Yesterday, a twelve-member task force, convened by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), released a report on “Quality Education.” The task force was formed in December 2016 after the NAACP’s October 2016 call for a national moratorium on expanding charter schools until a set of conditions were met.
The charge of the task force was to bring forward “practical recommendations that respond to the urgency of this resolution and the inequities undermining public education.” In order to fulfill their charge, from December 2016 to April 2017, the task force held public hearings in seven cities—New Haven, Memphis, Orlando, Los Angeles, Detroit, New Orleans, and New York.
The report acknowledged that, from testimonials at the public hearings, they found some positive aspects of charter schools. However, the report ultimately concluded that “even the best charters are not a substitute for more stable, adequate and equitable investments in public education in communities that serve all children.”
Criticism of Public Hearings
According to NAACP task report report, the “hearing format [for the public meetings] ensured testimony” from all of the following stakeholders: educators, administrators, school policy experts, charter school leaders, parents, advocates, students, and community leaders. However, some have questioned the authenticity and fairness of these meetings, claiming that they did not include groups and individuals who were charter supporters.
For example, in Tennessee, members of Memphis Lift, a parent-activist organization, voiced disapproval when they were only allowed 12 minutes at the end of a four-hour meeting. Additionally, in Orlando, Minnesota education activist Rashad Anthony Turner was ushered out of the meeting by police after he interrupted a speech by Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers President, because opponents of the moratorium were kept waiting.
Task Force Provides Five Recommendations Based on Public Hearings
According to the report, the testimonials illuminated the “perceived” benefits and problems with charter schools. Using those testimonials, the task force created five recommendations, summarized below, that would improve the quality of charter schools.
Recommendation #1: Provide more equitable and adequate funding for schools serving students of color. The task force argued that education funding has been “inadequate and unequal for students of color for hundreds of years.” In order to remedy the problem, the task force recommended that states should implement weighted student formula systems and model them after the systems that Massachusetts and California have pursued. They also recommended that the federal government should “fully enforce” the funding equity provisions within the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).
Recommendation #2: Invest productively in low-performing schools and schools with significant opportunity and achievement gaps. In order to ensure that all students receive a high-quality education, the task force recommends that federal, state, and local policies need to “sufficiently” invest in three things: creating incentives to attract and retain teachers, evolving instruction to be more challenging and inclusive, and providing more wraparound services for students such as health and mental services.
Recommendation #3: Develop and enforce robust charter school accountability measures. There were five parts within this recommendation. They are as follows:
Create and enforce a rigorous chartering authorizing and renewal process. The task force recommends that states should only allow districts to serve as authorizers. This is significant since, of the 44 states that allow charter schools, only four—Wyoming, Virginia, Iowa, and Kansas—have district-only charter authorization.
Create and enforce a common accountability system.
Monitor and require charter schools to admit and retain all students. This recommendation calls for open enrollment procedures, and asserts that charter schools should not be allowed to counsel out, push out, or expel students that they “perceive as academically or behaviorally struggling, or whose parents cannot maintain participation requirements or monetary fees.”
Create and monitor transparent disciplinary guidelines that meet students’ ongoing learning needs and prevent push out. The report recommends that charter schools should be required to follow the “same state regulations regarding discipline as public schools,” and use restorative justice practices.
Require charter schools to hire certified teachers. Many states allow charter schools to hire uncertified teachers at higher rates than traditional public schools, however Minnesota is not one of them.
Recommendation #4: Require fiscal transparency and equity. The task force recommends that all charter schools be held to the “same level of fiscal transparency and scrutiny as other public schools.”
Recommendation #5: Eliminate for-profit charter schools. This recommendation not only states that all for-profit charter schools should be eliminated, but that all for-profit management companies that run nonprofit charter schools should be eliminated as well. Approximately 13 percent of U.S. charter schools are run by for-profit companies. Additionally, at least 15 states allow virtual schools, with many of them operated by for-profit organizations.
Report Elicits Scrutiny from Education Advocates
In response to the NAACP report, Nina Rees, CEO and President of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), issued a statement where she indicated that NAPCS was glad to see the NAACP recognize the value of charter schools and agreed with them that “whoever oversees a public school should take that responsibility seriously, have the highest expectations, and hold educators in the school accountable” for educating students.
