring 2012, according to a letter to administrators that was posted on the Web site of the Texas Education Agency, students will take the State of Texas Assessments of Academics Readiness exam.
They will no longer use the TAKS tests or rating systems, but they will be held to their earned ratings for the first two years of the STAAR exams.
The Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills program is a standardized test used in primary and secondary schools statewide.
TAKS measures the student's attainment of reading, writing, math, science, and social studies skills that are required by the Texas education standards.
Every portion of the TAKS exam includes multiple-choice questions. The high school reading and English language arts tests require students to answer three open-ended questions: one on the literary selection, one on the expository piece, and one "crossover" synthesizing the two.
The writing and ELA tests include a written composition as well. The 9th-11th-grade reading test permits the use of a dictionary and/or thesaurus, and the high school math and science tests allow the use of calculators along with formula charts.
The TAKS tests are not timed.
In comparison, the State of Texas Assessments of Academics Readiness exam (STAAR) differs at the upper end of testing.
The STAAR program at grades 3-8 will assess the same subjects and grades that are currently assessed on TAKS. At the high-school level, grade-specific assessments will be replaced with 12 end-of-course assessments: Algebra 1, geometry, Algebra II, biology, chemistry, physics, English I, English II, English III, world geography, world history, and U.S. history.
STAAR also assigns time limits on testing.
Both TAKS and STAAR include the same number of testing days, 19.
There is no clear indication how the STAAR program will "grade" schools as their performance improves or declines year to year.
The public perception of the TAKS grading system is misleading, according to some educators.
Rodriguez-Nunez said her campus is not "exemplary" because only 21 percent of her subgroup of economically disadvantaged students earned a commended score in one of the subjects, falling short of the required 25 percent.
"I wish they would take a more equal look at the student population," she said. "No one is focusing on the major success we've had."
She said it's also a challenge because her school is not Title 1.
This means it receives less money because the school does not have enough economically disadvantaged students and doesn't have a budget that allows for additional tutors.
"I believe in the state assessments," she said. "I'm not against it. I'm against the inequity of it."
Suzanne Marchman, spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency, said the rating system has become more complicated over the years. For example, it now includes measures of improvement such as looking at multiple subgroups for each subject tested and then offering exceptions for close scores.
She said there has been some criticism for the current rating system, but a new test will usher in a new system and a new label for schools and districts.
"This is the last year under the accountability ratings as we know them," she said. "The desire is to have a system that is more even across the board."
A few years ago, the Texas Projected Measure was added. It inflated a school's scores if the campus above them did well.
The measure came under criticism from districts and state legislators who believed it painted a false picture. It was recently removed from the rating system, Marchman said. The timing of its removal and the fact scores will hold for two years was coincidental, not intentional.
She thinks the new test will bring new possibilities in how they determine ratings, although terms and measures have yet to be determined.
"I think you're going to see other things besides TAKS scores," she said, suggesting future ratings could possibly include SAT and ACT scores and career- and college-readiness scores.
Pauline Dow, associate superintendent for academics in the Ysleta district, said she would like the new ratings and assessments to be totally transformed.
She thinks the high-stakes testing Texas school districts now face is complex and not in the best interest of teaching and learning. She said the move to the new test and the trend toward even more days of testing is not a "gut feeling that it's bad; research says this is bad."
"The fact that there is a serious consequence for students and schools who don't measure up isn't in the best interest of students," she said.
She said the Texas Projected Measure rating system created an artificial ranking, and she is fine with not having to use it anymore.
EPISD Superintendent Lorenzo Garcia said he thought using the Texas Projected Measure was a mistake from the outset.
"To me, the most important thing is we're looking at all kids," he said. "The state exams should not be the absolute. There's a lot of intangibles that occur in the school."
Garcia said he thinks there is too much testing.
He would like the new rating system to look beyond test scores and include student scholarships and extracurricular involvement.
He said there is no perfect report card system -- each would have flaws -- but he emphasized that schools should be proud of overall student success.
"I think our report card system needs to be more expansive," he said. "We need a well-balanced student." Socorro Superintendent Xavier De La Torre said that in his opinion, the timing of a rating-system change does not reflect well on either the TEA or Education Commissioner Robert Scott.
"They're the ones who came up with the system and made it available to schools," he said.
De La Torre thinks the agency should have just continued with the current system.
He said the numbers should stand on their merit and do not need to be inflated.
"The TAKS has been shown to be the floor, not the ceiling," he said.
Caylor Ballinger may be reached at cballinger@elpasotimes.com; 546-6133.
the high-stakes testing Texas school districts now face is complex and not in the best interest of teaching and learning...the move to the new test and the trend toward even more days of testing is not a 'gut feeling that it's bad'; research says this is bad. The fact that there is a serious consequence for students and schools who don't measure up isn't in the best interest of students
-Patricia
by Caylor Ballinger \ El Paso Times
06/05/2011
El Paso school officials are stuck in a riddle.
Their schools are seen as failing, thanks to a confusing ratings system that bases performance on "exemplary or not."
This performance is determined by the results of the administered Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test.
The reality is that area schools are doing well, in some cases, performing at a very high level. The problem resides in the fact that TAKS doesn't grade on the commonly understood standard of pass or fail.
Administrators view the current system as complicated and confusing, and they believe the scores and the ratings can be misleading to the public, further damaging the image of the educator in the eyes of the taxpayers.
One school that has suffered the consequences is Tippin Elementary School.
Gina Rodriguez-Nunez, principal of the El Paso Independent School District school, said that despite passable scores above the 90 percent mark, Tippin did not reach "exemplary status" for the third straight year. Though there is no financial incentive tied to a school's rating, that mark is important to the community's residents.
"I think it's the recognition of it all," she said. "Teachers aren't given huge salaries and are going on the second year in a row without a raise. To them, it's the recognition. It's overall a sense of pride."
But for some, hope for a more understandable system is on the horizon. Starting in Spring 2012, according to a letter to administrators that was posted on the Web site of the Texas Education Agency, students will take the State of Texas Assessments of Academics Readiness exam.
They will no longer use the TAKS tests or rating systems, but they will be held to their earned ratings for the first two years of the STAAR exams.
The Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills program is a standardized test used in primary and secondary schools statewide.
TAKS measures the student's attainment of reading, writing, math, science, and social studies skills that are required by the Texas education standards.
Every portion of the TAKS exam includes multiple-choice questions. The high school reading and English language arts tests require students to answer three open-ended questions: one on the literary selection, one on the expository piece, and one "crossover" synthesizing the two.
The writing and ELA tests include a written composition as well. The 9th-11th-grade reading test permits the use of a dictionary and/or thesaurus, and the high school math and science tests allow the use of calculators along with formula charts.
The TAKS tests are not timed.
In comparison, the State of Texas Assessments of Academics Readiness exam (STAAR) differs at the upper end of testing.
The STAAR program at grades 3-8 will assess the same subjects and grades that are currently assessed on TAKS. At the high-school level, grade-specific assessments will be replaced with 12 end-of-course assessments: Algebra 1, geometry, Algebra II, biology, chemistry, physics, English I, English II, English III, world geography, world history, and U.S. history.
STAAR also assigns time limits on testing.
Both TAKS and STAAR include the same number of testing days, 19.
There is no clear indication how the STAAR program will "grade" schools as their performance improves or declines year to year.
The public perception of the TAKS grading system is misleading, according to some educators.
Rodriguez-Nunez said her campus is not "exemplary" because only 21 percent of her subgroup of economically disadvantaged students earned a commended score in one of the subjects, falling short of the required 25 percent.
"I wish they would take a more equal look at the student population," she said. "No one is focusing on the major success we've had."
She said it's also a challenge because her school is not Title 1.
This means it receives less money because the school does not have enough economically disadvantaged students and doesn't have a budget that allows for additional tutors.
"I believe in the state assessments," she said. "I'm not against it. I'm against the inequity of it."
Suzanne Marchman, spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency, said the rating system has become more complicated over the years. For example, it now includes measures of improvement such as looking at multiple subgroups for each subject tested and then offering exceptions for close scores.
She said there has been some criticism for the current rating system, but a new test will usher in a new system and a new label for schools and districts.
"This is the last year under the accountability ratings as we know them," she said. "The desire is to have a system that is more even across the board."
A few years ago, the Texas Projected Measure was added. It inflated a school's scores if the campus above them did well.
The measure came under criticism from districts and state legislators who believed it painted a false picture. It was recently removed from the rating system, Marchman said. The timing of its removal and the fact scores will hold for two years was coincidental, not intentional.
She thinks the new test will bring new possibilities in how they determine ratings, although terms and measures have yet to be determined.
"I think you're going to see other things besides TAKS scores," she said, suggesting future ratings could possibly include SAT and ACT scores and career- and college-readiness scores.
Pauline Dow, associate superintendent for academics in the Ysleta district, said she would like the new ratings and assessments to be totally transformed.
She thinks the high-stakes testing Texas school districts now face is complex and not in the best interest of teaching and learning. She said the move to the new test and the trend toward even more days of testing is not a "gut feeling that it's bad; research says this is bad."
"The fact that there is a serious consequence for students and schools who don't measure up isn't in the best interest of students," she said.
She said the Texas Projected Measure rating system created an artificial ranking, and she is fine with not having to use it anymore.
EPISD Superintendent Lorenzo Garcia said he thought using the Texas Projected Measure was a mistake from the outset.
"To me, the most important thing is we're looking at all kids," he said. "The state exams should not be the absolute. There's a lot of intangibles that occur in the school."
Garcia said he thinks there is too much testing.
He would like the new rating system to look beyond test scores and include student scholarships and extracurricular involvement.
He said there is no perfect report card system -- each would have flaws -- but he emphasized that schools should be proud of overall student success.
"I think our report card system needs to be more expansive," he said. "We need a well-balanced student." Socorro Superintendent Xavier De La Torre said that in his opinion, the timing of a rating-system change does not reflect well on either the TEA or Education Commissioner Robert Scott.
"They're the ones who came up with the system and made it available to schools," he said.
De La Torre thinks the agency should have just continued with the current system.
He said the numbers should stand on their merit and do not need to be inflated.
"The TAKS has been shown to be the floor, not the ceiling," he said.
Caylor Ballinger may be reached at cballinger@elpasotimes.com; 546-6133.
Big Student Debt Could Limit Schools' Financial Aid Access
by Tali Arbel, AP Business Writer
June 3, 2011
NEW YORK - The government is moving forward with its crackdown on the country's for-profit schools, aiming to protect students from taking on too much debt to attend schools that do nothing for their job prospects.
But the final version of the Department of Education's rule, released Thursday, is much softer than its original incarnation. It gives schools more time to correct deficiencies and makes it likely that fewer will lose access to federal student aid dollars. The news sent education stocks soaring in morning trading, with companies that analysts had considered most at risk of having to shut down programs or change them significantly like Corinthian Colleges Inc. and Education Management Corp. gaining each more than 25 percent.
Shares of the nation's largest chain, Apollo Group Inc., which owns the University of Phoenix, rose 13 percent. DeVry was up 11 percent and the Washington Post Co., which owns the Kaplan school chain, rose 6 percent.
The “previously proposed onerous rules have been relaxed,” said UBS analyst Ariel Sokol.
Nearly 18 months after negotiations began on how to define “gainful employment,” the DOE has released conditions that for-profit schools must meet in order to access federal financial aid dollars. If graduates owe too much relative to their income or too few former students are paying back their tuition loans on time, schools stand to lose access to Pell grants and federal student aid. Such a loss would seriously crimp schools' ability to attract students.
“These new regulations will help ensure that students at these schools are getting what they pay for: Solid preparation for a good job,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Thursday. “We're giving career colleges every opportunity to reform themselves, but we're not letting them off the hook, because too many vulnerable students are being hurt.”
Most students at career colleges and vocational schools pay tuition with federal financial aid dollars as much as 90 percent of a school's revenue can come from government aid. But that leaves taxpayers on the hook if students can't find good jobs and default on their loans.
And they are defaulting in large numbers.
Students at for-profit institutions such as technical programs and culinary schools represent just 12 percent of all higher education students but 46 percent of all student loan dollars in default. The average student earning an associate degree at a for-profit school carries $14,000 in federal loan debt.
Government scrutiny of the industry grew as the Great Recession exacerbated students' debt burdens. The DOE last fall created rules to rein in deceptive advertising and barred schools from paying enrollment counselors based on how many students they signed up, among other measures. The agency drew up the “gainful employment” rule in 2010 but delayed putting it into effect as it faced heavy lobbying from schools and politicians.
Under final terms of the law, announced Thursday, schools will only be able to receive federal-paid tuition if at least 35 percent of its former students are repaying their loans. Or, the estimated annual loan payment of a typical graduate must not be bigger than 30 percent of his or her discretionary income, or 12 percent of his or her total earnings.
Many maintain that the rule will protect students from toxic programs.
“The Department of Education's gainful employment rule is a modest and important first step to protect students and taxpayers from subprime academic programs that have a demonstrated track record of failure,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who has headed a series of hearings critical of the for-profit sector.
“The only programs that would lose funding would be programs that are consistently failing to provide students with gainful employment and are providing them with insurmountable debt,” adds Pauline Abernathy of the Institute for College Access & Success, an education advocacy group that favors more industry regulation.
Others, including the National Black Chamber of Commerce and the Hispanic Leadership Fund, have said the new federal rule could hurt minority and low-income students by eliminating important funding options and therefore reducing the number of schools they can afford to attend. Congressman John Kline, R-Minn., filed an amendment in February to try to cut DOE funding in order to stop the rule from being enacted. Harris Miller, the president of Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, an industry group, has said the rule has “fundamental legal flaws” because the DOE is “engaging in a form of price fixing,” which it doesn't have the authority to do.
The lobbying seems to have worked.
Analysts say the rule is more lenient than they and most investors had expected “meaningfully watered down,” according to R.W. Baird's Amy Junker. Under the rule's original terms, programs that failed to meet the criteria would have lost federal loan eligibility immediately and enrollment would have been frozen at any school in danger of failing. The finalized rule gives schools multiple chances over a four-year period to improve their stats. After “three strikes,” a school would lose eligibility for three years.
