Conduit Street

MSDE recently released its revised draft calculations for the Major State Aid Programs for Fiscal Year 2014. Tables  listed below provide revised calculations for education funding including those figures used to determine wealth, total enrollment, and per pupil amounts.  They include adjustments for legislation passed during the 2013 session and provide a county-by-county breakdown for each component of education funding.

A recent article in the Des Moines Register (limited free views available online) highlighted Maryland’s public school achievement, and drew comparisons and contrasts with the schools in Iowa.

From the article online:

Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad has pushed for wide-ranging K-12 education reforms to reverse the slide. But as the General Assembly heads toward likely adjournment this week, legislation remains stalled.

Iowa Education Director Jason Glass and other reform supporters point to Maryland as a possible model for how Iowa can overhaul its system to boost student achievement.

“They put the right reforms in place, stuck with them and then worked to continually improve, never being satisfied with the results,” said Linda Fandel, a Branstad education adviser.

Iowa has tried education reforms in fits and starts over the past two decades. Policymakers tinkered with teacher pay, funneled money into professional development and lowered class sizes. The moves have largely failed to improve student test scores, education leaders acknowledge today.

“They weren’t systemic (changes),” Glass said. “As soon as the political will or the money ran out, those programs vanished.”

Read the full article from the Des Moines Register.

An recent editorial in Governing draws into question the value of school boards.  As described by the author, the idea of eliminating school boards has been circulated over the past few years, and may be increasing in popularity.

Advocates contend that the school board structure gives communities a direct voice in governance and that members are held accountable through the election process. But there’s an increasing sense among others that it may be time to eliminate school boards altogether. The idea has crossed party lines. The Center for American Progress is a generally liberal institution, but Chester Finn, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a former assistant education secretary under President Ronald Reagan, has issued similar decrees. “School boards are an aberration, an anachronism, an education sinkhole,” he said in 2006. “Put this dysfunctional arrangement out of its misery.”

The author suggests alternative educational governance structures to the current school board system, including local government control and charter schools.

This year in Maryland the General Assembly passed the Prince George’s County – School System – Academic Revitalization and Management Effectiveness Initiative PG 411-13.  The new law grants the County Executive of Prince George’s County and the Prince George’s County Council the authority to appointment certain members of the county school board, including the chair and vice chair of the board.  It also establishes that the Prince George’s County Executive shall select the Chief Executive Officer of the Prince George’s County public school system, and authorizes the Chief Executive Officer to consolidate schools under certain circumstances.  

For more commentary on this topic, see the complete editorial from Governing.

As reported in the Baltimore Business Journal, the greater Baltimore business community may feel a negative effect from the Baltimore City School Chief’s early departure.  According to the editorial,

Donald Manekin, a developer who served as the school system’s chief operating officer from 2000-2002, says the answer can be found in the classroom.

“Businesses are ultimately the recipient of these graduates,” he said Monday, still a little in shock that Alonso announced his June 30 departure Monday morning. . . . Manekin, who served under schools CEO Carmen V. Russo, said the business community now has the responsibility of helping select the new CEO, welcome him or her and create partnerships with the new schools chief.

For more information, see the full story from the Baltimore Business Journal.

As reported by Homeroom, the official blog of the US Department of Education, some rural teachers are receiving web-based guidance through a large-scale distance coaching study by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  The Department’s Institute for Education Sciences funds the study through a five-year grant.

Homeroom describes how the guidance works,

Inside a classroom at Chantry Elementary School in the small town of Malvern, Iowa, four 1st grade students are gathered around a table facing Becky Curtis. She is teaching them to read.  It appears to be a traditional reading intervention class. However, they are not alone.

A state away in Omaha, Nebraska, Mrs. Patty Smith is observing the small group via WebEx software and a webcam on an open laptop sitting on a table behind the students. Occasionally Mrs. Smith speaks with Ms. Curtis through a small listening device. The technology is allowing Mrs. Smith to communicate, see and hear the students’ responses and their teacher’s instruction.

For more information on this program, see the full story from Homeroom.  For information on 2014 funding opportunities from the Institute of Education Sciences see their website.

As featured in the Washington Post, Greg Anrig of The Century Foundation, a non-profit research organization based in Washington D.C. recently set forth the theory that struggling schools can make improvements by collaboration between labor and management.  In his post, Anrig references studies by the Consortium on Chicago School Research and the National Center for Educational Achievement, and management studies from the manufacturing and health care fields.

Anrig highlights the importance of trust and collaboration between stakeholders in education based on his review of research.  For example, he cities the Consortium on Chicago School Research’s finding of five pillars of successful schools:

1. a coherent instructional guidance system, in which the curriculum, study materials, pedagogical strategies, and assessments are coordinated within and across grades with meaningful teacher input;

2. an effective system to improve professional capacity, including making teachers’ classroom work public for examination by colleagues and external consultants to  enable ongoing support and guidance to teachers;

3. strong parent-community-school ties, which closely integrate the network of people focused on enabling each student to learn;

4. a student-centered learning climate that identifies and responds to particular difficulties any child may be encountering; and

5. leadership focused on cultivating a growing cadre of stakeholders (teachers, parents, and community members) who become invested in sharing overall responsibility for the school’s improvement.

For more information, see the full post in the Post or read more about the cited studies, Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago, and The 20 Non-Negotiable Characteristics of Higher Performing School Systems