School districts: Interested in having your local, state, and federal funding follow children, so that kids with greater need have more money attached to them? Now’s your chance.
The U.S. Department of Education is officially opening up the “Weighted Student Funding Pilot” in the Every Student Succeeds Act. The department can allow up to 50 districts to participate initially, and ESSA leaves open the possibility of opening that up to more districts down the line.
So what’s the weighted student funding pilot? Participating districts can combine federal, state, and local dollars into a single funding stream tied to individual students. English-language learners, kids in poverty, students in special education—who cost more to educate—would carry with them more money than other students. Some districts, including Denver, are already using this type of formula with state and local dollars.
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is pretty excited about the pilot.
“This is a great opportunity for local district leaders to put students first,” she said in a statement. “Instead of relying on complex federal rules to allocate funds, local leaders can use this flexibility to match funds—local, State or Federal—to the needs of students.”
Read the full story here: May require an Education Week subscription.
“We need to question everything; to look for ways in which we can improve, and embrace the imperative of change. At the end of the day, success shouldn’t be measured by how much ivy is on the wall,” said U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. “It should be determined by how you’re educating and preparing students for today’s and tomorrow’s challenges.”
Setting this tone of innovation, Secretary DeVos welcomed over 20 education leaders from across the nation to the Education Innovation Summit on Higher Education, held recently at the U.S. Department of Education’s headquarters in Washington. The agenda included general discussion as well as several featured presentations.
Anant Agarwal, CEO of Boston-based edX, said that our society needs a system where universities and educators can work with learners throughout their careers, not just during the traditional college ages of 18 to 22.
Ben Nelson of the for-profit Minerva Project asked the group to consider what the purpose of higher education is. He submitted that today businesses across various fields want the same thing: employees who have a core skill but can also have the well-rounded education to learn skills in new areas.
Kathleen Plinske of Valencia College in Central Florida recommended simplification of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid for students with the greatest financial need and recommended that short-term training programs that have already been vetted and approved by another federal agency be eligible for U.S. Department of Education Title IV funding.
Jerry Davis, president of the College of the Ozarks in Missouri, said that his college is a work college. That is, all students are required to work at jobs, leading to the school’s nickname of “Hard Work U.” The school has a student-focused environment where the students’ personal needs are regularly met. For example, one student’s father was in the penitentiary, and the student’s mother had died. The college’s Helping Hand Fund paid $3,000 for the funeral costs of the student’s mother. The student went on to graduate and today is a teacher. “From my own family experience and in work colleges for over 40 years,” Davis said, “I can tell you that not everything can be solved with a computer. Sometimes it takes a personal touch to make sure students don’t fall through the cracks in our society.”
Mike Zeliff, dean of faculty and students at the Jack Welch Management Institute, said, “We treat our students like customers and rely on their willingness to recommend our program and our professors as a key performance measure. The curriculum is designed to learn it today, apply it tomorrow, and return to the classroom to talk about their observations.”
At the end of the nearly four-hour summit, Secretary DeVos thanked the participants for creatively meeting the needs of the students that they serve. “I welcome your continued input to me and to the department on ways that the federal government can get out of the way on some of the things we need to get out of the way of,” she said. “And tell us the ways we can support meaningfully the things you are doing to serve students.”
Joe Barison is a public affairs specialist in the Office of Communications and Outreach
Here we go again: President Donald Trump and Congress were unable to reach agreement on temporary spending plan to keep the government open. So the U.S. Department of Education and other government agencies are on a partial shutdown, as of midnight Friday night. This is the first time this has happened in four years.
Lawmakers will keep trying to hammer out a deal. But in the meantime, the department’s headquarters at 400 Maryland Ave. will be a much quieter place than usual, but most school districts aren’t going to be immediately affected if this turns out to be a short-term shutdown. A longer-term shutdown, however, could cause more headaches. Head Start, the federal preschool program, and Impact Aid to districts with a federal presence in their backyard will likely feel the pinch first. (See below for more).