“We're focusing on improving (for-profit programs) rather than closing them. Students would be better off if their programs were stronger rather than closed down,” said James Kvaal, a DOE official, during a conference call with reporters.
The DOE said it expects 18 percent of for-profit schools' programs to fail its tests at some point, and 5 percent of programs to lose eligibility under the new law.
There's a lot at stake for the schools and their investors, who have benefited from the surge in for-profit programs hitting the market in the last decade. The country's largest chain, Apollo Group, has seen revenue and net income grow about eightfold since 2000. And despite the hit that the sector has taken from increased regulatory scrutiny, Apollo's stock has more than quadrupled in that time.
But BMO Capital Markets analyst Jeff Silber sees profits declining or stagnating at most for-profit schools over the next few years. New enrollments are dropping sharply after years of double-digit growth as the schools adjust their businesses to accommodate the government's stricter oversight.
Some schools have been trying to get out in front of the new laws and adapt their business models to the new reality. Apollo's University of Phoenix, for example, now offers a free, three-week orientation that helps weed out unprepared students without charging them. The Washington Post Co.'s Kaplan education division also has put in place a free trial period so students can see if they really want to commit to school. Career Education Corp. is making new online undergraduate students pass a college prep course if they haven't attended college before; if they can't do the work, they can drop out without paying tuition.
University of Phoenix spokesperson Rick Castellano and Kaplan spokesperson Mark Harrad said they had no comment yet on the new regulations.
June 3, 2011
NEW YORK - The government is moving forward with its crackdown on the country's for-profit schools, aiming to protect students from taking on too much debt to attend schools that do nothing for their job prospects.
But the final version of the Department of Education's rule, released Thursday, is much softer than its original incarnation. It gives schools more time to correct deficiencies and makes it likely that fewer will lose access to federal student aid dollars. The news sent education stocks soaring in morning trading, with companies that analysts had considered most at risk of having to shut down programs or change them significantly like Corinthian Colleges Inc. and Education Management Corp. gaining each more than 25 percent.
Shares of the nation's largest chain, Apollo Group Inc., which owns the University of Phoenix, rose 13 percent. DeVry was up 11 percent and the Washington Post Co., which owns the Kaplan school chain, rose 6 percent.
The “previously proposed onerous rules have been relaxed,” said UBS analyst Ariel Sokol.
Nearly 18 months after negotiations began on how to define “gainful employment,” the DOE has released conditions that for-profit schools must meet in order to access federal financial aid dollars. If graduates owe too much relative to their income or too few former students are paying back their tuition loans on time, schools stand to lose access to Pell grants and federal student aid. Such a loss would seriously crimp schools' ability to attract students.
“These new regulations will help ensure that students at these schools are getting what they pay for: Solid preparation for a good job,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Thursday. “We're giving career colleges every opportunity to reform themselves, but we're not letting them off the hook, because too many vulnerable students are being hurt.”
Most students at career colleges and vocational schools pay tuition with federal financial aid dollars as much as 90 percent of a school's revenue can come from government aid. But that leaves taxpayers on the hook if students can't find good jobs and default on their loans.
And they are defaulting in large numbers.
Students at for-profit institutions such as technical programs and culinary schools represent just 12 percent of all higher education students but 46 percent of all student loan dollars in default. The average student earning an associate degree at a for-profit school carries $14,000 in federal loan debt.
Government scrutiny of the industry grew as the Great Recession exacerbated students' debt burdens. The DOE last fall created rules to rein in deceptive advertising and barred schools from paying enrollment counselors based on how many students they signed up, among other measures. The agency drew up the “gainful employment” rule in 2010 but delayed putting it into effect as it faced heavy lobbying from schools and politicians.
Under final terms of the law, announced Thursday, schools will only be able to receive federal-paid tuition if at least 35 percent of its former students are repaying their loans. Or, the estimated annual loan payment of a typical graduate must not be bigger than 30 percent of his or her discretionary income, or 12 percent of his or her total earnings.
Many maintain that the rule will protect students from toxic programs.
“The Department of Education's gainful employment rule is a modest and important first step to protect students and taxpayers from subprime academic programs that have a demonstrated track record of failure,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who has headed a series of hearings critical of the for-profit sector.
“The only programs that would lose funding would be programs that are consistently failing to provide students with gainful employment and are providing them with insurmountable debt,” adds Pauline Abernathy of the Institute for College Access & Success, an education advocacy group that favors more industry regulation.
Others, including the National Black Chamber of Commerce and the Hispanic Leadership Fund, have said the new federal rule could hurt minority and low-income students by eliminating important funding options and therefore reducing the number of schools they can afford to attend. Congressman John Kline, R-Minn., filed an amendment in February to try to cut DOE funding in order to stop the rule from being enacted. Harris Miller, the president of Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, an industry group, has said the rule has “fundamental legal flaws” because the DOE is “engaging in a form of price fixing,” which it doesn't have the authority to do.
The lobbying seems to have worked.
Analysts say the rule is more lenient than they and most investors had expected “meaningfully watered down,” according to R.W. Baird's Amy Junker. Under the rule's original terms, programs that failed to meet the criteria would have lost federal loan eligibility immediately and enrollment would have been frozen at any school in danger of failing. The finalized rule gives schools multiple chances over a four-year period to improve their stats. After “three strikes,” a school would lose eligibility for three years.
“We're focusing on improving (for-profit programs) rather than closing them. Students would be better off if their programs were stronger rather than closed down,” said James Kvaal, a DOE official, during a conference call with reporters.
The DOE said it expects 18 percent of for-profit schools' programs to fail its tests at some point, and 5 percent of programs to lose eligibility under the new law.
There's a lot at stake for the schools and their investors, who have benefited from the surge in for-profit programs hitting the market in the last decade. The country's largest chain, Apollo Group, has seen revenue and net income grow about eightfold since 2000. And despite the hit that the sector has taken from increased regulatory scrutiny, Apollo's stock has more than quadrupled in that time.
But BMO Capital Markets analyst Jeff Silber sees profits declining or stagnating at most for-profit schools over the next few years. New enrollments are dropping sharply after years of double-digit growth as the schools adjust their businesses to accommodate the government's stricter oversight.
Some schools have been trying to get out in front of the new laws and adapt their business models to the new reality. Apollo's University of Phoenix, for example, now offers a free, three-week orientation that helps weed out unprepared students without charging them. The Washington Post Co.'s Kaplan education division also has put in place a free trial period so students can see if they really want to commit to school. Career Education Corp. is making new online undergraduate students pass a college prep course if they haven't attended college before; if they can't do the work, they can drop out without paying tuition.
University of Phoenix spokesperson Rick Castellano and Kaplan spokesperson Mark Harrad said they had no comment yet on the new regulations.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Perry's higher education policy taking on a tea party flavor
By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, May 30, 2011
Rick Perry had been governor of Texas for all of 13 days when he announced in January 2001 that higher education would be his top legislative priority. He called for voucher-style funding, an expansion of online learning and a dramatic increase in student financial aid.
More than 10 years later, reinventing public higher education remains a work in progress for the state's longest-serving governor.
That effort has taken an unusual turn lately, with prominent alumni, donors, business leaders and university officials questioning Perry's initiatives and those of his appointees to university governing boards. The governor, for his part, has accused critics, whom he did not name, of lying.
"The big lie making the rounds in Texas is that elected or appointed officials want to undermine or de-emphasize research at our colleges and universities," Perry wrote in a recent column in the American-Statesman. "That disinformation campaign is nothing more than an attempt to shut down an open discussion about ways to improve our state universities and make them more effective, accountable, affordable and transparent."
The GOP governor's higher education message has long had a populist tone, but it has taken on a tea party flavor of late. That's not surprising inasmuch as he has cultivated a political profile since the early days of the last gubernatorial campaign that emphasizes smaller, cheaper and more economically minded government, said James Henson , director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas.
At a time of declining state funding for colleges and universities, for instance, Perry has urged governing boards to develop $10,000 bachelor's degree programs and freeze tuition for four years.
"From a political point of view, the governor is on fairly safe territory being critical of the status quo in higher education," Henson said, adding that his approach appeals to his voting base more than to traditional Republicans, some of whom have been critical of the Perry administration on higher education.
Perry's pronouncements could mesh with a strategy to position him for a presidential or vice presidential candidacy, Henson said. The governor said last week that he would think about running for president.
"Conservative think tanks, which I think he listens to and trusts, have been very suspicious of the tenure system and the research mission of a lot of tier one universities," said Daron Shaw, a professor of government at UT. "It's not bad politics (to challenge the status quo), given his constituency and perhaps long-term interests."
Debate over the future of public higher education in Texas reached a full boil in March when Gene Powell, Perry's choice for chairman of the UT System Board of Regents, hired a $200,000-a-year adviser who had written dismissively of much academic research. The adviser, Rick O'Donnell, was dismissed after charging that officials were suppressing data on professors' salaries and workloads.
O'Donnell previously worked for charitable foundations run by Jeff Sandefer, a Perry donor and architect of several Perry-endorsed recommendations, including bonus pay for teachers based solely on student evaluations. When the Texas A&M University System adopted such a bonus system, the Association of American Universities called it a simplistic approach.
Some of the governor's appointees to the UT board, including Alex Cranberg and Brenda Pejovich , have pressed the nine UT academic campuses to pull together extensive data on faculty salaries, workloads, research grants and other measures of productivity — an exercise that UT President William Powers Jr., the Ex-Students' Association and others have faulted because it does not account for the quality and impact of professors' work.
Powell has both defended the regents' right to request such information and criticized an analysis of the draft data by an Ohio University researcher, who concluded that 20 percent of UT-Austin professors instruct most of the school's students.
The broad outlines of Perry's higher education policy, with an emphasis on affordability, access and accountability, first emerged on Jan. 3, 2001 , when he began crisscrossing the state to promote proposals from his Special Commission on 21st Century Colleges and Universities, a panel he established in 1999 while he was lieutenant governor.
The most important recommendation called for overhauling the way public colleges and universities are funded. Instead of appropriating money to schools, the state would place it in the hands of students.
This is a bold idea," Perry said at the time. "It essentially means that the State of Texas will guarantee a scholarship to every Texan who qualifies in an amount that would cover average tuition, fees and books at a public institution of higher education."
The proposal never got serious traction, but it continues to surface occasionally. Voucher-style funding was one of seven "breakthrough solutions" outlined by Sandefer and embraced by Perry at a May 2008 summit of public university regents.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin-based group with close ties to Perry, helped organize that meeting and continues to tout the breakthrough solutions. Sandefer, who is on the foundation's board, was a member of Perry's special commission.
Emails released under an open records request show that the governor, Sandefer and Sandefer's father, J.D. "Jakie" Sandefer III, pressed regents at public university systems to adopt the recommendations after the 2008 summit. The Dallas Morning News, citing unnamed sources, has reported that retiring A&M Chancellor Mike McKinney was pushed from his post by regents because he failed to be assertive enough in implementing the breakthrough solutions.
Some of Perry's early proposals have become state policy. At his direction, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and the Texas Education Agency have worked together to enhance college readiness standards for public schools. Public colleges and universities regularly report graduation rates and other measures of academic performance. Schools get some of their funding on the basis of such performance.
Other proposals remain under discussion.
The special commission recommended that schools collaborate to deliver online coursework, adding that if the effort fails the state should consider creating a virtual university. Coordinating board officials echoed part of that recommendation recently when they suggested that schools could cut costs and improve quality by developing common online programs rather than separate ones for each campus.
Spending on Texas Grants, the state's main financial aid program, has risen considerably over the years with Perry's backing but not enough to keep up with population growth. Thousands of needy students who meet eligibility requirements don't get a grant. The shortfall will worsen during the next two years under a budget agreement reached by state legislative negotiators.
Although all members of the state's higher education governing boards are Perry appointees, he hasn't always gotten his way when it comes to the boards' selections of university leaders. A&M regents picked Robert Gates for president of the College Station campus in 2002 rather than the governor's preference, then-U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas. UT regents named Francisco Cigarroa chancellor instead of Perry's choice, former state Sen. John Montford.
Perry's quarter-century of political life has seen him morph from New Deal Democrat to Ronald Reagan Republican to a kind of tea party insurgent. The latest transformation has opened a rift between him and some longtime allies.
Perhaps the sharpest criticism has come from Peter O'Donnell Jr., a Dallas investor, philanthropist and former chairman of the state Republican Party who donated $30,000 to Perry's campaign in 2009-10. O'Donnell, no relation to the former UT System adviser, said the governor apparently does not understand that ill-considered changes in UT System policy could impair recruiting of top professors and threaten the model of public higher education that depends increasingly on philanthropy.
Moreover, the CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp., a Nobel laureate and leaders in higher education and philanthropy gathered on the UT-Austin campus recently to emphasize the importance of university-based research.
Perry has championed research with an economic development flavor. The state has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in medical, scientific and technological research since he became governor.
But Perry hasn't said much about the importance of research in the humanities, arts and social sciences. And he is donating proceeds from his book, "Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America From Washington," to the Public Policy Foundation, which looks askance at much academic research.
Perry, who has said he doesn't agree with all of the foundation's positions, named two of its board members, Phil Adams of Bryan and Pejovich of Dallas, to the A&M and UT governing boards, respectively.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Rick Perry had been governor of Texas for all of 13 days when he announced in January 2001 that higher education would be his top legislative priority. He called for voucher-style funding, an expansion of online learning and a dramatic increase in student financial aid.
More than 10 years later, reinventing public higher education remains a work in progress for the state's longest-serving governor.
That effort has taken an unusual turn lately, with prominent alumni, donors, business leaders and university officials questioning Perry's initiatives and those of his appointees to university governing boards. The governor, for his part, has accused critics, whom he did not name, of lying.
"The big lie making the rounds in Texas is that elected or appointed officials want to undermine or de-emphasize research at our colleges and universities," Perry wrote in a recent column in the American-Statesman. "That disinformation campaign is nothing more than an attempt to shut down an open discussion about ways to improve our state universities and make them more effective, accountable, affordable and transparent."