However, Rees also asserted that the NAACP’s policy resolution and report failed to “acknowledge that Black parents are demanding more and better public-school options,” citing a nationally representative survey which found that found 82 percent of Black parents favored allowing parents to choose their child’s public school.
She also cited a 2015 CREDO Urban Charter Schools Report, which found that Black public charter school students gained 36 days of learning in math and 26 in reading over their non-charter school peers.
Chris Stewart, based in Minnesota and former director of outreach and external affairs for Education Post, asserted that “the NAACP has lost its way,” claiming that they have become an “unwitting tool of teacher unions” due to the union’s significant contributions to the NAACP over the years. He also claimed that the unions are “threatened by the growth and success of non-unionized charter schools.”
District-Charter Collaboration: Hope in a Time of Political Tension
The growing and contentious disagreements between education organizations and advocates regarding the merits of charter versus traditional district schools are not new and will likely continue to dominate the news cycle.
However, in recent years, a growing number of districts and charter schools have put aside their political differences and worked together in order to do what’s best for students. Our next two blog posts will examine the cities where some of those collaborative relationships are taking place, as well as provide history on district-charter collaboration in Minnesota.
By: Michelle Croft and Richard Lee ACT Research and Policy
Despite (or because of) the federal requirement that all students in certain grades participate in statewide achievement testing, stories of parents opting their student out of the testing gained national attention in the media in the spring of 2015. Ultimately, twelve states—California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin—received a notice from the U.S. Department of Education that they needed to create a plan to reduce opt-outs due to low participation rates.
When statewide testing came in spring 2016, there were more stories of opt-outs, and information about districts failing to meet participation requirements will follow in the coming months.3 Early reports from New York indicate that 21% of students in grades 3–8 opted out in 2016, which was slightly more than the prior year. (See attached PDF below for reference information.)
Participation Rate Requirements
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (both the No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds authorizations) requires that all students annually participate in statewide achievement testing in mathematics and English in grades 3–8 and high school as well as science in certain grade spans. Ninety-five percent of students at the state, district, and school level must participate; otherwise there is a range of consequences.
Under the No Child Left Behind authorization, the school would automatically fail to meet Adequate Yearly Progress if the school—or subgroups of students within the school—did not meet the participation rate requirement. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides states with greater flexibility to determine how to incorporate the participation rate into the state’s accountability system. However, in proposed regulations, the state will need to take certain actions such as lowering the school’s rating in the state’s accountability system or identifying the school for targeted support or improvement, if all students or one or more student subgroups do not meet the 95% participation rate.
Michelle Croft is a principal research associate in Public Affairs at ACT. Richard Lee is a senior analyst in Public Affairs at ACT.
This report highlights significant investments made by both Republican and Democratic policymakers in state-funded pre-k programs for the fourth year in a row. In the 2015-16 budget year, 32 states and the District of Columbia raised funding levels of pre-k programs. This increased support for preschool funding came from both sides of the aisle–22 states with Republican governors and 10 states with Democratic governors, plus the District of Columbia.
In contrast, only five states with Republican governors and three states with Democratic governors decreased their pre-k funding.
Overall, state funding of pre-k programs across the 50 states and the District of Columbia increased by nearly $755 million, or 12 percent over 2014-15. While this progress is promising, there is still work to be done to set children on the path to academic success early in life. Still, less than half of preschool-aged students have access to pre-k programs.
Increasing the number of students in high-quality preschool programs is broadly viewed as a way to set young learners on a path to a secure economic future and stable workforce. This report includes several state examples and an overview of the pre-k programs they have in place. Data tables on total state pre-K funding and state pre-kindergarten funding by program are appended. [Megan Carolan contributed to this publication.]
Education Commission of the States. ECS Distribution Center, 700 Broadway Suite 1200, Denver, CO 80203-3460. Tel: 303-299-3692; Fax: 303-296-8332; e-mail: ecs@ecs.org; Web site: http://www.ecs.org
President Trump released his Fiscal Year (FY) 2018 budget on May 23 and immediately received bipartisan criticism from members of Congress concerned with deep cuts to education, health-care programs for low-income adults and children, and a variety of other federal programs.
