by Nancy Andrews for Connecticut Education Association
Connecticut teachers are urging legislators to take up the critical issue of education funding when they convene for a special session later this month to focus on the draconian cuts devastating the state’s public schools and shortchanging students’ education.
“While we appreciate legislators standing up for our senior citizens, our youngest and most vulnerable citizens are also facing peril with continued school funding cuts that must be addressed,” said CEA President Sheila Cohen. “The time for action is now. Our children can’t wait until next February. Legislators must take up the issue in special session.”
Governor Malloy recently cut an additional $58 million in ECS funding, and more cuts are planned in 2018. As Connecticut’s cities and towns struggle to make up these costs, many are planning to cut school resources, eliminate educational programs, and lay off teachers.
“These funding cuts are creating chaos in our schools and causing disruptions for students, parents, teachers, and communities in the middle of the school year,” said Cohen. “Every day our teachers are being asked to do more with less, and every day our students are being shortchanged by cuts in education funding. Education funding is being strangled in a budget nightmare that has created an economic crisis in our schools.”
Hundreds of teachers have also reached out to legislators. In phone calls and emails, teachers are asking legislators to do the right thing and protect Connecticut’s children.
Cohen stressed, “Without providing critical funding, the state is irreversibly jeopardizing the future of Connecticut’s students and the future of our state. Our children and our public schools are too important to cast aside and just hope for the best. We need to support the education of our children.”
Georgia and Utah, as well as hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, have some work to do on their plans to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act, according letters published this week by the U.S. Department of Education. Each turned in its ESSA plan back in September. U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her team are just beginning to respond to state plans. (Maryland is the only other state that submitted this fall to receive feedback.)
Here’s a quick look at some of the issues the department sited in each plan. Click on the state name to read the full letter from the feds.
Georgia has proposed looking at whether schools are able to close achievement gaps as part of its academic achievement indicator. The department says that gap-closing can’t be used there, although it can figure in elsewhere in the state’s accountability system.
The Peach State has listed nine indicators of school quality or student success, but it hasn’t sufficiently explained how they would be measured, or how they will differentiate among schools, the department says.
Georgia needs to do a better job of explaining how much weight it is giving to different accountability indicators. ESSA says academic factors, like test scores, need to count for more than school quality indicators, like school climate. It’s not clear Georgia met that requirement, the feds say.
The state needs to provide more information to show that its plans for identifying low-performing schools and schools where certain groups of students are struggling meet ESSA’s requirements. And it needs to explain how it will ensure poor students get their fair share of effective teachers, the department says.
Where do state ESSA plans stand? Sixteen states and the District of Columbia submitted their ESSA plans this fall. So far, all but one of those states has been approved. (The exception is Colorado, which asked for more time to improve its plan.) Another 34 states submitted their plans earlier this fall. So far, Maryland is the only other state to receive feedback.
FutureEd, a non-partisan think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, launched a new website on various education related topics including ESSA examination. The organization is designed to “produce clear, compelling analysis on key education issues” for “policymakers, practitioners, the media, and other key education change agents” at the federal and local level.
Democrats on the Senate education committee had some tough questions Tuesday for President Donald Trump’s picks to head up civil rights and special education policy at the U.S. Department of Education.
Kenneth Marcus, who is currently the head of a Jewish civil rights organization and has been tapped to lead the department’s office for civil rights, and Johnny Collett, the program director for special education at the Council of Chief State School Officers, are likely to be confirmed. But Democrats used the confirmation hearing to air deep concerns about the Trump administration’s record on both civil rights and disabilities issues.
“One of the most appalling ways that President Trump has damaged our country is when it comes to civil rights, and undermining the rights and safety of women, people of color, and people with disabilities,” said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the panel.
Murray said Marcus appears to “share the goal of halting discrimination on the basis of race ethnicity or religion” particularly on college campuses. But she worries about his ability to stand up to Trump and to U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
And she expressed qualms about Collett’s record as head of special education in Kentucky. She noted that the state was criticized for allowing frequent use of seclusion and restraint in schools, which are used to a disproportionate degree on students with disabilities.