The GOP governor's higher education message has long had a populist tone, but it has taken on a tea party flavor of late. That's not surprising inasmuch as he has cultivated a political profile since the early days of the last gubernatorial campaign that emphasizes smaller, cheaper and more economically minded government, said James Henson , director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas.
At a time of declining state funding for colleges and universities, for instance, Perry has urged governing boards to develop $10,000 bachelor's degree programs and freeze tuition for four years.
"From a political point of view, the governor is on fairly safe territory being critical of the status quo in higher education," Henson said, adding that his approach appeals to his voting base more than to traditional Republicans, some of whom have been critical of the Perry administration on higher education.
Perry's pronouncements could mesh with a strategy to position him for a presidential or vice presidential candidacy, Henson said. The governor said last week that he would think about running for president.
"Conservative think tanks, which I think he listens to and trusts, have been very suspicious of the tenure system and the research mission of a lot of tier one universities," said Daron Shaw, a professor of government at UT. "It's not bad politics (to challenge the status quo), given his constituency and perhaps long-term interests."
Debate over the future of public higher education in Texas reached a full boil in March when Gene Powell, Perry's choice for chairman of the UT System Board of Regents, hired a $200,000-a-year adviser who had written dismissively of much academic research. The adviser, Rick O'Donnell, was dismissed after charging that officials were suppressing data on professors' salaries and workloads.
O'Donnell previously worked for charitable foundations run by Jeff Sandefer, a Perry donor and architect of several Perry-endorsed recommendations, including bonus pay for teachers based solely on student evaluations. When the Texas A&M University System adopted such a bonus system, the Association of American Universities called it a simplistic approach.
Some of the governor's appointees to the UT board, including Alex Cranberg and Brenda Pejovich , have pressed the nine UT academic campuses to pull together extensive data on faculty salaries, workloads, research grants and other measures of productivity — an exercise that UT President William Powers Jr., the Ex-Students' Association and others have faulted because it does not account for the quality and impact of professors' work.
Powell has both defended the regents' right to request such information and criticized an analysis of the draft data by an Ohio University researcher, who concluded that 20 percent of UT-Austin professors instruct most of the school's students.
The broad outlines of Perry's higher education policy, with an emphasis on affordability, access and accountability, first emerged on Jan. 3, 2001 , when he began crisscrossing the state to promote proposals from his Special Commission on 21st Century Colleges and Universities, a panel he established in 1999 while he was lieutenant governor.
The most important recommendation called for overhauling the way public colleges and universities are funded. Instead of appropriating money to schools, the state would place it in the hands of students.
This is a bold idea," Perry said at the time. "It essentially means that the State of Texas will guarantee a scholarship to every Texan who qualifies in an amount that would cover average tuition, fees and books at a public institution of higher education."
The proposal never got serious traction, but it continues to surface occasionally. Voucher-style funding was one of seven "breakthrough solutions" outlined by Sandefer and embraced by Perry at a May 2008 summit of public university regents.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin-based group with close ties to Perry, helped organize that meeting and continues to tout the breakthrough solutions. Sandefer, who is on the foundation's board, was a member of Perry's special commission.
Emails released under an open records request show that the governor, Sandefer and Sandefer's father, J.D. "Jakie" Sandefer III, pressed regents at public university systems to adopt the recommendations after the 2008 summit. The Dallas Morning News, citing unnamed sources, has reported that retiring A&M Chancellor Mike McKinney was pushed from his post by regents because he failed to be assertive enough in implementing the breakthrough solutions.
Some of Perry's early proposals have become state policy. At his direction, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and the Texas Education Agency have worked together to enhance college readiness standards for public schools. Public colleges and universities regularly report graduation rates and other measures of academic performance. Schools get some of their funding on the basis of such performance.
Other proposals remain under discussion.
The special commission recommended that schools collaborate to deliver online coursework, adding that if the effort fails the state should consider creating a virtual university. Coordinating board officials echoed part of that recommendation recently when they suggested that schools could cut costs and improve quality by developing common online programs rather than separate ones for each campus.
Spending on Texas Grants, the state's main financial aid program, has risen considerably over the years with Perry's backing but not enough to keep up with population growth. Thousands of needy students who meet eligibility requirements don't get a grant. The shortfall will worsen during the next two years under a budget agreement reached by state legislative negotiators.
Although all members of the state's higher education governing boards are Perry appointees, he hasn't always gotten his way when it comes to the boards' selections of university leaders. A&M regents picked Robert Gates for president of the College Station campus in 2002 rather than the governor's preference, then-U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas. UT regents named Francisco Cigarroa chancellor instead of Perry's choice, former state Sen. John Montford.
Perry's quarter-century of political life has seen him morph from New Deal Democrat to Ronald Reagan Republican to a kind of tea party insurgent. The latest transformation has opened a rift between him and some longtime allies.
Perhaps the sharpest criticism has come from Peter O'Donnell Jr., a Dallas investor, philanthropist and former chairman of the state Republican Party who donated $30,000 to Perry's campaign in 2009-10. O'Donnell, no relation to the former UT System adviser, said the governor apparently does not understand that ill-considered changes in UT System policy could impair recruiting of top professors and threaten the model of public higher education that depends increasingly on philanthropy.
Moreover, the CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp., a Nobel laureate and leaders in higher education and philanthropy gathered on the UT-Austin campus recently to emphasize the importance of university-based research.
Perry has championed research with an economic development flavor. The state has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in medical, scientific and technological research since he became governor.
But Perry hasn't said much about the importance of research in the humanities, arts and social sciences. And he is donating proceeds from his book, "Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America From Washington," to the Public Policy Foundation, which looks askance at much academic research.
Perry, who has said he doesn't agree with all of the foundation's positions, named two of its board members, Phil Adams of Bryan and Pejovich of Dallas, to the A&M and UT governing boards, respectively.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Policy Report Says Reform Critical to Viability of U.S. Higher Education
Interesting article on both higher education accountability and degree completion. Everyone is jumping to weigh in. Check out the full report "Front and Center: Critical Choices for Higher Education."
-Patricia
by Jamaal Abdul-Alim , May 26, 2011
In order for public colleges and universities to remain viable and effective in the coming years, higher education leaders must revamp the way they do business and refocus on delivery modes that lead to higher rates of completion.
Such are the main messages in a new report titled Front and Center: Critical Choices for Higher Education.
Produced by the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, the report calls on higher education leaders to “take several actions, none of them comfortable.”
Those recommendations essentially call for a leaner, meaner higher education system, if you will, that focuses more on accountability, using online and other technology to get better results, de-emphasizing “general education” and keeping a tight rein on research.
The report—borne largely through a meeting convened in December 2010 in Charlottesville, Va., by the Miller Center, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, the National Conference of State Legislatures and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices—drew both praise and sharp criticism in various quarters of higher education.
Dr. Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, called the report “essentially schizophrenic” for its endorsement of liberal education on the one hand but then calling for certain students to bypass liberal education altogether.
“Whatever you’re majoring in, whether medical records or engineering, everybody needs big-picture knowledge,” Geary Schneider said, explaining that liberal education inculcates essential things such as critical thinking and ethics.
Stan Jones, founder and president of Complete College America, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that works to increase degree attainment, particularly for traditionally underrepresented populations, credited the report with calling attention to the role that government can play.
However, he said he disagreed with the report’s suggestion that the federal government act as a “convener” of state leaders on higher education.
“I don’t think that makes much sense,” said Jones, explaining that the power to determine things such as tuition, appropriations and charters is reserved by the states.
The report also evoked some skepticism for its not-so-subtle presupposition that its recommendations will radically change America’s higher education and economic landscape.
“I do not think that state or federal policy-makers can enact changes in policy that will cure the problems of cost, degree completion and employment,” said Bill Barrett, Executive Director of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design and a vocal critic of various efforts to formulate more standards.
“These issues are way too complicated and interwoven with global forces beyond our control, for a simple gathering like the one at the Miller Center to have any meaningful effect,” Barrett said.
The primary recommendation of the Miller report is to “promote and reward institutional changes that advance the completion agenda.”
But this also includes allocating greater percentages of operating budgets to instruction, reducing the number of adjuncts and requiring permanent faculty to teach more courses while letting go of other interests or assignments.
The report also calls for colleges and universities to “evaluate and reduce administrative overhead” and shifting the savings to the area of advising.
“Many institutions have grown used to spending their money on things that may not reflect the needs of the states or regions that they are supposed to serve,” the report states.
The report also calls on states and the federal government to “focus research efforts at fewer institutions” and say clearly that the “research” obligation of the great majority of faculty members is simply to remain in their current fields.
“Relatively few of them,” the report says, “are going to make historic contributions to human knowledge.”
The report states further: “The past few decades have seen far too many colleges and universities engage in a rush toward elite status. The more selective an institution is, the better. The more research money it collects, the better. The higher it ranks in national and international publications, the better. But what has the race for status contributed to the public good?”
Geary Schneider, of AAC&U, said it’s wholly wrongheaded and shortsighted to view research in such a way.
“The U.S. investment in research and the advancement of knowledge as a core mission of higher education is what helped us become a world leader in higher education in all fields,” Geary Schneider said, “and it’s simply folly to imagine the United States can pull back its investment in research and advance knowledge and still be a world-class higher education system and society.”
Not everyone agreed. Barrett, for instance, said he was aligned with the report’s stance on research, increased faculty responsibilities and other issues.
“I generally agree that we will need to focus research at fewer, mega universities; we will need to increase teaching loads at most other colleges; we will surely need more flexible delivery systems, and we will need more coordination, cooperation and data,” Barrett said.
-Patricia
by Jamaal Abdul-Alim , May 26, 2011
In order for public colleges and universities to remain viable and effective in the coming years, higher education leaders must revamp the way they do business and refocus on delivery modes that lead to higher rates of completion.
Such are the main messages in a new report titled Front and Center: Critical Choices for Higher Education.
Produced by the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, the report calls on higher education leaders to “take several actions, none of them comfortable.”
Those recommendations essentially call for a leaner, meaner higher education system, if you will, that focuses more on accountability, using online and other technology to get better results, de-emphasizing “general education” and keeping a tight rein on research.
The report—borne largely through a meeting convened in December 2010 in Charlottesville, Va., by the Miller Center, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, the National Conference of State Legislatures and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices—drew both praise and sharp criticism in various quarters of higher education.
Dr. Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, called the report “essentially schizophrenic” for its endorsement of liberal education on the one hand but then calling for certain students to bypass liberal education altogether.
“Whatever you’re majoring in, whether medical records or engineering, everybody needs big-picture knowledge,” Geary Schneider said, explaining that liberal education inculcates essential things such as critical thinking and ethics.
Stan Jones, founder and president of Complete College America, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that works to increase degree attainment, particularly for traditionally underrepresented populations, credited the report with calling attention to the role that government can play.
However, he said he disagreed with the report’s suggestion that the federal government act as a “convener” of state leaders on higher education.
“I don’t think that makes much sense,” said Jones, explaining that the power to determine things such as tuition, appropriations and charters is reserved by the states.
The report also evoked some skepticism for its not-so-subtle presupposition that its recommendations will radically change America’s higher education and economic landscape.
“I do not think that state or federal policy-makers can enact changes in policy that will cure the problems of cost, degree completion and employment,” said Bill Barrett, Executive Director of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design and a vocal critic of various efforts to formulate more standards.
“These issues are way too complicated and interwoven with global forces beyond our control, for a simple gathering like the one at the Miller Center to have any meaningful effect,” Barrett said.
The primary recommendation of the Miller report is to “promote and reward institutional changes that advance the completion agenda.”
But this also includes allocating greater percentages of operating budgets to instruction, reducing the number of adjuncts and requiring permanent faculty to teach more courses while letting go of other interests or assignments.
The report also calls for colleges and universities to “evaluate and reduce administrative overhead” and shifting the savings to the area of advising.
“Many institutions have grown used to spending their money on things that may not reflect the needs of the states or regions that they are supposed to serve,” the report states.
The report also calls on states and the federal government to “focus research efforts at fewer institutions” and say clearly that the “research” obligation of the great majority of faculty members is simply to remain in their current fields.
“Relatively few of them,” the report says, “are going to make historic contributions to human knowledge.”
The report states further: “The past few decades have seen far too many colleges and universities engage in a rush toward elite status. The more selective an institution is, the better. The more research money it collects, the better. The higher it ranks in national and international publications, the better. But what has the race for status contributed to the public good?”
Geary Schneider, of AAC&U, said it’s wholly wrongheaded and shortsighted to view research in such a way.
“The U.S. investment in research and the advancement of knowledge as a core mission of higher education is what helped us become a world leader in higher education in all fields,” Geary Schneider said, “and it’s simply folly to imagine the United States can pull back its investment in research and advance knowledge and still be a world-class higher education system and society.”
Not everyone agreed. Barrett, for instance, said he was aligned with the report’s stance on research, increased faculty responsibilities and other issues.
“I generally agree that we will need to focus research at fewer, mega universities; we will need to increase teaching loads at most other colleges; we will surely need more flexible delivery systems, and we will need more coordination, cooperation and data,” Barrett said.
Behold the power of challenging all high school students — not just the A team
By Jay Mathews, Washington Post
May 19, 2011
West Potomac High School in Fairfax County and Oakland Mills High School in Howard County are as close as schools come to being twins. Both are in affluent counties and serve ethnically and economically diverse populations. Forty-seven percent of West Potomac students and 52 percent of Oakland Mills students are black or Hispanic. Thirty-eight percent at West Potomac and 31 percent at Oakland Mills are from low-income families.
But when I indulge in my obsessive comparison of schools by their college-level course programs, significant differences emerge. Oakland Mills often bars students from taking Advanced Placement classes if they don’t have B’s in previous courses. West Potomac lets in everyone who signs up and pays the test fees. The AP test participation rate at West Potomac is three times what it is at Oakland Mills, but the passing rate on tests at the Fairfax school is lower: 61 percent, compared with 78 percent at Oakland Mills.
That wide gap in approaches to challenging courses is why I started rating high schools 13 years ago by how successful they were at giving students a taste of college trauma. In a national context, as college-level programs such as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate have become the prime means of preparing students for higher education, giving more students those opportunities has become crucial and controversial. Only half of students who go to college get to take college-level courses in high school, which many educators think is fine and others think is wrong. That controversy is one reason my rankings have drawn such attention.