“I can understand why President Trump wanted to be overseas when he released a budget slashing education at home,” said Alliance for Excellent Education President Bob Wise. “Still, I bet he could hear the outcry emanating from U.S. schools all the way in Rome. Thankfully, members of Congress are already signaling that Trump’s proposal will be parked—permanently—on the tarmac when he returns.”
Trump’s budget would cut discretionary funding for the U.S. Department of Education, excluding Pell Grants, by $5.3 billion or 11.6 percent compared to the 2017 funding levels recently approved by Congress. Funding cuts and program eliminations were plentiful and targeted everything from large programs such as Title I, which was cut by $578 million, and special education, which was cut by $114 million, to smaller programs focused on literacy and afterschool academic opportunities.
In a statement, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said the budget “reflects a series of tough choices” and “ensures funding for programs with proven results for students while taking a hard look at programs that sound nice but simply haven’t yielded the desired outcomes.”
Labeling a program as ineffective has been a popular justification to cut funding, even in instances where research says otherwise. In a March 16 press briefing, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said Twenty-First-Century Community Learning Centers, or afterschool programs, had “no demonstrable evidence of actually helping kids do better in school.” This is despite a U.S. Department of Education report finding that these programs “[touch] students’ lives in ways that will have far-reaching academic impact” and make students “more likely to persist to graduation.”
Afterschool Alliance Executive Director Jodi Grant said Trump’s proposal is “painfully short-sighted and makes a mockery of the president’s promise to make our country safer and to support inner cities and rural communities alike.”
Trump also proposes that funding be eliminated for the brand-new Student Support and Academic Enrichment (SSAE) grant program created with bipartisan support under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The program supports a well-rounded education for students; a safe and healthy school climate; and the effective use of schoolwide technology.
“Republicans and Democrats consolidated and eliminated several different programs to create SSAE and give flexibility to school leaders,” said Wise. “Now the president’s budget removes the funding—and flexibility—designed to improve education. Instead of eliminating funding for the program, President Trump should take the advice of two key ESSA architects, former House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline and U.S. Representative Bobby Scott who have urged that the program receive the full $1.65 billion for which it is eligible under ESSA.”
Even programs recently praised by DeVos and Trump did not avoid the budget cleaver. In an April 18 speech in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Trump said that vocational schools are “going to be a big factor” in the his administration. However, his budget proposes to cut career and technical education grants to states by $168 million, or 15 percent.
Proponents for charter schools were among the very few winners in Trump’s budget as it includes an increase of $158 million, or 46 percent, to start new charter schools or expand and replicate existing high-performing charter schools. Still, charter school advocates disagree with Trump’s approach.
“The National Alliance supports the administration’s investment in opening, expanding, and replicating high-quality charter public schools,” said National Alliance for Public Charter Schools President and Chief Executive Officer Nina Rees. “However, we are concerned that the proposed budget doesn’t maintain final FY 2017 funding levels for IDEA and reduces Title I Part A formula funds. Both IDEA and Title I are foundational programs for some of our most vulnerable students.”
In addition to expanded funding for charter schools, Trump proposes $1 billion for a new program that would provide supplemental awards to school districts that allow federal, state, and local funds to follow students to a public school of their choice. These Furthering Options for Children to Unlock Success, or FOCUS, grants would help school districts establish or expand “student-centered systems that (1) differentiate funding based on student characteristics, providing disadvantaged students more funding on a per-pupil basis than other students; (2) offer a range of viable school options and enable the federal, state, and local funds to follow students to the public school of their choice; (3) make school performance and funding data easily accessible to parents; and (4) empower school leaders to use funds flexibly to address student and community needs,” according to the U.S. Department of Education’s budget summary.
“Under the guise of empowering parents with school choice, the Trump administration has proposed a federal budget that would hurt the very communities that have the most to gain from high-quality public school options,” said Eli Broad, founder of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. “The budget would undermine the purpose of Title I by encouraging states to redirect resources away from the highest-need schools and students. It would slash other education and social support programs that serve students and families in need. Arts education and science instruction, a safe place to go after the last school bell rings, an affordable home, and financial support to make it through college—these are all essential to a student’s success. Public school choice cannot come at the expense of all public school families and students.”