Below are the answers to some frequently asked questions about what happens now:
How many people will still report to work at the Education Department? A lot fewer than usual. More than 90 percent of the department’s nearly 4,000 employees will be furloughed for the first week of the shutdown. Of course, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her top aides still come in. If the shutdown goes on for more than a week, more employees could return on a temporary basis, but it would not be more than 6 percent of the department’s staff.
Read the full article here: May require an Education Week subscription.
Associate Editor Christina Samuels contributed to this post.
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has given six more states the thumbs-up on their plans to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act: Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Kansas, Montana, and New Hampshire.
These approvals bring the grand total of approved state ESSA plans to 33, plus Puerto Rico’s and the District of Columbia’s. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia submitted plans last spring, and all but one of those states, Colorado, have been approved. Another 34 states turned in plans last fall, and so far, 18 have been approved.
So what do the approved plans look like? Below are some highlights of the state’s draft applications…
Read the full article here: May require an Education Week subscription.
Want to learn more about the Every Student Succeeds Act? Here’s some useful information:
Did you know that game-based learning is gaining popularity in education as more young people and adults learn from games in and out of the classroom? Well-designed games can motivate students to actively engage in content that relates to coursework, and to master challenging tasks designed to sharpen critical thinking and problem solving, as well as employment and life skills.
On January 8, 2018, the 5th annual ED Games Expo occurred at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. The event was organized in collaboration between the Department of Education’s (ED) Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and the Kennedy Center’s Education team. The event showcased more than 100 learning games, most developed with funding from 17 different government programs within and outside ED. The games were for students of all ages in education and special education and covered topics across STEM, reading, social studies and social development. Many incorporated emerging technologies, such as virtual reality, augmented reality and maker spaces with 3D printing stations, as well as engaging approaches to learning, such as narrative adventures and puzzle games.
A Unique Opportunity
This year the Expo featured panel sessions with game developers and live demos by more than 80 developers from around the country. At a daytime panel session on the Millennium Stage titled “So You Want to Be a Game Developer,” 13 different game developers shared inspiring stories for why and how they became game developers. The audience included more than 500 DC-area school students, many of whom took the microphone and asked questions such as “What is it like to be a game developer?” and “What can I do to be a game developer?”
The live demos of learning games and technologies occurred across multiple galleries on the Terrace Level of the Kennedy Center. Across the day and into the early evening, the students and more than 200 other visitors played games while meeting face-to-face with the developers. The experience provided a unique opportunity for attendees to discuss how the games were developed and to learn about the research findings on how games can impact student performance.
Learning Games Emerge Across Many Government Programs
Along with being a fun and rich learning experience for everyone, the Expo demonstrated the impact of a wide range of government programs that invest in learning games as a strategy to advance their mission to support education and learning.
Outside of ED, learning games at the Expo were supported by ten different government programs, including the SBIR programs at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Agriculture, and the National Institutes for Health and research programs at the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health. A group of games were also developed from programs at USAID, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Lastly, the Kennedy Center joined the Expo this year in recognition of the arts and creativity embedded in the game development process. The Expo provided tangible opportunities for students to learn directly from game developers how they use the creative artistic process to design multi-modal, differentiated games that are engaging, customized learning experiences for all. Through its Education programs, the Kennedy Center encourages a broad audience of students and stakeholders to consider game development as an opportunity for a range of learning experiences, through concept ideation, design, coding, graphic art creation, musical score writing and performance, or research and evaluation during and after development.
Edward Metz is a Research Scientist at the Institute of Education Sciences within the Department of Education, where he leads the SBIR and the Education Technology Research Grants programs.
Jeanette McCune is the Director of School and Community Programs in Education at the Kennedy Center.
Follow IES (@IESResearch) and the Kennedy Center (@Kencen) for updates on the next ED Games Expo and other initiatives.