“Only after public outcry and work from the [state’s] protection and advocacy agency did Kentucky take steps to address this,” Murray said. “Additionally, you told my staff you support Secretary DeVos’ privatization agenda, which includes $20 billion school voucher proposal. Voucher programs do not support all of the needs of students with disabilities.”
But Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the chairman of the committee, defended both nominees. He said Marcus “has a deep understanding of civil rights issues having founded the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights and having served as staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for four years.” He said he had letters from 10 individuals and organizations supporting Marcus’ nomination. And he said that Collett is “widely supported by the special education community…”
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Did you know that before entering kindergarten, low-income students are an average of about one year behind other students in math and reading? Did you know that African-American and Hispanic children begin kindergarten up to 13 months behind? These are gaps in both opportunity and achievement.
With support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, NCSL convened 23 legislators and two legislative staff at a two-day seminar in Seattle in November to focus on early learning policy strategies to address these gaps.
Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the federal education law passed in 2015, there are new opportunities for states to renew their efforts to give each student a similar start to their education and to ensure that they do not fall behind once they enter kindergarten.
These policymakers dialogued with 12 national policy experts on the economics, data, research and policies related to opportunity gaps, comparing their own state data to national trends and workshopping ideas. Participants left the meeting with ideas, questions and next steps for when they return home, including the following policy options:
Improved data collection to support more robust accountability and reporting.
Adequate funding and tracking resources.
Importance of high-quality teaching.
Extra supports or wraparound services.
Strategies to support English Language Learners.
Copies of all PowerPoint presentations discussing these policy options can be found here.
Perhaps hearing some of the meeting takeaways has sparked some ideas for you as well. To learn more about NCSL’s work on closing opportunity gaps through early learning opportunities in ESSA, please visit NCSL’s webpages on closing opportunity gaps and supporting early learning, or contact Madeleine Webster and Matt Weyer.
Madeleine Webster is a policy specialist in NCSL’s Education program.
Since taking office last February, the U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has eliminated dozens of education directives to school officials. Now the Education Department is reconsidering a rule intended to hold states to a higher standard when determining if districts have overenrolled minority students in special education. It has also signaled an intention to pull back on considering “systemic” causes of discrimination during civil rights investigations at schools.
The unprecedented cleansing and revisions of Department of Education guidance to states, school districts, and private schools is passed off largely as a response to President Donald Trump’s simplistic Jan. 30 executive order that agencies remove two regulatory documents for every one issued. Even if, as has been reported, large swaths of the documents the department has eliminated so far have been out-of-date or superfluous, other guidance revisions have grave implications for marginalized students. The department’s headline-making withdrawal of Obama-era policy guidance permitting transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identities is just one such example.LLL
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David C. Bloomfield is a professor of educational leadership, law, and policy at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. He is the author of American Public Education Law, 3rd Edition. Alan A. Aja is an associate professor in the department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College.
The Department of Education’s (Education) Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) and postsecondary schools collect, use, and share a variety of information—including personally identifiable information (PII)—from students, their families, and others to support the administration of student aid. This information is used to make decisions about the eligibility of schools to participate in federal student aid programs, the processing of student applications and students’ eligibility to receive various types of aid, the disbursement of funds to aid recipients, and the repayment of loans and recovery of defaulted loan payments.
Education and FSA have established policies and procedures for managing and protecting student information that are aligned with applicable federal laws. However, shortcomings in key areas hinder the effectiveness of FSA’s procedures. For example, FSA established procedures and tools for managing and organizing records and scheduling them for disposition, but did not fully establish such procedures for electronic data, ensure that employees regularly received training, or conduct a required internal assessment of its records management program. Regarding the protection of student information, FSA did not consistently analyze privacy risks for its electronic information systems, and policies and procedures for protecting information systems were not always up to date. FSA’s shortcomings are consistent with the Education Inspector General’s identification of persistent weaknesses in the department’s information security policies, procedures, and controls. Recommendations to address these weaknesses are not yet fully implemented. Until FSA implements the recommendations, it increases the risk of improper disclosure of information contained in student aid records.
Based on a GAO survey of schools, the majority (an estimated 95 percent of all schools) of those participating in the federal student aid process reported having policies in place, including records retention and disposition policies. However, schools varied in the methods they used to store records, the retention periods for paper and electronic records, and the disposition control activities they employed (such as the authorization and approval process for destroying records).