Members of Congress from both parties quickly panned Trump’s budget. U.S. Senators John Cornyn (R-TX), the second-highest ranking Republican in the Senate, and John McCain (R-AZ) called it “dead on arrival.” U.S. Representative Bobby Scott (D-VA), top Democrat on the House education committee, said Trump’s budget “undermines public education.”
WASHINGTON – The House education committee approved a bipartisan bill to reauthorize the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act on Wednesday.
The Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act, with Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi as the lead co-sponsors, passed unanimously out of the committee. It now moves to the full House for consideration, and could become the first major education legislation sent to President Donald Trump during this Congress.
Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., the committee chairwoman, and Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., the top Democrat, both said there is a skills gap between what students are provided in educational settings and the demands of the current workforce.
“This legislation will empower state and local leaders to tailor programs to meet the unique needs” of students in their community, Foxx said in the Wednesday committee meeting. “Local leaders will be better equipped to respond to changing education and economic needs.”
As we reported earlier this month, the legislation is tailored to give states more flexibility in their plans for Perkins funds and for prioritizing programs that meet their particular workforce environments. It is very similar to a 2016 bill that easily passed the House, although this year’s version does impose somewhat stricter requirements on state CTE spending, as well as the process by which state plans are approved or rejected. In several respects, it matches the emphasis on greater state and local control in the Every Student Succeeds Act.
Scott said the bill promotes equity in career and technical education while updating the Perkins law to reflect the changing economy. However, he said the bill isn’t perfect in its current form and that the authority of the education secretary in the bill over funding issues isn’t as strong as he would like.
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Ore., introduced and then withdrew an amendment to the bill to beef up secretarial authority she expressed concern that the bill in its current form would allow states to use federal funds on failing CTE programs. (Disputes over secretarial authority led last year’s bill to stall out in the Senate.) She said lawmakers should continue to discuss this issue as the bill moves ahead.
On Tuesday, Foxx expressed optimism about the bill’s prospects in public remarks at a CTE event. In addition to more freedom for states, Foxx said the Thompson-Krishnamoorthi bill creates greater transparency and accountability for CTE programs.
Read the full CTE bill below, which Thompson introduced as a substitute on Wednesday and which makes a few technical changes to the legislation he and Krishnamoorthi introduced earlier this month.
Legislation that would direct more than $100 billion into building and upgrading school infrastructure around the country was introduced Wednesday by Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., the House education committee’s top Democrat.
The Rebuild America’s Schools Act of 2017 would be tailored for schools in high-poverty areas, and would direct money to high-speed broadband internet as well as school construction. In a summary of the legislation, Scott and other Democratic lawmakers also said the bill would create 1.9 million jobs that latter figure is via an estimate from the Economic…
NEA President Lily Eskelsen García discussing the Every Student Succeeds Act at a townhall in Manassas, Virginia.
Morgan Dennis, a high school student at Forest Park High School in Prince William County, Virginia, said she gets migraines from the enormous amount of test stress she’s under at school. Classmate Caili Downs agreed.
“It’s actually affecting my eyesight, all the testing,” Downs said. “It takes the fun out of school. The work and testing level in AP classes is just way too high.”
The students were seated around a cafeteria table at Stonewall Jackson High School in Manassas, Virginia, with educators, parents and community leaders at a townhall meeting hosted by the Prince William County Education Association (PWEA). The goal of the meeting was to get input from everyone in the school community about how the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) could reduce testing and improve public education overall.
Community members now have the chance to weigh in on both the Virginia state plan, which will be rolled out in September, as well their district plans. The National Education Association (NEA), Virginia Education Association (VEA) and affiliates like PWEA are now asking that fill out an “opportunity checklist” for schools that will improve learning conditions. Reducing testing, increasing enrichment programs, improving school climate, updating technology – anything and everything that makes a school great should be on the list.
NEA President Lily Eskelsen García calls for an “opportunity dashboard” composed of key indicators of school quality that is largely data already captured by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. They include access to advanced coursework (AP/IB, dual enrollment, college gateway math and science) fully-qualified teachers, specialized instructional support personnel (school counselors, nurses and psychologists), high-quality early education, arts and athletic programs, and community health care and wellness programs.