The national list is being published now for the first time by The Washington Post. We call it The High School Challenge.
The idea for the list came to me as I was completing a book about America’s best public high schools. I kept running into the same mindless policy: Schools refused to let average students take the college-level courses and tests, reserving them for the better students. Research and common sense suggested that C students would learn much and be readier for college if they also took AP, but few schools appreciated that.
To illuminate the issue, I began ranking schools in 1998 on participation in AP and IB tests. Later, I added the Cambridge Advanced International Certificate of E ducation exam to what I named the Challenge Index. The national list started that year in Newsweek, the local list in The Post. This year’s national ranking moved to The Post after The Washington Post Co. sold Newsweek last summer.
The Challenge Index calculation is simple. I wanted everyone to be able to understand it and use it. Add up all the AP, IB or AICE tests taken in a given year. Divide by the number of graduating seniors. The target I set is also simple: Every school should reach a ratio of at least 1.000 — that is, as many college-level tests taken as diplomas issued. Any school that does will make my national list, unless its passing rate on those tests is unusually low or the school is unusually selective.
School leaders in Larchmont, N.Y., Winnetka, Ill., Beverly Hills, Calif., and elsewhere were puzzled and annoyed when I began this exercise. Because schools in those places allowed only their best students to take AP, they ranked lower on my list than some daring schools in less-wealthy communities that opened AP to all who wanted to work hard.
By coincidence, Washington area educators began a massive reform of their rules for placing students in college-level courses and tests. Influenced by the same pioneering teachers who had shown me the power of challenging more students, high schools in Northern Virginia, Maryland and the District created in this metropolitan region what continues to be the heaviest concentration of college-level courses in the country.
My list finds that only 1,910 U.S. public high schools, about 7 percent of the nationwide total, meet the target ratio. In the Washington area, 75 percent of public high schools do.
Some other regions do well, but not that well. Numerous school systems, wary of challenging students they believe are unready, hold the view that AP, IB and AICE are appropriate only for those with A or B averages. Some urban schools are discouraged by low test scores and therefore don’t encourage students to take AP.
But in some low-income communities, schools encourage as many students as possible to take AP, even if they rarely pass the exams, so they will get a sense of what college demands.
My method differs from how high schools are usually rated. Some lists use average SAT or ACT scores, state test scores or the percentage of graduates who go to four-year colleges. Those results are often so influenced by family income that you could get similar rankings by averaging the square footage of the students’ homes. Many principals and teachers have told me they prefer a measure such as mine that puts weight on efforts of school staffs to prepare students for college. They say that shows the quality of the school rather than the economic status of the parents and gives schools full of impoverished students a rare opportunity to shine.
The list draws attention in part because readers love rankings of any sort. It also is regularly denounced by educators who say it is wrong to rank schools based on just one number.
One of the most revealing arguments about this was between me and Patrick Welsh, an acclaimed English teacher at Alexandria’s T.C. Williams High School who frequently contributes to The Post. When we debated the issue in Outlook in 2005, Welsh said: “You’ve unwittingly created an out-of-control monster, a smoke and mirrors numbers game, the equivalent of ranking the teams in the NCAA basketball tournament on the basis of the number of players who got in the game, instead of the final score.”
I thought the metaphor worked better for me, since a school does not exist to beat other schools but to raise the achievement of students. Getting a lot of them into games is likely to sharpen their skills.
Welsh said adding students who read way below grade level into AP meant high achievers weren’t being challenged and low achievers were overwhelmed. I said he ought to visit Wakefield High in Arlington County, a five-minute drive from T.C. Williams. The two schools were demographically similar, serving large numbers of black or Hispanic students, many from poor families. Yet Wakefield teachers urged everyone to try AP and got award-winning results. The month after our debate, Wakefield had a Challenge Index rating of 2.030, compared with T.C. Williams’s 1.494. The percentage of AP tests passed by Wakefield students was higher: 51 percent to 39 percent. Thirty-five percent of the graduating Wakefield senior class had passed at least one AP exam, compared with 20 percent at T.C. Williams.
Mike Grill, the AP coordinator at Wakefield, told me then: “I don’t have patience for teachers who make excuses to explain why students can’t learn in their courses. The issue is not ‘why they can’t learn,’ but rather ‘why can’t you teach them?’ ”
Average students barred from AP usually don’t complain. They are used to being overlooked. But a few protest. Kerry Constabile at Mamaroneck High School in the New York City suburbs was upset when her request to take AP American History was denied because she had less than a B in social studies her sophomore year. She assigned the AP course to herself, getting the homework assignments from friends. She got a 3 on the 5-point AP exam. She was convinced that she would have done better had the school let her in the course.
Students in Howard have the same problem. If they don’t have at least a B in 10th-grade social science or a teacher’s recommendation, they can’t take AP U.S. history. Clarissa Evans, the county’s executive director for secondary curricular programs, said, “we have more work to do” in that area. Howard got a College Board award for improving AP access but still trails many other districts.
Frank Eastham, principal of Oakland Mills, said his teachers have been talking about ways to give more students exposure to AP, “but some think we are setting kids up for failure if we let them take a course for which they haven’t gotten the prerequisite class.”
At West Potomac High, AP Coordinator Drew Hamlin said: “We stress that success in AP courses is achievable for all students who are driven to succeed.”
The situation is worse in inner-city schools, where most students fail the AP exams. But those students often lack strong preliminary courses to get ready.
The inspiration for the list came a decade before I started compiling the AP participation data for schools nationwide. In 1987, I had the AP results from just one school — Garfield High in East Los Angeles. Eighty-five percent of the students were from low-income families, and AP courses had been rare. A few teachers changed that by upgrading lower-level courses so students would be ready for AP.
In 1987, 85 of the 129 Garfield students who took an AP calculus exam got a passing score of 3 or better. Amazingly, 26 percent of all Mexican American students in the country who passed an AP Calculus exam that year were from Garfield.
The famous math teacher Jaime Escalante had about half of them, but the other half were taught by Ben Jimenez. He was not a celebrity, just a competent, hard-working educator.
That statistic has haunted me since. I was glad to see the Garfield teachers recognized, but there was a darker side to the data. Why hadn’t the thousands of other schools in the country with underestimated Mexican Americans (or other kinds of students) done what the Garfield teachers had done? What was stopping them?
Take a look at the new national list and you will see which schools are asking themselves that question and trying to do something about it. I wish there were many more schools on the list than there are.
May 19, 2011
West Potomac High School in Fairfax County and Oakland Mills High School in Howard County are as close as schools come to being twins. Both are in affluent counties and serve ethnically and economically diverse populations. Forty-seven percent of West Potomac students and 52 percent of Oakland Mills students are black or Hispanic. Thirty-eight percent at West Potomac and 31 percent at Oakland Mills are from low-income families.
But when I indulge in my obsessive comparison of schools by their college-level course programs, significant differences emerge. Oakland Mills often bars students from taking Advanced Placement classes if they don’t have B’s in previous courses. West Potomac lets in everyone who signs up and pays the test fees. The AP test participation rate at West Potomac is three times what it is at Oakland Mills, but the passing rate on tests at the Fairfax school is lower: 61 percent, compared with 78 percent at Oakland Mills.
That wide gap in approaches to challenging courses is why I started rating high schools 13 years ago by how successful they were at giving students a taste of college trauma. In a national context, as college-level programs such as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate have become the prime means of preparing students for higher education, giving more students those opportunities has become crucial and controversial. Only half of students who go to college get to take college-level courses in high school, which many educators think is fine and others think is wrong. That controversy is one reason my rankings have drawn such attention.
The national list is being published now for the first time by The Washington Post. We call it The High School Challenge.
The idea for the list came to me as I was completing a book about America’s best public high schools. I kept running into the same mindless policy: Schools refused to let average students take the college-level courses and tests, reserving them for the better students. Research and common sense suggested that C students would learn much and be readier for college if they also took AP, but few schools appreciated that.
To illuminate the issue, I began ranking schools in 1998 on participation in AP and IB tests. Later, I added the Cambridge Advanced International Certificate of E ducation exam to what I named the Challenge Index. The national list started that year in Newsweek, the local list in The Post. This year’s national ranking moved to The Post after The Washington Post Co. sold Newsweek last summer.
The Challenge Index calculation is simple. I wanted everyone to be able to understand it and use it. Add up all the AP, IB or AICE tests taken in a given year. Divide by the number of graduating seniors. The target I set is also simple: Every school should reach a ratio of at least 1.000 — that is, as many college-level tests taken as diplomas issued. Any school that does will make my national list, unless its passing rate on those tests is unusually low or the school is unusually selective.
School leaders in Larchmont, N.Y., Winnetka, Ill., Beverly Hills, Calif., and elsewhere were puzzled and annoyed when I began this exercise. Because schools in those places allowed only their best students to take AP, they ranked lower on my list than some daring schools in less-wealthy communities that opened AP to all who wanted to work hard.
By coincidence, Washington area educators began a massive reform of their rules for placing students in college-level courses and tests. Influenced by the same pioneering teachers who had shown me the power of challenging more students, high schools in Northern Virginia, Maryland and the District created in this metropolitan region what continues to be the heaviest concentration of college-level courses in the country.
My list finds that only 1,910 U.S. public high schools, about 7 percent of the nationwide total, meet the target ratio. In the Washington area, 75 percent of public high schools do.
Some other regions do well, but not that well. Numerous school systems, wary of challenging students they believe are unready, hold the view that AP, IB and AICE are appropriate only for those with A or B averages. Some urban schools are discouraged by low test scores and therefore don’t encourage students to take AP.
But in some low-income communities, schools encourage as many students as possible to take AP, even if they rarely pass the exams, so they will get a sense of what college demands.
My method differs from how high schools are usually rated. Some lists use average SAT or ACT scores, state test scores or the percentage of graduates who go to four-year colleges. Those results are often so influenced by family income that you could get similar rankings by averaging the square footage of the students’ homes. Many principals and teachers have told me they prefer a measure such as mine that puts weight on efforts of school staffs to prepare students for college. They say that shows the quality of the school rather than the economic status of the parents and gives schools full of impoverished students a rare opportunity to shine.
The list draws attention in part because readers love rankings of any sort. It also is regularly denounced by educators who say it is wrong to rank schools based on just one number.
One of the most revealing arguments about this was between me and Patrick Welsh, an acclaimed English teacher at Alexandria’s T.C. Williams High School who frequently contributes to The Post. When we debated the issue in Outlook in 2005, Welsh said: “You’ve unwittingly created an out-of-control monster, a smoke and mirrors numbers game, the equivalent of ranking the teams in the NCAA basketball tournament on the basis of the number of players who got in the game, instead of the final score.”
I thought the metaphor worked better for me, since a school does not exist to beat other schools but to raise the achievement of students. Getting a lot of them into games is likely to sharpen their skills.
Welsh said adding students who read way below grade level into AP meant high achievers weren’t being challenged and low achievers were overwhelmed. I said he ought to visit Wakefield High in Arlington County, a five-minute drive from T.C. Williams. The two schools were demographically similar, serving large numbers of black or Hispanic students, many from poor families. Yet Wakefield teachers urged everyone to try AP and got award-winning results. The month after our debate, Wakefield had a Challenge Index rating of 2.030, compared with T.C. Williams’s 1.494. The percentage of AP tests passed by Wakefield students was higher: 51 percent to 39 percent. Thirty-five percent of the graduating Wakefield senior class had passed at least one AP exam, compared with 20 percent at T.C. Williams.
Mike Grill, the AP coordinator at Wakefield, told me then: “I don’t have patience for teachers who make excuses to explain why students can’t learn in their courses. The issue is not ‘why they can’t learn,’ but rather ‘why can’t you teach them?’ ”
Average students barred from AP usually don’t complain. They are used to being overlooked. But a few protest. Kerry Constabile at Mamaroneck High School in the New York City suburbs was upset when her request to take AP American History was denied because she had less than a B in social studies her sophomore year. She assigned the AP course to herself, getting the homework assignments from friends. She got a 3 on the 5-point AP exam. She was convinced that she would have done better had the school let her in the course.
Students in Howard have the same problem. If they don’t have at least a B in 10th-grade social science or a teacher’s recommendation, they can’t take AP U.S. history. Clarissa Evans, the county’s executive director for secondary curricular programs, said, “we have more work to do” in that area. Howard got a College Board award for improving AP access but still trails many other districts.
Frank Eastham, principal of Oakland Mills, said his teachers have been talking about ways to give more students exposure to AP, “but some think we are setting kids up for failure if we let them take a course for which they haven’t gotten the prerequisite class.”
At West Potomac High, AP Coordinator Drew Hamlin said: “We stress that success in AP courses is achievable for all students who are driven to succeed.”
The situation is worse in inner-city schools, where most students fail the AP exams. But those students often lack strong preliminary courses to get ready.
The inspiration for the list came a decade before I started compiling the AP participation data for schools nationwide. In 1987, I had the AP results from just one school — Garfield High in East Los Angeles. Eighty-five percent of the students were from low-income families, and AP courses had been rare. A few teachers changed that by upgrading lower-level courses so students would be ready for AP.
In 1987, 85 of the 129 Garfield students who took an AP calculus exam got a passing score of 3 or better. Amazingly, 26 percent of all Mexican American students in the country who passed an AP Calculus exam that year were from Garfield.
The famous math teacher Jaime Escalante had about half of them, but the other half were taught by Ben Jimenez. He was not a celebrity, just a competent, hard-working educator.
That statistic has haunted me since. I was glad to see the Garfield teachers recognized, but there was a darker side to the data. Why hadn’t the thousands of other schools in the country with underestimated Mexican Americans (or other kinds of students) done what the Garfield teachers had done? What was stopping them?
Take a look at the new national list and you will see which schools are asking themselves that question and trying to do something about it. I wish there were many more schools on the list than there are.
Texas’ Rapid Latino Growth Fueled by Those with Mexican Ancestry
Texas’ Rapid Latino Growth Fueled by Those with Mexican Ancestry
Dallas Morning News / 26 May 2011
By Michael E. Young/Staff Writer
myoung@dallasnews.com
In increasingly diverse Texas, one key component of the state’s strong growth over the past decade isn’t quite as diverse as it was.
