Education Policy in the News

Education Policy in the News is the biweekly e-newsletter of The Forum on the Future of Public Education.  It provides links to recent policy news and reports, notice of upcoming events, and occasional overviews of current policy debates. 

States submit Race to the Top applications

Last Tuesday, states submitted their applications for the first round of the $4 billion Race to the Top (RTTT) federal funding competition.   This Ed Week article provides an overview of the types of policy changes states have pursued to strenghten their applications.   Although RTTT is widely regarded as an early success, a number of states encountered late opposition to RTTT from unions and local districts.  Obama announced plans last week to seek $1.35 billion in FY11 to expand RTTT.  Links to many states' RTTT applications can be found here. 

Who will win?  A report from the National Council on Teacher Quality predicts that teacher quality and the loosely defined category of State Success Factors will set some states apart from the pack.  The report provides a scorecard on the strength of each state's human capital policy environment.   Will RTTT serve as a model for ESEA reauthorization?   Secretary Duncan recently spoke with Congressional leaders about plans for renewal and told the U.S. Conference of Mayors that the revised ESEA may aim to incentivize student achievement growth.

NCATE launches effort to enhance clinical experiences of pre-service teachers

Colleges of education have come under fire in recent years for not adequately preparing the next generation of teachers.  In October, Arne Duncan criticized teacher education programs in a speech at Teacher's College.   In response, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) has formed a blue ribbon panel of teacher education experts to produce "recommendations for restructuring the preparation of teachers to reflect teaching as a practice-based profession akin to medicine, nursing, or clinical psychology. Practice-based professions require not only a solid academic base, but strong clinical components, a supported induction experience, and ongoing opportunities for learning."

Illinois charter school policy ranked in bottom half of states due to poor authorizer system

This report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools looks at each state that has a charter school law and assesses the strengths of its law against a model law designed to balance growth and quality.  Illinois ranks 28th out of 40. The report states, "Illinois recently lifted its cap partially, is open to new start-ups, public school conversions, and virtual schools, and fares well on charter school autonomy. However, it needs significant work in several areas, including expanding authorizer options for applicants, ensuring authorizer accountability, providing adequate authorizer funding, beefing up the law in relation to the model law’s four 'quality control' components, and ensuring equitable operational funding and equitable access to capital funding and facilities".    Charter schools in Illinois are approved by local school boards, but there are some indications that alternative chartering boards may provide better oversight.

Report criticizes aid policies and low minority enrollment at flagship institutions

A report from Education Trust notes the continued underrepresentation of poor and minority students at flagship public higher education institutions. While the representation of minority students edged up slightly at the 50 institutions from 2004 to 2007, as measured by Education Trust, students from low-income students were slightly less well represented on the campuses than they were three years earlier. "In a spending pattern that is literally beyond belief, these institutions are spending almost exactly the same amount of money to provide grant aid to students in the top two quintiles of family income as they are spending on students in the bottom two quintiles," the report says.

States redirecting special ed funds to other uses

Facing tight budgets, many districts have used special education funds to avoid cuts in other areas.  This Wall Street Journal article notes, "A provision in federal law allows some school districts to spend millions of dollars of special-education money elsewhere, and a government report indicates many more districts plan to take advantage of the provision....But supporters of special education say special-needs students are being shortchanged. The biggest rub: To shift the funds, schools must show they have met certain criteria, which may include graduation and drop-out rates of special-education students. To allow more districts to qualify, some states are ignoring or lowering the standards." 

House panel recommends free access to funded research only after journal publication

There have been calls for free public access to publicly funded research. However, open access needs to be balanced with a quality control process, which often happens through the review process in academic journals. The Committee on Science and Technology in the U.S. House recently announced: "Each federal agency should expeditiously but carefully develop and implement an explicit public access policy that brings about free public access to the results of the research that it funds as soon as possible after those results have been published in a peer-reviewed journal."

FORUM in the news: District urged to review research before charter school expansion

Prior to a school board vote regarding the addition of a charter school to Peoria District 150, Forum associate Peter Weitzel shared some of the major findings from charter school research in an op-ed in the Peoria Journal Star. Mr. Weitzel is co-editing The Charter School Experiment, a book on 20 years of charter school research, with U of I Associate Professor Chris Lubienski. The District 150 school board voted to approve the new charter school on January 11th.