This past fall I had the opportunity to visit the U.S. Virgin Islands, twice — first, in October, and two weeks later, in the company of Secretary DeVos. There, I saw firsthand the wholesale destruction left by back-to-back hurricanes. The experience was both humbling and uplifting.
During my first visit, I joined the Commissioner of Education for the U.S. Virgin Islands, Dr. Sharon McCollum, on a car trip around the Islands. On our way, she noticed the owner of a damaged wholesale club store — he was outside, combing through inventory, trying to salvage any goods that Hurricanes Maria and Irma had spared.
Pausing our scheduled tour, Dr. McCollum stopped the car in front of the store. She began negotiating the sale of cleaning supplies to be used in some of the many schools under her care. Simply getting students physically back to school is a monumental undertaking, she said: they shouldn’t have to fear getting sick from mold and the like once they’ve returned to the classroom.
Her goal that day — as it is every day — was to return a sense of normalcy to the more than 14,000 students whose lives and studies were interrupted by the powerful storms. I learned that, these days, such encounters are an integral part of Dr. McCollum’s day-to-day work: staff told me she can often be found out in the field, exploring the Islands in search of supplies and other resources to help students get back to school and engaged in learning again.
This is a fundamental objective on the Islands, where the scale of devastation from the storms defies description. Surveying the damage by military helicopter, I was overwhelmed by what I saw. Roofs had been ripped off houses; stores destroyed; roads impassable. School facilities that had once been home to fine arts and music — integral parts of the culture and education on the Islands — are gone forever, with many well-loved instruments, such as the region’s iconic steel drums, lost.
The two-year-old Every Student Succeeds Act was supposed to free states up to go off in bold, new directions on K-12 policy. So did state plans, all of which have been turned into the U.S. Department of Education, live up to that promise?
Not so much, according Bellwether Education Partners, a Washington consulting firm that reviewed the plans as part of a partnership with the Collaborative for Student Success, a nonprofit advocacy organization.
“With few exceptions, we found state ESSA plans to be mostly uncreative, unambitious, unclear, or unfinished,” wrote Bellwether in an executive summary of the review. That was true even though the set of states that submitted their plans in September had more time to refine their blueprints than the 17 states, including the District of Columbia, that turned in their plans in the spring.
Bellwether said some of the weakest areas of state plans included goals, which Bellwether didn’t think were grounded in evidence; confusing school ratings systems; and states’ failure to incorporate student subgroup performance into school ratings. (Minnesota was an exception on subgroups.) States also weren’t specific about how they would address the needs of English-language learners and students in special education, according to Bellwether.
Read the full article here: May require an Education Week subscription.
Democratic lawmakers want to know how Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos will work to stop bullying, harassment, and discrimination in public schools.
In a Wednesday letter, nine senators, including Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the Senate education committee, asked the secretary what resources the U.S. Department of Education was providing schools in order to counter “the recent increase in hateful and discriminatory speech and conduct.” They also asked for the number of ongoing investigations by the department into student-on-student harrassment based on things like race, religion, and sexual orientation, as well as whether the federal task force on bullying prevention initiated by President Barack Obama in 2010 would continue on DeVos’ watch.
The senators also took a potshot at DeVos’ boss, President Donald Trump, arguing that his remarks on Twitter have “normalized” homophobia, misogyny, and other forms of discrimination, and that his words have negatively impacted students. And they cite recent incidents in schools, from swastikas drawn in schools to Latino students blocked from entering class by a human chain of other students, to buttress their concerns.
Read the full article here: May require an Education Week subscription.
Disability advocates hailed the U.S. Department of Education’s finding that Texas for years put roadblocks in the path of children who potentially qualified for special education—a clear violation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
“It shows that they are willing to stand up when a state is clearly not doing what’s right,” said Robbi Cooper, a leader of the parent advocacy group Decoding Dyslexia Texas and the mother of a son with dyslexia. “Now let’s just hope that we can get the policies right.”