FSA oversees schools’ participation in student aid programs, but this oversight does not extend to schools’ information security programs. To oversee schools’ compliance, FSA conducts reviews of schools’ student aid programs, based on a number of risk factors. However, it has not identified implementation of information security programs as a factor to consider in selecting schools for program reviews, even though schools have reported serious data breaches. GAO’s review of selected schools’ policies found that schools did not always include required information security elements, such as assessing risks or designing and implementing safeguards. Moreover, Education’s implementing regulations do not require schools to demonstrate their ability to protect student information as a condition for participating in federal aid programs. This raises concerns about FSA’s oversight and how effectively schools are protecting student aid information. Until Education ensures that information security requirements are considered in program reviews of schools, FSA will lack assurance that schools have effective information security programs.
Why GAO Did This Study
FSA oversees the award of billions of dollars in federal student aid to eligible students each year. The processing of student aid requires FSA, along with participating schools, to perform a range of functions across the student aid life cycle, including the management of PII on students and their families.
GAO was asked to examine how FSA and schools manage federal student aid records. The objectives of this study were to: (1) describe how FSA and schools use information they collect to manage the federal student aid program, (2) determine the extent to which FSA policies and procedures for managing and protecting this information align with federal requirements, (3) describe the extent to which schools have established policies and procedures for managing student aid information, and (4) determine the extent to which FSA ensures that schools protect this information. To do this, GAO reviewed Education and FSA policies and interviewed agency officials. GAO also administered a survey to a stratified random sample of 560 schools that is generalizable to the population of about 6,200 schools.
What GAO Recommends
GAO recommends that FSA take seven actions to strengthen its management and protection of federal student aid records and enhance its oversight of schools. FSA concurred or generally concurred with five of GAO’s recommendations, partially concurred with another, and did not concur with another. GAO believes all of the recommendations as discussed in the report are warranted.
For more information, contact Nick Marinos at (202) 512-9342 or marinosn@gao.gov.
Today “education is where medicine was in 1910,” stated Dan Leeds, founder of the Alliance for Excellent Education (the Alliance) and current board chairman. Leeds was referring to the pivotal moment in history, after the publication of the Flexner report, when American medical schools began to adhere strictly to the protocols of science in their teaching and research. With modern technological advances and a wider range of research methodologies for studying how humans learn and develop, the field of education likewise now has greater access to research that can guide practitioners and policymakers in how best to design schools to improve student outcomes and close achievement gaps.
But this research must be useable and accessible if researchers hope to influence education decisions. Therefore, the Alliance’s science of adolescent learning initiative focuses on translating and disseminating adolescent learning and development research to inform school improvement policy and practice, especially for secondary schools serving historically underserved students.
As part of this initiative, the Alliance recently gathered together an impressive group of researchers, practitioners, and policy experts to examine these advances in research and discuss how recent findings from the science of adolescent learning might inform high school improvement strategies under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). As states finalize their plans for identifying schools in need of comprehensive or targeted support, school districts are developing processes and strategies for ensuring that they support these schools, and their subgroups of students, using evidence-based strategies…
The science of adolescent learning is the interdisciplinary study of what happens in and with the brain during learning. To learn more, visit https://all4ed.org/issues/science-of-learning/.
Robyn Harper is a policy and research associate at the Alliance for Excellent Education.
Under ESSA, the California Dept. of Education debuted a “school accountability dashboard” website. The page is designed to be a “one-stop comparison tool” for its “ability to highlight high-performing schools for best practices and low-performing schools that need the most help.”
California Model Five-by-Five Placement Reports & Data
The Five-by-Five Placement Reports provide an “at a glance” display on how a district or school is performing on the state indicators. They graphically display which schools or student groups are: a) performing well, or b) in need of additional support.
Georgia and Utah, as well as hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, have some work to do on their plans to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act, according letters published this week by the U.S. Department of Education. Each turned in its ESSA plan back in September. U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her team are just beginning to respond to state plans. (Maryland is the only other state that submitted this fall to receive feedback.)