We want to find what the best schools with the most successful students are providing and give that to all of our schools. Did you know that 80 percent of the richest families send their kids to their neighborhood public schools? Why? Because they are fabulous schools” – NEA President Lily Eskelsen García.
At the PWEA townhall, more than 150 people crowded around tables throughout the cafeteria to share what they thought schools needed to improve and how ESSA might help. The one issue that kept popping up at every table – testing and test stress.
One educator said she tries to find ways to give students brain breaks and creative outlets to break up the grueling testing sessions. A central office staff member said schools should offer instructional support with more mental health specialists like counselors, social workers and nurses to help boost positive school climate and reduce test stress. A parent said her daughter must take AP tests even if she doesn’t want to and that parents should be informed about how to opt their kids out.
“A townhall like this is so critical because we have an opportunity for change and improvement and we need to listen to all voices,” says Prince William County School Board vice chair Lillie Jessie. “We’re hearing a lot about testing, and though we need ongoing assessments, there is a lot of standardized testing that doesn’t guide instruction. Any test that doesn’t guide instruction is the wrong kind of test. Right now, ESSA offers an opportunity to improve assessments, and as we continue with implementation we’ll continue to get input from the community.”
When Jim Livingston, a middle school math teacher and VEA president, addressed the townhall he said that “nobody in this room has ever learned a thing by filling in a bubble on a standardized test. With ESSA we are talking now about how to improve performance assessments and reduce testing. For teachers, that’s exciting because that’s where the joy gets back into learning. It’s coming!”
He said that the heart and soul of ESSA is about continuous improvement. “As union leaders, educators, parents, community members and students we should always be asking how could I have done that better?” he said. “And what ESSA recognizes and the No Child Left Behind Law failed to see is that improvement doesn’t come from the top down but from the bottom up. ESSA requires policy makers to listen to us and that’s the piece that’s been left out for far too long.”
ESSA allows for educator and community voices to be heard and Livingston encouraged everyone gathered to make their voices heard. “It’s an opportunity we haven’t had in two decades.”
Northern Virginia high school students at the ESSA townhall on April 20.
NEA President Lily Eskelsen García, the keynote speaker at the townhall, said her proudest moment was sitting in the White House with President Obama when he signed ESSA into law and signed out of existence No Child Left Behind, or what she called “No Child Left Untested.”
But she said that ESSA isn’t only about getting rid of the era of toxic testing, it’s about finding ways to improve all aspects of education and doing so with the expertise of those who know it best – our educators.
“On every state and school level they are asking us to provide a dashboard of indicators of what makes a school successful, things that measure student success beyond standardized tests like access to classes offer college credit in high school, access to rigorous classes, or gifted and talented programs in elementary schools,” she said. “And a librarian! That’s like a unicorn in some places, having a librarian in some areas is like a fable, but we know a staff librarian is a measure of school success.”
For years, Eskelsen García said, the government tried to find the school failures by looking at test scores, and when they were low, they blamed the teachers and administrators. They fired people and shut schools down.
“We want to do the opposite. We want to find what the best schools with the most successful students are providing and give that to all of our schools,” she said. “Did you know that 80 percent of the richest families send their kids to their neighborhood public schools? Why? Because they are fabulous schools.”
She encouraged everyone to visit the best schools they can find and take inventory. Do they have an orchestra? A school nurse, librarian and counselors? How about updated technology? Are there AP classes, baccalaureates, after school programs, enrichment classes, and nutrition programs? She said that educators should make a list of all the things that make a school great and demand that they be offered at their own schools. ESSA offers that opportunity.
The focus on charters and vouchers are a deflection that evade the real questions, she said, like why some schools are allowed to have roofs that are leaking or why some schools have no counselors to reach out to kids at risk of dropping out.
“Every public school should look like our best public schools,” she said.
While policymakers focus on the letter of the law, educators, parents and community members can focus on the spirit of the law, Eskelsen García said.
“It’s all about voice, your voice,” she said. “Talk to each other. Partner with each other. Together we can design the schools of our dreams. What would the school or your dreams look like? Kids would smile. Parents would show up. Well, who wants to work on why the parents aren’t coming and how we can change that? Why aren’t kids smiling and what can we do to change that? Once you’re working on your dreams, you won’t let anyone stop you.”
A new working paper puts some numbers to that question.