The Jan. 11 monitoring report from the office of special education services—the first to be issued under the leadership of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos—outlines a series of IDEA violations by the state.
In conversations with Texas parents and educators, federal officials heard conflicting reports about how children with dyslexia should be screened and served. Children who struggled in school were shifted to response-to-intervention programs that were supposed to meet their needs, but, once there, some languished for years, the monitoring report said…
Read the full article here: May require an Education Week subscription.
We, teachers, change the mindsets of self-doubters, instill a lifelong love of learning for many, care for the children of others as if they’re our own, and play a major role in creating all other professions. Yet, despite those superpowers, many of us have heard or uttered the phrase ourselves, “But I’m just a teacher,” when we’ve been encouraged to pursue leadership opportunities beyond our classrooms, schools or districts.
I’ll confess that I’ve used that phrase at various points during my career as an educator. While it might be difficult to determine why educators are often less confident in the value of their input, the self-doubt is real.
Perhaps it’s the perception that major policy decisions impacting students and schools often occur with minimum input from teachers. Maybe it’s the manner in which social media has a way of amplifying the most critical voices in any topic, including education. Or, perhaps teachers are feeling overwhelmed and fatigued from being frequent targets of criticism for issues beyond their control.
Regardless of the reasons, the voices of dedicated, creative, and solution-focused educators are often overlooked on issues that impact how they do their jobs and serve children.
Special Opportunity for Educator Input
As I’ve gained opportunities over the years to interact with individuals at the state and federal level concerning education issues, I’ve seen the importance of being in the position to share the stories of those who might not have the ability or opportunity to speak out concerning their interests. The Department of Education values and needs the input of those who interact with students on a daily basis. The School Ambassador Fellowship Program is unique because it gives teachers, counselors, librarians and other school leaders the opportunity to provide input and feedback on policy matters that impact their schools and communities.
Although Fellows will have differing goals and interests, the opportunity to hone leadership skills is a universal aspect of the program. I’ve been fortunate to work in numerous contexts as an educator – from preschool to teaching university students. Those experiences have been gratifying. Nevertheless, I’ve always questioned the lack of diversity in our teacher corps. Simply stated, there aren’t enough Black men leading our classrooms.
James Ford, Nathan Gibbs-Bowling, Abdul Wright & Kevin Dua – State Teachers of the Year for NC, WA, MN and MA – discuss their journeys as Black male educators.
Although I’ve had numerous wonderful experiences thus far as a Fellow, it has been extremely rewarding to do work supporting others who also have a desire to increase our percentage of Black male educators. Whether through work as a Teach to Lead critical friend, or as a presenter at the inaugural convening of Black Male Educators for Social Justice, the ability to develop my leadership skills while addressing that topic (and others) has been extremely rewarding. Other Fellows have addressed areas that represent their interests in education, like special education and career readiness.
Elephant in the Room
Let’s be honest. For any number of reasons you might feel that applying to represent teachers on behalf of the Department of Education is just something you don’t feel you can do. And, if your primary reason for applying to the Fellowship is based exclusively on how you feel about issues, it might be best to pursue other opportunities where you can impact our field. However, if you desire to be a voice for the students and families you support at the national level, consider applying. For me, the best time to be a true advocate for my students and my families is, always, right now.
There were 6 Fellows selected for the 2017-2018 cohort. Does that mean you have to be the BEST at something in order to be selected? Not necessarily.
Must you be creative, passionate and eager to contribute to conversations around improving the outcomes of all students? Absolutely!
Most teachers have those skills and many more to spare. They’re our local heroes. What’s your superpower? More importantly, are you willing to share it?
School districts: Interested in having your local, state, and federal funding follow children, so that kids with greater need have more money attached to them? Now’s your chance.
Did you know that game-based learning is gaining popularity in education as more young people and adults learn from games in and out of the classroom? Well-designed games can motivate students to actively engage in content that relates to coursework, and to master challenging tasks designed to sharpen critical thinking and problem solving, as well as employment and life skills.