The state’s Hispanic population increased 42 percent from 2000 to 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, to almost 9.5 million. But after a dip in the 2000 census, when just 76 percent of Hispanics reported direct or family ties to Mexico, that percentage grew to 84 percent, according to demographic information released Thursday by the Census Bureau.
“I think what we’re seeing in part stems from the instability we saw in past decades in Central America compared to what we have now,” said Dr. Steve Murdock, director of the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas at Rice University and former U.S. Census Bureau director.
But the real driver in Hispanic — and notably Mexican — growth is the Texas economy.
Through the first seven years of the decade, Murdock said, the state’s growth triggered a building boom that attracted construction workers, most notably from Mexico.
Dr. Lloyd Potter, the Texas state demographer, said that even when the U.S. economy faltered over the last three years, Texas’ “has been particularly robust compared with other states and weathered the recession relatively well.”
“That attracts everyone,” Potter said, “particularly people of Hispanic descent from other states. When we look at domestic migration into Texas, the greatest flow is from California,” a state whose population has deep ties to Mexico.
At the same time, U.S. immigration policy favors family reunification. So many of those who came from Mexico for work eventually obtained visas to bring their families here, too, Potter said.
“In terms of migration into the state, those two things favor people of Mexican origin,” he said.
Though Dallas County has by far the largest Hispanic population in North Texas, more than 900,000, its 37 percent growth rate from 2000 to 2010 trailed both the statewide rate of 42 percent and those of its suburban neighbors.
Collin County’s Hispanic population more than doubled to 115,345, an increase of 128 percent, while Hispanics in Denton County increased 129 percent, to 120,836. Tarrant County’s Hispanic population grew to 482,977, an increase of 69 percent.
“That’s another issue that clearly comes out in these numbers — we are more diverse, and that diversity is increasingly distributed not only in the central city counties, but in suburban counties as well,” Murdock said.
Asian population
That’s true for Asian immigrants, too. The Asian population increased 46 percent nationally from 2000 to 2010 and 71 percent in Texas to 964,000. Many of them sought homes in the suburbs.
“With their strong emphasis on education, many of the Asians are heading to the Katys and Planos, looking for better schools and a suburban lifestyle,” Murdock said.
While Dallas County’s population increased 6.7 percent over the decade, the Asian population rose 35 percent, to 87,752. Suburban growth rates were far more dramatic, though with much smaller numbers. In the seven-county Dallas-Fort Worth area, the Asian population increased from 194,050 to 338,692 over the decade, an increase of more than 74 percent.
On a percentage basis, most Asian groups in Texas grew even faster than Hispanics, but the real numbers of Asians are far smaller, Murdock said. And there has been a shift in the groups in most parts of Texas, with Indians the largest group in 2010, replacing the Vietnamese, who led in 2000.
“But all have had substantial increases, except in the Japanese population,” he said. “Over the decade, the population of Asian Indians increased about 90 percent in Texas, the Chinese 48 percent, 77 percent for Filipinos, 49 percent for Koreans and 56 percent for the Vietnamese.”
And as with Mexicans, the driving force for Asian growth, particularly Indian growth, is jobs, Potter said.
“There’s no question that over the decade, if you look at migration flow, Texas had a significant increase in the number of persons of Asian Indian descent,” he said. “That’s certainly consistent with the way the economy has gone, with industry moving a lot of people here on student visas or because they have skills in the high-tech industries or engineering.”
Once the workers are established, their families often follow, Potter said.
The latest census demographic numbers show the impact of increased diversity in powerful ways, Murdock said. Over the last decade, non-Hispanic whites increased 8.2 percent nationally. But Hispanic growth was 43 percent — an increase of 15.2 million people, more than half of the total national increase of 27.3 million.
Aging whites
While non-Hispanic whites are the largest race and ethnic group, they are growing at the slowest rate. And the group is getting increasingly older.
“We talk about how diverse Texas is, and that’s also true with age structure,” Murdock said. “We continue to be younger than the country as a whole, but we now have 44 counties where the median age is 45-plus. That’s an old population.”
Llano County is the oldest in the state, with a median age of 55, meaning half the population is older than 55 and half younger.
“The oldest counties in general are in the Panhandle, with predominantly aging Anglo populations,” Murdock said. “And the youngest counties are in the [Rio Grande] Valley … with huge minority populations.”
The seven counties in the Dallas area — Collin, Dallas, Denton, Ellis, Kaufman , Rockwall and Tarrant — have median ages from the low- to mid-30s. But each is older than it was 10 years ago.
The more dramatic population shifts pose particular problems across the state.
“If you’re in suburban areas around Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, you wonder, ‘How do we build enough schools and hire enough teachers?’” he said.
“And in West Texas and the Panhandle, it’s ‘How do we find enough students to keep our schools open?’ ”
Staff writer Ryan McNeill contributed to this report.
Dallas Morning News / 26 May 2011
By Michael E. Young/Staff Writer
myoung@dallasnews.com
In increasingly diverse Texas, one key component of the state’s strong growth over the past decade isn’t quite as diverse as it was.
The state’s Hispanic population increased 42 percent from 2000 to 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, to almost 9.5 million. But after a dip in the 2000 census, when just 76 percent of Hispanics reported direct or family ties to Mexico, that percentage grew to 84 percent, according to demographic information released Thursday by the Census Bureau.
“I think what we’re seeing in part stems from the instability we saw in past decades in Central America compared to what we have now,” said Dr. Steve Murdock, director of the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas at Rice University and former U.S. Census Bureau director.
But the real driver in Hispanic — and notably Mexican — growth is the Texas economy.
Through the first seven years of the decade, Murdock said, the state’s growth triggered a building boom that attracted construction workers, most notably from Mexico.
Dr. Lloyd Potter, the Texas state demographer, said that even when the U.S. economy faltered over the last three years, Texas’ “has been particularly robust compared with other states and weathered the recession relatively well.”
“That attracts everyone,” Potter said, “particularly people of Hispanic descent from other states. When we look at domestic migration into Texas, the greatest flow is from California,” a state whose population has deep ties to Mexico.
At the same time, U.S. immigration policy favors family reunification. So many of those who came from Mexico for work eventually obtained visas to bring their families here, too, Potter said.
“In terms of migration into the state, those two things favor people of Mexican origin,” he said.
Though Dallas County has by far the largest Hispanic population in North Texas, more than 900,000, its 37 percent growth rate from 2000 to 2010 trailed both the statewide rate of 42 percent and those of its suburban neighbors.
Collin County’s Hispanic population more than doubled to 115,345, an increase of 128 percent, while Hispanics in Denton County increased 129 percent, to 120,836. Tarrant County’s Hispanic population grew to 482,977, an increase of 69 percent.
“That’s another issue that clearly comes out in these numbers — we are more diverse, and that diversity is increasingly distributed not only in the central city counties, but in suburban counties as well,” Murdock said.
Asian population
That’s true for Asian immigrants, too. The Asian population increased 46 percent nationally from 2000 to 2010 and 71 percent in Texas to 964,000. Many of them sought homes in the suburbs.
“With their strong emphasis on education, many of the Asians are heading to the Katys and Planos, looking for better schools and a suburban lifestyle,” Murdock said.
While Dallas County’s population increased 6.7 percent over the decade, the Asian population rose 35 percent, to 87,752. Suburban growth rates were far more dramatic, though with much smaller numbers. In the seven-county Dallas-Fort Worth area, the Asian population increased from 194,050 to 338,692 over the decade, an increase of more than 74 percent.
On a percentage basis, most Asian groups in Texas grew even faster than Hispanics, but the real numbers of Asians are far smaller, Murdock said. And there has been a shift in the groups in most parts of Texas, with Indians the largest group in 2010, replacing the Vietnamese, who led in 2000.
“But all have had substantial increases, except in the Japanese population,” he said. “Over the decade, the population of Asian Indians increased about 90 percent in Texas, the Chinese 48 percent, 77 percent for Filipinos, 49 percent for Koreans and 56 percent for the Vietnamese.”
And as with Mexicans, the driving force for Asian growth, particularly Indian growth, is jobs, Potter said.
“There’s no question that over the decade, if you look at migration flow, Texas had a significant increase in the number of persons of Asian Indian descent,” he said. “That’s certainly consistent with the way the economy has gone, with industry moving a lot of people here on student visas or because they have skills in the high-tech industries or engineering.”
Once the workers are established, their families often follow, Potter said.
The latest census demographic numbers show the impact of increased diversity in powerful ways, Murdock said. Over the last decade, non-Hispanic whites increased 8.2 percent nationally. But Hispanic growth was 43 percent — an increase of 15.2 million people, more than half of the total national increase of 27.3 million.
Aging whites
While non-Hispanic whites are the largest race and ethnic group, they are growing at the slowest rate. And the group is getting increasingly older.
“We talk about how diverse Texas is, and that’s also true with age structure,” Murdock said. “We continue to be younger than the country as a whole, but we now have 44 counties where the median age is 45-plus. That’s an old population.”
Llano County is the oldest in the state, with a median age of 55, meaning half the population is older than 55 and half younger.
“The oldest counties in general are in the Panhandle, with predominantly aging Anglo populations,” Murdock said. “And the youngest counties are in the [Rio Grande] Valley … with huge minority populations.”
The seven counties in the Dallas area — Collin, Dallas, Denton, Ellis, Kaufman , Rockwall and Tarrant — have median ages from the low- to mid-30s. But each is older than it was 10 years ago.
The more dramatic population shifts pose particular problems across the state.
“If you’re in suburban areas around Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, you wonder, ‘How do we build enough schools and hire enough teachers?’” he said.
“And in West Texas and the Panhandle, it’s ‘How do we find enough students to keep our schools open?’ ”
Staff writer Ryan McNeill contributed to this report.
A&M System regents to get more input on state university investments under bill
By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Texas A&M University System regents would get more say on how the multibillion-dollar Permanent University Fund and other higher education endowments are invested under a measure expected to be signed by Gov. Rick Perry.
House Bill 2825, written by Rep. John Otto, R-Dayton , would give the A&M System Board of Regents authority to name two people to the University of Texas Investment Management Co.'s board of directors. At least one of the appointees would have to possess a substantial background and expertise in investments.
Currently, the UT regents appoint all nine members of UTIMCO's board. Although state law specifies that "one or more" must be from a list submitted by the A&M regents, in actual practice the UT regents select one person from a list of two.
Unchanged would be a provision that requires the UT board to name three of its members and the UT chancellor to the UTIMCO board.
No one testified for or against the measure, and it was sent to the governor this week after the House and Senate approved it without objection.
By granting appointment power to the A&M regents, the bill navigates a fine legal and political line.
Under the Texas Constitution, the UT regents have full responsibility for overseeing the Permanent University Fund. The regents nevertheless sought and obtained legislation in 1996 authorizing UTIMCO, a private, nonprofit organization that answers to them and that is subject to state open records and open meetings laws.
Bruce Zimmerman, chief executive officer of UTIMCO, said Friday that he and his staff are comfortable with the measure and have the "utmost respect and confidence" in the UT and A&M regents.
A&M Chancellor Mike McKinney told the regents at a meeting in College Station on Thursday that he was pleased that A&M would get two appointees to UTIMCO's board. Under the state constitution, the A&M System gets one-third of the Permanent University Fund's proceeds and the UT System gets two-thirds.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Texas A&M University System regents would get more say on how the multibillion-dollar Permanent University Fund and other higher education endowments are invested under a measure expected to be signed by Gov. Rick Perry.
House Bill 2825, written by Rep. John Otto, R-Dayton , would give the A&M System Board of Regents authority to name two people to the University of Texas Investment Management Co.'s board of directors. At least one of the appointees would have to possess a substantial background and expertise in investments.
Currently, the UT regents appoint all nine members of UTIMCO's board. Although state law specifies that "one or more" must be from a list submitted by the A&M regents, in actual practice the UT regents select one person from a list of two.
Unchanged would be a provision that requires the UT board to name three of its members and the UT chancellor to the UTIMCO board.
No one testified for or against the measure, and it was sent to the governor this week after the House and Senate approved it without objection.
By granting appointment power to the A&M regents, the bill navigates a fine legal and political line.
Under the Texas Constitution, the UT regents have full responsibility for overseeing the Permanent University Fund. The regents nevertheless sought and obtained legislation in 1996 authorizing UTIMCO, a private, nonprofit organization that answers to them and that is subject to state open records and open meetings laws.
Bruce Zimmerman, chief executive officer of UTIMCO, said Friday that he and his staff are comfortable with the measure and have the "utmost respect and confidence" in the UT and A&M regents.
A&M Chancellor Mike McKinney told the regents at a meeting in College Station on Thursday that he was pleased that A&M would get two appointees to UTIMCO's board. Under the state constitution, the A&M System gets one-third of the Permanent University Fund's proceeds and the UT System gets two-thirds.
Some Austin students struggle to meet graduation requirements, including 29% at Eastside Memorial
Keep in mind that these figures do not reflect students that are no longer in the system. Some of which were counted as dropouts, and others have disappeared from the the data altogether.
-Patricia
By Melissa B. Taboada and Laura Heinauer | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, May 27, 2011
Austin school district officials changed Johnston High School's name, redesigned its approach to teaching the curriculum and were required to replace more than three-quarters of its faculty, but it appears the campus, which has struggled for years to meet state academic standards, again will rank among Austin's most troubled schools.
More than 29 percent of students at what's now Eastside Memorial Green Tech High School at the Johnston Campus will be ineligible to graduate next week after failing state-mandated exit exams.
Overall, 92 percent of Austin students passed the exit-level Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, which matches the statewide average, according to figures released Thursday. The numbers varied from school to school: 21 percent of seniors from Reagan and LBJ high schools failed to pass; the highest exit-level passing rate, 100 percent, came from the Liberal Arts and Science Academy .
Students must pass all four parts of the exit-level exam, and pass their classes, to receive a diploma from Texas public schools. Students had five chances, beginning their junior year, to pass the exams before graduation, but 194 Austin students did not pass one test, and 117 needed two or more tests, district documents show. In all, 33 Eastside students didn't pass in time for graduation, although they can continue to test to get their diplomas.