Having just one black teacher in third, fourth or fifth grade reduced low-income black boys’ probability of dropping out of high school by 39 percent, the study found.
And by high school, African-American students, both boys and girls, who had one African-American teacher had much stronger expectations of going to college. Keep in mind, this effect was observed seven to ten years after the experience of having just one black teacher.
The study is big. The authors, Seth Gershenson and Constance A. Lindsay of American University, Cassandra M.D. Hart of U.C. Davis and Nicholas Papageorge at Johns Hopkins, looked at long-term records for more than 100,000 black elementary school students in North Carolina.
Then the researchers checked their conclusions by looking at students in a second state, Tennessee, who were randomly assigned to certain classes.
There they found that not only did the black students assigned to black teachers graduate high school at higher rates, they also were more likely to take a college entrance exam. “The results line up strikingly well,” says Papageorge.
And this isn’t news to many African-American families who already feel strongly that their children need role models in their education. Khalilah Harris has experienced the issue both as a policymaker and as a mother of three daughters. She was the Deputy Director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans under the Obama administration. She recently transferred her two older daughters, 12 and 14, to a progressive private school to expose them to more diverse teachers and curriculum.
“My youngest, who is 7, goes to supposedly the best public school in Baltimore City, but there is not any teacher of color there, and that is deplorable,” she says. “If you grow up in a world that does not reflect your essence as valuable from birth, the fact that you don’t have a teacher … who looks like you, will cause cognitive dissonance.”
Papageorge says the “role model effect” that Harris describes is quantifiable. “Sometimes when I talk about expectations, people think I’m talking about magic fairy dust,” he says, “but in economics, it’s one of the biggest things that determine the kinds of investments people make.” In other words, whether it’s money you put toward a mutual fund, or time and energy you spend on your education, how much you expect to get out can determine how much you put in.
If a low-income black boy never sees anyone in the classroom who looks like him, Papageorge says he might conclude, “‘Hey, college is just not for me’. And then why would you work hard in school?”
Yolanda Coles Jones of Charlottesville, Va., says she and her husband avoided the school system altogether. They homeschool their four children, two girls who are 9 and 7, and 4-year-old twin boys. She says they didn’t see their local public or private schools “understanding the needed emphasis on black children seeing black faces.” The family is part of a homeschooling co-op called Community Roots, that, Coles Jones says, was founded “to have an atmosphere that is safe for children of color to be in.”
In future research, Papageorge hopes to replicate the study and unpack the powerful and long-lasting effects observed. But based on the evidence he already has, he has an immediate policy recommendation. Having just one black teacher in his study made all the difference to students; having two or three didn’t increase the effect significantly. Therefore, schools could work to change student groupings so that every black student gets at least one black teacher by the end of elementary school.
“Should we hire more black teachers?” he asks. “Yeah, probably, but it requires more black college graduates … We could push around rosters tomorrow, change the way we assign kids, and have some effects next school year, not 10 years from now.”
For some time, lawmakers have been pondering what should go into a reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Now GOP lawmakers overseeing education issues in Congress appear set to take another crack at updating the law, which was last renewed in 2008.
In a recent story, we looked at some issues lawmakers will be tackling in a refreshed HEA that are likely to have an impact on public schools, and in particular those students who are preparing to make the transition from secondary to postsecondary life. It’s clearly on Sen. Lamar Alexander’s mind—the Senate education committee chairman and Tennessee Republican recently told us that reauthorizing the law will be his committee’s “major focus” over the next year.
Among those issues are what kind of information about colleges and universities prospective students will be able to see. The Obama administration released a new “College Scorecard” with information about debt loads and graduation rates. But it’s based on a limited pool of information, and skeptics question whether the information is particularly useful (or used often) by prospective students…
Two Democrats who played a key role in crafting the Every Student Succeeds Act, Sen. Patty Murray D-Wash., and Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos Friday asking what her plans are for giving states guidance on implementing the law, now that Congress has scrapped a key set of regulations written by the Obama administration.
Among a lot of other things, those regulations, which dealt with the accountability portion of the law, included a “template” or application form for states to use in developing their plans. A number of states have already gotten started using the old template, posting the form on their websites for feedback. But now that Congress has scrapped the regs, that form doesn’t apply.
