Anne Bubnic's List: ARRA/School Improvement

• Whatever the administration decides to do, it needs the approval of Congress, which passed the law with broad bipartisan support in 2001 but deadlocked over a rewrite in 2007.

• Yet Duncan has many criticisms of No Child Left Behind, and he has plenty of company. Opponents insist the law's annual reading and math tests have squeezed subjects like music and art out of the classroom and that schools were promised billions of dollars they never received.

  Critics also say the law is too punitive: More than a third of schools failed to meet yearly progress goals last year, according to the Education Week newspaper.

  That means millions of children are a long way from reaching the law's ambitious goals. The law pushes schools to improve test scores each year, so that every student can read and do math on grade level by the year 2014.

• "What No Child Left Behind did is, they were absolutely loose on the goals," Duncan told the Education Writers Association meeting in Washington. "But they were very tight, very prescriptive on how you get there.

  "I think that was fundamentally backwards," he said.

  Duncan said the federal government should be "tight" on the goals, insisting on more rigorous academic standards that are uniform across the states. And he said it should be "much looser" in terms of how states meet the goals.

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• In a world of competing priorities and limited resources, there is great need for help that is targeted to those who need it most. Arguably, too many of our nation’s low-income and minority public school students fall into this category. But the reforms that are necessary to upgrade our nation’s public school system and ensure that these students receive a high-quality education require considerable investment. Weighed against other policy strategies, education reform initiatives too often remain near the bottom of the list.
• This report examines whether high-poverty and high-minority schools and districts are rethinking the school calendar, if they are adding learning time to the calendar in a significant way, and if they are using learning time differently. To address these questions, the Center for American Progress has conducted research over a two-and-a-half year period to identify and study schools and districts across the country with more learning time. This report identifies more than 300 current initiatives in high-poverty and high-minority schools across 30 states, implemented between 1991 and 2007.
• this report touches on why schools and districts choose to expand learning time, how that time was added to the calendar, and what additional time means for schools and students.

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• Parents charged with overseeing federal money complain that they were not included in the plans that were hastily drafted by schools last week. Teachers and their union say the superintendent has sidestepped them. The school district refused to share the draft plans with the media on Friday. And some of the brief plans hashed out by schools, obtained from other sources by voiceofsandiego.org, raise a barrage of new questions, from whether schools can mandate that teachers stay in one area to curb turnover to how lengthening the school year would work.
• Morris said that schools had to hurry so that the plans could be brought to the school board before unrolling any major changes, such as changing the school calendar, which could take time to put together before next school year. The budget deadline is June 30. No final decisions have been made, the school board has yet to weigh in, and it is unclear when the final plans will be chosen
• The teachers union plans to file a charge that San Diego Unified violated labor law when patching together the plans, alleging that it dodged the union on issues that must be bargained, such as how many days teachers work. It contends that such changes can only be brought to the union, not directly to teachers, just as individual schools cannot ask teachers to change their salaries without going to the bargaining table.
• While Grier has earned praise for his fast pace and passion for change, that same speediness has sparked criticism for failing to get input from parents and teachers on his plans. And with millions in stimulus money at stake, those arguments are even more pressing, especially as tension builds between the stimulus goals of doing new things and saving jobs that already exist.
• "There needs to be community input and participation. That doesn’t happen extremely quickly," said school board member John Lee Evans. He added, "It is a quandary in terms of, 'Here is some quick stimulus money to hold things together, and we want you to be innovative, and we want your ideas to be well thought out and based on research.' There are a lot of contradictions there."
• Both the Lincoln and Crawford plans include extending the school year for four more weeks, which costs money because schools must pay teachers more for the extra time. Some reformers like the idea because it gives children more time in the classroom, which has been shown to benefit disadvantaged students who tend to backslide during breaks. But changing schedules is logistically tricky and sometimes unpopular with parents.
• Technology is also touted in plans from Lincoln, Crawford and San Diego High, several of which push for digital whiteboards and laptops for every student. Other ideas include adding more counselors, nurses and social workers to schools around Crawford, emphasizing writing at all the schools that lead into San Diego High, and creating a district-run middle school that leads into Lincoln, where many surrounding middle schools are charter schools that are independently run with public funding
• Every principal there was excited about the possibility of doing something different," Allen said. "But they were concerned about getting the buy-in on the ideas."
  

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• Despite solid evidence that preschool can have lasting effects on children, even curbing dropout rates and slimming the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their classmates, there is no uniform system for funding it. Preschools in California often rely on a complex web of funds to stay afloat. There are federal funds and state funds, temporary grants, dollars passed along from school districts and dollars handed down from county commissions funded by a statewide tobacco tax.
• Each fund is saddled with rules that limit which families it can be spent on, how many children can be grouped with each teacher, and how the money must be tracked. State preschool money, for instance, is supposed to be used to help families who earn less than 75 percent of the California median income -- roughly $44,000 for a family of four. But federal money for the Head Start preschool program has a lower threshold of about $22,000 for a family of four, according to figures supplied by the California Head Start Association.
• The paradox means that preschools that survive on a mixture of state and federal funds may be forced to cut programs that depend on state funding at the same time they buy new equipment or boost salaries for their workers with stimulus dough
• Each fund is facing different threats -- and benefits -- in a bleak economy. State legislators plan to slash roughly $55 million from a fund that pays for state preschool and programs for infants and toddlers, Moore said, leaving between 11,000 and 14,000 preschoolers in the lurch if stimulus funds cannot plug the gap.

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