Austin school district officials didn't respond to repeated requests for more information or comment Thursday.
In a statement, officials said preliminary results from the first 2011 TAKS administration show that in four of five test subjects, districtwide passing rates for all grades will either improve or remain the same. Passing rates for reading fell 1 percentage point — the statement wasn't more specific — in four grades.
The district's statement did not mention the exit-level exam at all.
"As another school year comes to a close, it's rewarding to know that the hard work of our teachers and students has paid off," Superintendent Meria Carstarphen said in the statement. "There is little doubt, that rule changes announced by the (Texas Education Agency) Commissioner on April 23 (regarding not using a formula that boosted some campus accountability ratings in the past) will have a significant negative impact on campus ratings."
An Austin school district spokeswoman said late Thursday afternoon that she couldn't speak on the exit-level results and that at least one administrator who could was away from the office at a retirement party.
A performance administrator, when questioned Thursday via cellphone text messages, replied that he couldn't comment because he didn't have the district's data on hand.
Statewide, passing rates on the TAKS test have ticked up since 2003, when the test was first administered. Passing standards have gotten tougher over the years as well.
State accountability ratings won't come out until the end of July.
How the district and its individual campuses rate this year is significant, because state ratings may stick for two years. The Texas Education Agency is moving from the TAKS to the new State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, starting with third- to ninth-graders in 2011-12. And during the transition, the state won't count results from that test for accountability ratings.
Also, the state this year won't use the Texas Projection Measure, which counts as passing the TAKS some students who didn't, based on past and anticipated improvement.
"With the changes that are occurring we do expect to see a decrease in ratings, not just for schools but also for school districts," said Round Rock school district Superintendent Jesús Chávez. He said scores in his district — where 91 percent of 11th-graders passed the TAKS on the first try — may be lower this year because teacher layoff announcements came just as testing was getting under way.
"It has impact (on) the mental state of teachers and students who were very worried that their teacher had been let go. It's probably not in the best state of mind in performing your best," Chávez said. "It's not an excuse for lower scores, but it does have an impact."
Not all area districts had a chance to analyze their data as of Thursday.
Last year, the projection measure, boosted three Austin schools from "academically unacceptable," the state's lowest rating, to "academically acceptable."
Despite the curve last year, Eastside Memorial has failed to meet state standards for the past two years. The campus was Austin's only unacceptable school in 2010.
Schools that received the rating for three years in a row can be repurposed, turned over to alternative management or closed . A law passed by the state House and Senate this session also allows parents students in chronically underperforming schools to request that the state education commissioner order closure.
Johnston was previously closed in 2008. The so-called accountability clock started over when it reopened as Eastside.
Texas Education Agency spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe said the school's fate won't be decided until final test scores and completion rate data are available in the next few months. She said it would be unusual for a school that had only three years of low performance to be closed but added that Eastside Memorial does have a unique history.
Austin district officials, meanwhile, already have made plans to strengthen the school. Eastside Memorial, which houses the Green Tech and Global Tech academies under the same roof, will be consolidated under a new principal and could get yet another new name , according to plans the school board approved Monday .
The district has plans to increase instruction time, place teachers and staff on improvement plans and use more data-driven instruction. The district may use an outside group to help reform the school, district documents show.
mtaboada@statesman.com; 445-3620
Austin district 2011 results
High school Students who failed the exit-level TAKS
Akins 9%
Anderson 1%
Austin 7%
Bowie 2%
Crockett 4%
Eastside Memorial Green Tech 29%
Garza Independence 7%
Lanier 16%
Liberal Arts and Science Academy 0%
LBJ 21%
McCallum 3%
Reagan 21%
Travis 13%
Districtwide 8%
Texas 8%
Source: Austin school district
-Patricia
By Melissa B. Taboada and Laura Heinauer | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, May 27, 2011
Austin school district officials changed Johnston High School's name, redesigned its approach to teaching the curriculum and were required to replace more than three-quarters of its faculty, but it appears the campus, which has struggled for years to meet state academic standards, again will rank among Austin's most troubled schools.
More than 29 percent of students at what's now Eastside Memorial Green Tech High School at the Johnston Campus will be ineligible to graduate next week after failing state-mandated exit exams.
Overall, 92 percent of Austin students passed the exit-level Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, which matches the statewide average, according to figures released Thursday. The numbers varied from school to school: 21 percent of seniors from Reagan and LBJ high schools failed to pass; the highest exit-level passing rate, 100 percent, came from the Liberal Arts and Science Academy .
Students must pass all four parts of the exit-level exam, and pass their classes, to receive a diploma from Texas public schools. Students had five chances, beginning their junior year, to pass the exams before graduation, but 194 Austin students did not pass one test, and 117 needed two or more tests, district documents show. In all, 33 Eastside students didn't pass in time for graduation, although they can continue to test to get their diplomas.
Austin school district officials didn't respond to repeated requests for more information or comment Thursday.
In a statement, officials said preliminary results from the first 2011 TAKS administration show that in four of five test subjects, districtwide passing rates for all grades will either improve or remain the same. Passing rates for reading fell 1 percentage point — the statement wasn't more specific — in four grades.
The district's statement did not mention the exit-level exam at all.
"As another school year comes to a close, it's rewarding to know that the hard work of our teachers and students has paid off," Superintendent Meria Carstarphen said in the statement. "There is little doubt, that rule changes announced by the (Texas Education Agency) Commissioner on April 23 (regarding not using a formula that boosted some campus accountability ratings in the past) will have a significant negative impact on campus ratings."
An Austin school district spokeswoman said late Thursday afternoon that she couldn't speak on the exit-level results and that at least one administrator who could was away from the office at a retirement party.
A performance administrator, when questioned Thursday via cellphone text messages, replied that he couldn't comment because he didn't have the district's data on hand.
Statewide, passing rates on the TAKS test have ticked up since 2003, when the test was first administered. Passing standards have gotten tougher over the years as well.
State accountability ratings won't come out until the end of July.
How the district and its individual campuses rate this year is significant, because state ratings may stick for two years. The Texas Education Agency is moving from the TAKS to the new State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, starting with third- to ninth-graders in 2011-12. And during the transition, the state won't count results from that test for accountability ratings.
Also, the state this year won't use the Texas Projection Measure, which counts as passing the TAKS some students who didn't, based on past and anticipated improvement.
"With the changes that are occurring we do expect to see a decrease in ratings, not just for schools but also for school districts," said Round Rock school district Superintendent Jesús Chávez. He said scores in his district — where 91 percent of 11th-graders passed the TAKS on the first try — may be lower this year because teacher layoff announcements came just as testing was getting under way.
"It has impact (on) the mental state of teachers and students who were very worried that their teacher had been let go. It's probably not in the best state of mind in performing your best," Chávez said. "It's not an excuse for lower scores, but it does have an impact."
Not all area districts had a chance to analyze their data as of Thursday.
Last year, the projection measure, boosted three Austin schools from "academically unacceptable," the state's lowest rating, to "academically acceptable."
Despite the curve last year, Eastside Memorial has failed to meet state standards for the past two years. The campus was Austin's only unacceptable school in 2010.
Schools that received the rating for three years in a row can be repurposed, turned over to alternative management or closed . A law passed by the state House and Senate this session also allows parents students in chronically underperforming schools to request that the state education commissioner order closure.
Johnston was previously closed in 2008. The so-called accountability clock started over when it reopened as Eastside.
Texas Education Agency spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe said the school's fate won't be decided until final test scores and completion rate data are available in the next few months. She said it would be unusual for a school that had only three years of low performance to be closed but added that Eastside Memorial does have a unique history.
Austin district officials, meanwhile, already have made plans to strengthen the school. Eastside Memorial, which houses the Green Tech and Global Tech academies under the same roof, will be consolidated under a new principal and could get yet another new name , according to plans the school board approved Monday .
The district has plans to increase instruction time, place teachers and staff on improvement plans and use more data-driven instruction. The district may use an outside group to help reform the school, district documents show.
mtaboada@statesman.com; 445-3620
Austin district 2011 results
High school Students who failed the exit-level TAKS
Akins 9%
Anderson 1%
Austin 7%
Bowie 2%
Crockett 4%
Eastside Memorial Green Tech 29%
Garza Independence 7%
Lanier 16%
Liberal Arts and Science Academy 0%
LBJ 21%
McCallum 3%
Reagan 21%
Travis 13%
Districtwide 8%
Texas 8%
Source: Austin school district
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Race is on to fund schools
Peggy Fikac | My San Antonio.com
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
AUSTIN — Legislative leaders continued to look for a compromise school funding plan Tuesday to allocate $4 billion worth of public school cuts they say is necessary to avoid a special session this summer.
A bill to make those cuts collapsed late Monday because of a procedural flaw that now has lawmakers scrambling back and forth between House and Senate chambers — with a stop Tuesday afternoon to meet with Gov. Rick Perry's staff — in search of a solution to buy them time until the 2013 session.
House leaders prefer a proration, an across-the-board cut for the state's 1,040 school districts amounting to nearly 6 percent for the 2012-13 school year. Senate leaders want school districts that have benefited from the controversial “target revenue system” to take larger cuts. Their plan could cut some districts 9 percent.
Lawmakers created the target revenue system five years ago that largely froze school funding at levels districts were getting in 2006 — except for enrollment growth. The temporary plan has continued and expanded to the point where most school districts no longer are funded under traditional formulas.
The current legislative session ends Monday. But legislative deadlines obligate lawmakers to settle on a school funding plan before Friday, said House Education Chairman Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands.
“In any plan where you have the same amount of money, it's how you rearrange the furniture,” Eissler said.
School funding cuts are necessary because of the state's massive revenue shortfall, and state leaders have limited the amount of money that can be used from the rainy day fund to plug budget holes. This stands to become the first time in modern history that Texas will not pay for school enrollment growth — about 170,000 additional students over the next two years.
Also pending are efforts to give school districts flexibility to absorb budget cuts by allowing larger class sizes, cutting teacher pay and giving teachers and other school employees unpaid leave.
Lawmakers have been hammering out a compromise budget for the next two years that would carve billions of dollars from current state and federal spending.
Along with the spending plan, they've still got to pass a revenue measure to help balance it, and it appeared any compromise on the school finance plan would have to be grafted onto that must-pass legislation.
Budget negotiators already have decided not to pay for $4.8 billion in anticipated Medicaid expenses in their two-year budget plan, meaning lawmakers in 2013 will have to cover that cost.
If lawmakers don't change the current school funding formulas, the state still will owe school districts an additional $4 billion — the amount that the proposed budget falls short of funding those existing formulas — said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden, R-Bryan.
“If we don't change the state law and basically scale back on that entitlement, then you'll have that hole that we have to fill in addition to the probable Medicaid hole, and we will really be in serious trouble in this state,” he said. “We can't kick the can down the road on both Medicaid and school finance at the same time.”Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, said she believes a special session is a certainty if lawmakers don't approve a new school finance plan to distribute a reduced amount of state aid.
“That was part of our budget deal,” Shapiro said.
Lawmakers said they would try to add the essential part of the school finance plan to the must-pass revenue legislation, Senate Bill 1811. Shapiro called it “the last train in town.”
Eissler speculated that lawmakers would try to develop a hybrid plan, using concepts from both House and Senate versions.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
AUSTIN — Legislative leaders continued to look for a compromise school funding plan Tuesday to allocate $4 billion worth of public school cuts they say is necessary to avoid a special session this summer.
A bill to make those cuts collapsed late Monday because of a procedural flaw that now has lawmakers scrambling back and forth between House and Senate chambers — with a stop Tuesday afternoon to meet with Gov. Rick Perry's staff — in search of a solution to buy them time until the 2013 session.
House leaders prefer a proration, an across-the-board cut for the state's 1,040 school districts amounting to nearly 6 percent for the 2012-13 school year. Senate leaders want school districts that have benefited from the controversial “target revenue system” to take larger cuts. Their plan could cut some districts 9 percent.
Lawmakers created the target revenue system five years ago that largely froze school funding at levels districts were getting in 2006 — except for enrollment growth. The temporary plan has continued and expanded to the point where most school districts no longer are funded under traditional formulas.
The current legislative session ends Monday. But legislative deadlines obligate lawmakers to settle on a school funding plan before Friday, said House Education Chairman Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands.
“In any plan where you have the same amount of money, it's how you rearrange the furniture,” Eissler said.
School funding cuts are necessary because of the state's massive revenue shortfall, and state leaders have limited the amount of money that can be used from the rainy day fund to plug budget holes. This stands to become the first time in modern history that Texas will not pay for school enrollment growth — about 170,000 additional students over the next two years.
Also pending are efforts to give school districts flexibility to absorb budget cuts by allowing larger class sizes, cutting teacher pay and giving teachers and other school employees unpaid leave.
Lawmakers have been hammering out a compromise budget for the next two years that would carve billions of dollars from current state and federal spending.
Along with the spending plan, they've still got to pass a revenue measure to help balance it, and it appeared any compromise on the school finance plan would have to be grafted onto that must-pass legislation.
Budget negotiators already have decided not to pay for $4.8 billion in anticipated Medicaid expenses in their two-year budget plan, meaning lawmakers in 2013 will have to cover that cost.
If lawmakers don't change the current school funding formulas, the state still will owe school districts an additional $4 billion — the amount that the proposed budget falls short of funding those existing formulas — said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden, R-Bryan.
“If we don't change the state law and basically scale back on that entitlement, then you'll have that hole that we have to fill in addition to the probable Medicaid hole, and we will really be in serious trouble in this state,” he said. “We can't kick the can down the road on both Medicaid and school finance at the same time.”Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, said she believes a special session is a certainty if lawmakers don't approve a new school finance plan to distribute a reduced amount of state aid.
“That was part of our budget deal,” Shapiro said.
Lawmakers said they would try to add the essential part of the school finance plan to the must-pass revenue legislation, Senate Bill 1811. Shapiro called it “the last train in town.”
Eissler speculated that lawmakers would try to develop a hybrid plan, using concepts from both House and Senate versions.
