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Three main variables in education policy -- all recently in flux and one still in need of details -- will affect how the nation's neighborhood schools are run within the next several months. President Obama has framed investment in education as having the potential to power a renaissance in American cultural and technological pre-eminence -- or, if we miss this opportunity, to toss aside decades of innovation as other nations out-achieve us.
First: On September 23, 2011, President Obama presented to the public details of the education funding portion of his proposed American Jobs Act of 2011. His priorities are to provide school modernization construction funds in the amount of $30 billion and federal funds of $30 billion to re-hire teachers. As many as 275,000 teachers around the country lost their jobs in the 2010-2011 school year, according to the American Association of School Administrators.
Second: Coincident with this news for cash-strapped schools was the announcement that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan would waive schools' adherence to the Adequate Yearly Progress measurement of No Child Left Behind if states could show they'd changed their policies to align with certain Department of Education conditions. If Duncan doesn't do this, the flawed law's measures would deem 80% of the nation's schools as "failures" for not meeting the rather unrealistic standard of 100% competency in math and reading test scores by 2014.
Third: Race to the Top (RTTT), the DoE's initiative requiring that troubled schools take one of four "turnaround" strategies or be denied federal money, continues to be in effect, with some $200 million left to distribute in Round Three to the states out of $80 billion set aside in the Recovery Act. The four conditions are:
- schools must adopt "career and college-ready standards" as articulated in the Common Core Standards approved by 48 states,
- focus on the most troubled 5% of schools with drastic school closure and charter management takeover tactics
- give renewed attention to the bottom 15% of schools as measured by performance on standardized test scores,
- use data such as student performance on standardized test scores to evaulate teacher performance.
These have become linked to the receipt of No Child Left Behind funds by being one and the same as the conditions to obtain a waiver from that law. According to Education Week , the differences are minor and occur mostly in tone.
At the same time as the White House has pressed Congress for new policy fixes in the biggest law determining education policy, Congress has also struggled to develop either a reauthorization of the entirety of NCLB, or a piecemeal approach to spin off portions and pass the laws that way. As can be expected in this highly partisan environment, Democrats have tended to favor reauthorization of the entire law, with fixes incorporated into it, while Senate republicans appeared, in just the past few weeks, to opt for the piecemeal approach. Four bills to "fix" No Child Left Behind were spun off various items.
Yet the very latest news out of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee is that they will start marking up NCLB for reauthorization of the whole bill on October 18, 2011.
It's no wonder parental disgruntlement increases while important issues go unaddressed. Where does this leave schools? Because of a wave of severe underfunding, in part driven by falling home prices in the areas where schools are directly funded through local real estate property taxes, and in part the result of governor-pushed crises, such as Wisconsin's state budget deficit, at least 26 states will continue to cut dollars that flow to classrooms. Federal money is a crucial but tiny percentage of total school funding dollars. This fall, many parents faced larger class sizes, reductions in the electives offered, cuts to after-school and other programs, and fewer teachers, guidance counselors, and librarians in public schools.