Outcomes-Based Higher Ed Funding Bill Passes Senate
by Reeve Hamilton | Texas Tribune
May 24, 2011
A bill that could alter the state's formula funding for institutions of higher education to allow some of it to be based on outcomes such as graduation rates rather than simply enrollment cleared the Senate this evening.
Gov. Rick Perry has made outcomes-based funding one of his legislative priorities with regard to higher education, and the bill — House Bill 9 by House Higher Education Chairman Dan Branch, R-Dallas — appears to be moving toward the governor's desk.
The bill, which already passed the House, was kicked out of the Senate this evening with minor alterations. Now, the House must either concur with the changes or head to conference before it can finally be sent to the governor.
The concept has drawn some opposition. The Texas Faculty Association has expressed concern that it will create a need for institutions to boost graduation rates "by any means necessary," such as lowering standards and course requirements.
While HB 9 limits the portion of base funding that can be based on outcomes to 10 percent, it provides flexibility to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, which supports the concept, to determine the specifics of the formula. The coordinating board would also be required to regularly review its outcomes-based system with institutions.
"A collaborative approach is key to the success of any outcomes-based funding initiative," said Senate Higher Education Chairwoman Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, who has been outspoken in her opposition of significant changes to higher education being pushed without public scrutiny and legislative input. "Instead of serving as an edict from on high, this bill would encourage cooperation between colleges and universities, the coordinating board and the Legislature. What's more, it would engage institutions in identifying and evaluating the most effective measures of student success."
Zaffirini, who sponsored HB 9 in the Senate, and Branch co-chair a recently created Joint Oversight Committee on Higher Education Governance, Excellence and Transparency. The bill would require the coordinating board to develop a report that identifies best practices for those issues and submit it to the committee.
May 24, 2011
A bill that could alter the state's formula funding for institutions of higher education to allow some of it to be based on outcomes such as graduation rates rather than simply enrollment cleared the Senate this evening.
Gov. Rick Perry has made outcomes-based funding one of his legislative priorities with regard to higher education, and the bill — House Bill 9 by House Higher Education Chairman Dan Branch, R-Dallas — appears to be moving toward the governor's desk.
The bill, which already passed the House, was kicked out of the Senate this evening with minor alterations. Now, the House must either concur with the changes or head to conference before it can finally be sent to the governor.
The concept has drawn some opposition. The Texas Faculty Association has expressed concern that it will create a need for institutions to boost graduation rates "by any means necessary," such as lowering standards and course requirements.
While HB 9 limits the portion of base funding that can be based on outcomes to 10 percent, it provides flexibility to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, which supports the concept, to determine the specifics of the formula. The coordinating board would also be required to regularly review its outcomes-based system with institutions.
"A collaborative approach is key to the success of any outcomes-based funding initiative," said Senate Higher Education Chairwoman Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, who has been outspoken in her opposition of significant changes to higher education being pushed without public scrutiny and legislative input. "Instead of serving as an edict from on high, this bill would encourage cooperation between colleges and universities, the coordinating board and the Legislature. What's more, it would engage institutions in identifying and evaluating the most effective measures of student success."
Zaffirini, who sponsored HB 9 in the Senate, and Branch co-chair a recently created Joint Oversight Committee on Higher Education Governance, Excellence and Transparency. The bill would require the coordinating board to develop a report that identifies best practices for those issues and submit it to the committee.
NEWS RELEASE: Data Shows Massive Disparity in Professor Productivity at UT-Austin
Attached and below is a news release announcing the release of a study by the
Center for College Affordability and Productivity that finds UT Austin could
make tuition vastly more affordable by moderately increasing faculty emphasis on
teaching. We worked with the Austin American-Statesman this weekend on the
story published this morning. Note that the report is being posted online within
the hour and we will send the link once posted.
Dr. Richard Vedder, a study author and director of the Center for College
Affordability and Productivity, is available and located in Ohio but Senator Dan
Patrick, former Vice Chair of the Higher Education committee, has been briefed
on the study and is available for comment. Senator Brian Birdwell has also been
briefed on the study. David Guenthner at the Texas Public Policy Foundation
(TPPF); and Peggy Venable, state director of Americans for Prosperity
Foundation’s Texas chapter, are also available for comment.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Bill Noble / Emily Songy
Monday, May 23, 2011
(512) 474-2005
Office
(512) 296-4651 Cell
bnoble@noblestrategic.com
esongy@noblestrategic.com
Data Shows Massive Disparity in Professor Productivity at UT-Austin
If bottom 80 percent were half as productive as top 20 percent,
tuition could be cut in half
AUSTIN – At a time of alarming tuition costs and economic uncertainties, an
analysis of the preliminary data released earlier this month by the University
of Texas System shows one of the state’s flagship universities could make
tuition vastly more affordable by moderately increasing faculty emphasis on
teaching.
The Center for College Affordability and Productivity conducted the study titled
“Faculty Productivity and Costs at The University of Texas at Austin.” The study
assesses faculty productivity at UT-Austin in terms of both research and
teaching by delving into the data on faculty compensation, teaching loads and
external research grant awards released by the University of Texas system.
“Our analysis shows that there is clearly room for improvement in terms of
faculty productivity at UT Austin,” said Dr. Richard Vedder, director of the
Center for College Affordability and Productivity and a co-author of the study.
“Simply by having faculty teach more students or courses, students and taxpayers
will benefit significantly by reduced university costs.”
The study reveals substantial disparities in the work professors actually
perform and the compensation they receive for their services. The data show a
relatively small portion of faculty
carry the majority of the teaching load, teaching a sizable majority of students
and while maintaining their research nearly at the same level as their peers.
A significant proportion of the faculty is far less productive, with small
teaching loads and little external research dollars generated. The data
suggests that increasing teaching responsibilities for the majority of faculty
would only marginally impact external research funding or productivity, while
significantly reducing the cost of a degree at UT-Austin.
“Given the rising tuition costs at UT Austin and other public universities in
Texas, this report clearly demonstrates how increases in faculty teaching can
result in significant cost savings to students, parents and taxpayers,” said
Senator Dan Patrick (R-Houston), former Vice Chair of the Higher Education
committee. “All Texans, students and taxpayers deserve the best value for their
investment in higher education – a system where professors are engaged and held
accountable for their teaching productivity and performance.”
The study’s analysis comes in the wake of often heated debate on the value of
looking closely at teaching and research productivity at Texas’ public colleges
and universities.
“Our goal in conducting this analysis was to provide a resource for university
leaders and policy makers as they make decisions on enhancing university systems
to provide the highest-quality education at an affordable price for students,”
said Vedder. “The findings at UT-Austin are not unique as tuition and fees
skyrocket at public universities across the nation, raising the question of who
is really working to control costs for parents and taxpayers during the worst
economic recession in 70 years.”
Additional highlights of the study include:
* 20 percent of UT Austin faculty are teaching 57 percent of student credit
hours. They also generate 18 percent of the campus’s research funding. This
suggests that these faculty are not jeopardizing their status as researchers by
assuming such a high level of teaching responsibility.
* Conversely, the least productive 20 percent of faculty teach only 2 percent
of all student credit hours and generate a disproportionately smaller percentage
of external research funding than do other segments of the faculty.
* Research grant funds go almost entirely (99.8 percent) to a small minority
(20 percent) of the faculty; only 2 percent of the faculty conduct 57 percent of
funded research.
* Non-tenured track faculty teach a majority of undergraduate enrollments and a
surprising 31 percent of graduate enrollments.
* The most active researchers teach nearly the average of all faculty;
increasing teaching loads of others would trivially impact outside research
support.
###
***Study authors are available to comment or provide remarks for radio
programming. Call 512.474.2005 to schedule an interview.
Center for College Affordability and Productivity that finds UT Austin could
make tuition vastly more affordable by moderately increasing faculty emphasis on
teaching. We worked with the Austin American-Statesman this weekend on the
story published this morning. Note that the report is being posted online within
the hour and we will send the link once posted.
Dr. Richard Vedder, a study author and director of the Center for College
Affordability and Productivity, is available and located in Ohio but Senator Dan
Patrick, former Vice Chair of the Higher Education committee, has been briefed
on the study and is available for comment. Senator Brian Birdwell has also been
briefed on the study. David Guenthner at the Texas Public Policy Foundation
(TPPF); and Peggy Venable, state director of Americans for Prosperity
Foundation’s Texas chapter, are also available for comment.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Bill Noble / Emily Songy
Monday, May 23, 2011
(512) 474-2005
Office
(512) 296-4651 Cell
bnoble@noblestrategic.com
esongy@noblestrategic.com
Data Shows Massive Disparity in Professor Productivity at UT-Austin
If bottom 80 percent were half as productive as top 20 percent,
tuition could be cut in half
AUSTIN – At a time of alarming tuition costs and economic uncertainties, an
analysis of the preliminary data released earlier this month by the University
of Texas System shows one of the state’s flagship universities could make
tuition vastly more affordable by moderately increasing faculty emphasis on
teaching.
The Center for College Affordability and Productivity conducted the study titled
“Faculty Productivity and Costs at The University of Texas at Austin.” The study
assesses faculty productivity at UT-Austin in terms of both research and
teaching by delving into the data on faculty compensation, teaching loads and
external research grant awards released by the University of Texas system.
“Our analysis shows that there is clearly room for improvement in terms of
faculty productivity at UT Austin,” said Dr. Richard Vedder, director of the
Center for College Affordability and Productivity and a co-author of the study.
“Simply by having faculty teach more students or courses, students and taxpayers
will benefit significantly by reduced university costs.”
The study reveals substantial disparities in the work professors actually
perform and the compensation they receive for their services. The data show a
relatively small portion of faculty
carry the majority of the teaching load, teaching a sizable majority of students
and while maintaining their research nearly at the same level as their peers.
A significant proportion of the faculty is far less productive, with small
teaching loads and little external research dollars generated. The data
suggests that increasing teaching responsibilities for the majority of faculty
would only marginally impact external research funding or productivity, while
significantly reducing the cost of a degree at UT-Austin.
“Given the rising tuition costs at UT Austin and other public universities in
Texas, this report clearly demonstrates how increases in faculty teaching can
result in significant cost savings to students, parents and taxpayers,” said
Senator Dan Patrick (R-Houston), former Vice Chair of the Higher Education
committee. “All Texans, students and taxpayers deserve the best value for their
investment in higher education – a system where professors are engaged and held
accountable for their teaching productivity and performance.”
The study’s analysis comes in the wake of often heated debate on the value of
looking closely at teaching and research productivity at Texas’ public colleges
and universities.
“Our goal in conducting this analysis was to provide a resource for university
leaders and policy makers as they make decisions on enhancing university systems
to provide the highest-quality education at an affordable price for students,”
said Vedder. “The findings at UT-Austin are not unique as tuition and fees
skyrocket at public universities across the nation, raising the question of who
is really working to control costs for parents and taxpayers during the worst
economic recession in 70 years.”
Additional highlights of the study include:
* 20 percent of UT Austin faculty are teaching 57 percent of student credit
hours. They also generate 18 percent of the campus’s research funding. This
suggests that these faculty are not jeopardizing their status as researchers by
assuming such a high level of teaching responsibility.
* Conversely, the least productive 20 percent of faculty teach only 2 percent
of all student credit hours and generate a disproportionately smaller percentage
of external research funding than do other segments of the faculty.
* Research grant funds go almost entirely (99.8 percent) to a small minority
(20 percent) of the faculty; only 2 percent of the faculty conduct 57 percent of
funded research.
* Non-tenured track faculty teach a majority of undergraduate enrollments and a
surprising 31 percent of graduate enrollments.
* The most active researchers teach nearly the average of all faculty;
increasing teaching loads of others would trivially impact outside research
support.
###
***Study authors are available to comment or provide remarks for radio
programming. Call 512.474.2005 to schedule an interview.
Texas legislators reach breakthrough on school funding
By Dave Montgomery | Star-Telegram
May 19, 2011
AUSTIN -- House leaders late Thursday announced a major breakthrough on education funding, saying they have agreed to accept Senate budget recommendations to reduce state public school funding by $4 billion over the next two years.
That's almost half the amount that House members had voted to cut in the budget they adopted in April. Many education groups, while fighting to avoid funding cuts, have touted the Senate proposal as the preferred scenario.
"Given the available options, that is the best outcome," said Lonnie Hollingsworth, director of governmental relations for the Texas Classroom Teachers Association. "Given what was on the table, this is good news."
Lawmakers outlined the agreement as House and Senate leaders continued tedious negotiations to reach a final budget agreement before their May 30 adjournment.
Several thorny issues were still on the table -- including the size of a proposed drawdown from the state's rainy-day fund -- but leaders of both chambers said they were still hopeful that they could strike a deal and avoid a midsummer special session.
Negotiations also continue over higher-education funding, but House leaders said that they were within $300 million of closing a $1 billion gap.
"We're pretty darned close," said House Speaker Joe Straus. Earlier in the day, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the Senate's presiding officer, told reporters that "it's moving in the right direction."
House and Senate negotiators have signed off on most elements of a compromise budget, but steep differences in education funding had emerged as major sticking points. Despite progress in that area, negotiators were at odds over on how much to draw from the state's $9.7 billion rainy-day fund to help close a deficit for the current biennium. House officials indicated that they won't go beyond the $3.1 billion withdrawal approved by House members. The Senate this week called for a withdrawal of nearly $4 billion.
Negotiators are trying to hammer out a final budget that will have to be approved by both chambers without amendments. The House budget called for $164.5 billion for 2012-13, -- a $23 billion reduction (12.3 percent) from current spending. The Senate budget of $176.5 billion proposed an $11 billion reduction (5.9 percent).
Lawmakers opened their session in January facing a budget shortfall of up $27 billion, largely due to a recession-caused downturn in state revenue. Original spending proposals that started the budget deliberations called for up to nearly $10 billion in cuts to public school assistance, prompting widespread fears of teacher layoffs and school closures.
Under the House-passed budget, state funding for school districts would have been reduced by $7.8 billion. The Senate's proposed reduction was $4 billion.
House officials said they would be able to match the level in the Senate bill through $1.2 billion that Comptroller Susan Combs said would be available in additional revenue and $2.9 billion from various revenue measures moving through the House.
Combs issued the revised revenue estimate this week, based on the state's improving economy. Straus said that House conferees "promptly agreed to put those dollars toward our first priority, our public schools.
"The House has gone more than halfway to meet the Senate," Straus said in a statement, "and it is now time for the Senate to do its part by making additional cuts."
Dewhurst and a delegation of senators presented Straus and other House leaders with a proposal that had the support of 21 of the Senate's 31 members -- all 19 Republicans and Sens. Royce West, D-Dallas, and Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa, D-McAllen. Participants declined to detail specifics.
Time running out
Emissaries from Gov. Rick Perry's office also participated in the discussions. Perry has insisted that lawmakers balance the budget by shrinking the size of government, avoiding new or increased taxes and not withdrawing from the rainy-day fund beyond the $3.1 billion for the current biennium.
The hang-up over the budget has forced House leaders to repeatedly postpone debate on a package of savings designed to avoid further cuts. The measure would generate more than $2 billion through accounting changes and streamlining government services. The biggest portion is designed to save $1.8 billion through a brief deferral in state aid to public school districts.
Also Thursday, the Senate Finance Committee charted another potential source of revenue by approving a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow the State Land Office to make millions of dollars in direct payments to public school funding. The amendment, sponsored by Rep. Rob Orr, R-Burleson, would be presented to voters in November.
Lawmakers have expressed growing concern that the late tie-up over the budget could force Perry to call lawmakers back for a 30-day special session, likely in July. Many acknowledged that they have only a few days at best to resolve their differences or face a steamy summer in Austin.
Questioned about that possibility, Rep. Vicki Truitt, R-Keller, said, "Ask me in 24 hours."
Read more: http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/05/19/3089467/texas-legislators-reach-breakthrough.html#ixzz1NL9SQ8Fa
May 19, 2011
AUSTIN -- House leaders late Thursday announced a major breakthrough on education funding, saying they have agreed to accept Senate budget recommendations to reduce state public school funding by $4 billion over the next two years.
That's almost half the amount that House members had voted to cut in the budget they adopted in April. Many education groups, while fighting to avoid funding cuts, have touted the Senate proposal as the preferred scenario.
"Given the available options, that is the best outcome," said Lonnie Hollingsworth, director of governmental relations for the Texas Classroom Teachers Association. "Given what was on the table, this is good news."
Lawmakers outlined the agreement as House and Senate leaders continued tedious negotiations to reach a final budget agreement before their May 30 adjournment.
Several thorny issues were still on the table -- including the size of a proposed drawdown from the state's rainy-day fund -- but leaders of both chambers said they were still hopeful that they could strike a deal and avoid a midsummer special session.
Negotiations also continue over higher-education funding, but House leaders said that they were within $300 million of closing a $1 billion gap.
"We're pretty darned close," said House Speaker Joe Straus. Earlier in the day, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the Senate's presiding officer, told reporters that "it's moving in the right direction."
House and Senate negotiators have signed off on most elements of a compromise budget, but steep differences in education funding had emerged as major sticking points. Despite progress in that area, negotiators were at odds over on how much to draw from the state's $9.7 billion rainy-day fund to help close a deficit for the current biennium. House officials indicated that they won't go beyond the $3.1 billion withdrawal approved by House members. The Senate this week called for a withdrawal of nearly $4 billion.
Negotiators are trying to hammer out a final budget that will have to be approved by both chambers without amendments. The House budget called for $164.5 billion for 2012-13, -- a $23 billion reduction (12.3 percent) from current spending. The Senate budget of $176.5 billion proposed an $11 billion reduction (5.9 percent).
Lawmakers opened their session in January facing a budget shortfall of up $27 billion, largely due to a recession-caused downturn in state revenue. Original spending proposals that started the budget deliberations called for up to nearly $10 billion in cuts to public school assistance, prompting widespread fears of teacher layoffs and school closures.
Under the House-passed budget, state funding for school districts would have been reduced by $7.8 billion. The Senate's proposed reduction was $4 billion.
House officials said they would be able to match the level in the Senate bill through $1.2 billion that Comptroller Susan Combs said would be available in additional revenue and $2.9 billion from various revenue measures moving through the House.
Combs issued the revised revenue estimate this week, based on the state's improving economy. Straus said that House conferees "promptly agreed to put those dollars toward our first priority, our public schools.
"The House has gone more than halfway to meet the Senate," Straus said in a statement, "and it is now time for the Senate to do its part by making additional cuts."
Dewhurst and a delegation of senators presented Straus and other House leaders with a proposal that had the support of 21 of the Senate's 31 members -- all 19 Republicans and Sens. Royce West, D-Dallas, and Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa, D-McAllen. Participants declined to detail specifics.
Time running out
Emissaries from Gov. Rick Perry's office also participated in the discussions. Perry has insisted that lawmakers balance the budget by shrinking the size of government, avoiding new or increased taxes and not withdrawing from the rainy-day fund beyond the $3.1 billion for the current biennium.
The hang-up over the budget has forced House leaders to repeatedly postpone debate on a package of savings designed to avoid further cuts. The measure would generate more than $2 billion through accounting changes and streamlining government services. The biggest portion is designed to save $1.8 billion through a brief deferral in state aid to public school districts.
Also Thursday, the Senate Finance Committee charted another potential source of revenue by approving a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow the State Land Office to make millions of dollars in direct payments to public school funding. The amendment, sponsored by Rep. Rob Orr, R-Burleson, would be presented to voters in November.
Lawmakers have expressed growing concern that the late tie-up over the budget could force Perry to call lawmakers back for a 30-day special session, likely in July. Many acknowledged that they have only a few days at best to resolve their differences or face a steamy summer in Austin.
Questioned about that possibility, Rep. Vicki Truitt, R-Keller, said, "Ask me in 24 hours."
Read more: http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/05/19/3089467/texas-legislators-reach-breakthrough.html#ixzz1NL9SQ8Fa
No Child Left Behind fix lagging in Congress
By Associated Press
Friday, May 20, 2011
The long-awaited overhaul of the 9-year-old No Child Left Behind law has begun in the House with the first in a series of targeted bills, but a bipartisan, comprehensive reform of the nation’s most important education law still appears far from the finish line.
Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, said there’s no chance of meeting President Barack Obama’s August deadline.
"I’ve been very, persistently clear that we cannot get this done by summer," Kline said in an interview with The Associated Press. "It is just not going to happen."
Republicans have been divided by new lawmakers who tend to oppose any federal role in education and fiscal conservatives who want greater efficiency but are open to giving Washington some input. On the other side, some Democrats favor incentives like merit pay for teachers while others are advocating for the more traditional education establishment.
"There are some areas of focus that I think you can get some consensus around," said Sandy Kress, who served as an education adviser to President George W. Bush in the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001. For example, he said, there’s agreement on the need to better prepare high school students for college and careers, create measures that improve teacher development and effectives, and prune back federal intrusions into the classroom.
"But after that, the differences come out," Kress said.
Republicans and Democrats agree the law is broken. The Bush-era legislation has accountability provisions in which even schools that are making improvements can be labeled as failures and has had a discouraging effect on the adoption of higher standards. The law sets a goal of having 100 percent of students proficient in math and reading by 2014, but states set what is considered proficient and how much schools must improve each year. Many left the biggest leaps for the final years, anticipating the law would be changed.
Since it has not, the number of schools not meeting annual growth benchmarks is likely to increase. Failing to meet the targets for several consecutive years leads to federal interventions that can result in staff replacement and school restructuring.
"It’s going to be more and more difficult for schools to make the targets," said Diane Rentner, director of national programs for the Center on Education Policy.
Two approaches have emerged to restructuring the law. The House plans to introduce several targeted fixes through multiple bills, starting with a proposal to eliminate 43 federal K-12 education programs. The Senate still aims for a more comprehensive legislation.
"We will hopefully have a bill that may not be what everybody wants, but I hope it will be broadly supported," said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Harkin said he is hopeful the bill will be before the committee before the July recess and will include systems for teacher and principal evaluations; metrics for success that include student growth and school gains; and some federal accountability and intervention in the bottom 5 percent of schools, as well as those with significant achievement gaps.
Potentially, a Senate bill could be aligned with the House proposals in a conference committee, but analysts say that would be difficult to pull off. House Republicans, wary of any broad-reaching federal legislation, may balk at a comprehensive education bill.
"The politics of education are in a place where the stars are not fully aligned yet," said Vic Klatt, a former GOP staff director for the House Education Committee.
Passing a series of small, targeted bills isn’t necessarily easier, either.
"We’re fully prepared to proceed in that fashion; it just makes it a little more difficult because you don’t have all the pieces on the table at the same time," said Rep. George Miller of California, the senior Democrat on the Education Committee.
Kline said he plans to introduce a second bill soon that would give school districts more flexibility in how they spend federal dollars. A third bill could be introduced before the August break, and at least one more, addressing how schools should be held accountable, would follow.
"I think it makes it easier for everybody to understand," Hunter said of the piecemeal approach, whereas for big bills, "I think people have an aversion to them now."
Neither of the first two bills addresses Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s concern that 82 percent of schools could be labeled as failures next year under No Child Left Behind. Kline said the accountability question is a difficult one.
"This is going to be a challenging prospect for us, no question about it," Kline said. "Schools are going to be accountable for what? And to whom? That’s an ongoing question."
Many education experts have questioned Duncan’s prediction. A study by the Center on Education Policy in April found that 38 percent of schools failed to meet adequate yearly progress in 2010, meaning the number failing would have to more than double.
Duncan has the authority to grant waivers to meeting the law’s requirements. In 2009, he granted more than 300, significantly higher than the number granted a year before by his predecessor. The department says the number was higher in part because officials invited states to submit several waivers, including those related to stimulus funding.
Kress said that not passing a reauthorization isn’t as serious as the administration has suggested and that there are many policy fixes that can be done under the current law. The political consequences for not passing a reform might not be steep for either party, he said.
"I think it’s inconsequential," Kress said. "The issues that separate them are so great. To come to an agreement on a modest bill that is restrained and modest, I don’t think anybody runs on that."
Friday, May 20, 2011
The long-awaited overhaul of the 9-year-old No Child Left Behind law has begun in the House with the first in a series of targeted bills, but a bipartisan, comprehensive reform of the nation’s most important education law still appears far from the finish line.
Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, said there’s no chance of meeting President Barack Obama’s August deadline.
"I’ve been very, persistently clear that we cannot get this done by summer," Kline said in an interview with The Associated Press. "It is just not going to happen."
Republicans have been divided by new lawmakers who tend to oppose any federal role in education and fiscal conservatives who want greater efficiency but are open to giving Washington some input. On the other side, some Democrats favor incentives like merit pay for teachers while others are advocating for the more traditional education establishment.
"There are some areas of focus that I think you can get some consensus around," said Sandy Kress, who served as an education adviser to President George W. Bush in the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001. For example, he said, there’s agreement on the need to better prepare high school students for college and careers, create measures that improve teacher development and effectives, and prune back federal intrusions into the classroom.
"But after that, the differences come out," Kress said.
Republicans and Democrats agree the law is broken. The Bush-era legislation has accountability provisions in which even schools that are making improvements can be labeled as failures and has had a discouraging effect on the adoption of higher standards. The law sets a goal of having 100 percent of students proficient in math and reading by 2014, but states set what is considered proficient and how much schools must improve each year. Many left the biggest leaps for the final years, anticipating the law would be changed.
Since it has not, the number of schools not meeting annual growth benchmarks is likely to increase. Failing to meet the targets for several consecutive years leads to federal interventions that can result in staff replacement and school restructuring.
"It’s going to be more and more difficult for schools to make the targets," said Diane Rentner, director of national programs for the Center on Education Policy.
Two approaches have emerged to restructuring the law. The House plans to introduce several targeted fixes through multiple bills, starting with a proposal to eliminate 43 federal K-12 education programs. The Senate still aims for a more comprehensive legislation.
"We will hopefully have a bill that may not be what everybody wants, but I hope it will be broadly supported," said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Harkin said he is hopeful the bill will be before the committee before the July recess and will include systems for teacher and principal evaluations; metrics for success that include student growth and school gains; and some federal accountability and intervention in the bottom 5 percent of schools, as well as those with significant achievement gaps.
Potentially, a Senate bill could be aligned with the House proposals in a conference committee, but analysts say that would be difficult to pull off. House Republicans, wary of any broad-reaching federal legislation, may balk at a comprehensive education bill.
"The politics of education are in a place where the stars are not fully aligned yet," said Vic Klatt, a former GOP staff director for the House Education Committee.
Passing a series of small, targeted bills isn’t necessarily easier, either.
"We’re fully prepared to proceed in that fashion; it just makes it a little more difficult because you don’t have all the pieces on the table at the same time," said Rep. George Miller of California, the senior Democrat on the Education Committee.
Kline said he plans to introduce a second bill soon that would give school districts more flexibility in how they spend federal dollars. A third bill could be introduced before the August break, and at least one more, addressing how schools should be held accountable, would follow.
"I think it makes it easier for everybody to understand," Hunter said of the piecemeal approach, whereas for big bills, "I think people have an aversion to them now."
Neither of the first two bills addresses Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s concern that 82 percent of schools could be labeled as failures next year under No Child Left Behind. Kline said the accountability question is a difficult one.
"This is going to be a challenging prospect for us, no question about it," Kline said. "Schools are going to be accountable for what? And to whom? That’s an ongoing question."
Many education experts have questioned Duncan’s prediction. A study by the Center on Education Policy in April found that 38 percent of schools failed to meet adequate yearly progress in 2010, meaning the number failing would have to more than double.
Duncan has the authority to grant waivers to meeting the law’s requirements. In 2009, he granted more than 300, significantly higher than the number granted a year before by his predecessor. The department says the number was higher in part because officials invited states to submit several waivers, including those related to stimulus funding.
Kress said that not passing a reauthorization isn’t as serious as the administration has suggested and that there are many policy fixes that can be done under the current law. The political consequences for not passing a reform might not be steep for either party, he said.
"I think it’s inconsequential," Kress said. "The issues that separate them are so great. To come to an agreement on a modest bill that is restrained and modest, I don’t think anybody runs on that."
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