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NY Times – Course Correction on School Testing
Education Week - With Federal Budget Deal Expiring in Four Days, Where Does K-12 Spending Stand?
By Andrew Ujifusa on December 7, 2015 6:02 PM
Amid the rush of news regarding the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, you may have forgotten the ongoing saga surrounding the federal budget. Earlier this year, Congress struck a temporary deal to fund the government and prevent it from shutting down. But that deal runs out on Friday, Dec. 11.
It's not at all clear that congressional budget negotiators are close to striking an omnibus budget deal. Without such a deal, Congress would have to once again pass a short-term spending plan, known as a continuing resolution, to fund the government and avert a partial shutdown. So what are the details, and where do things stand for K-12?
As of late Dec. 7, the short answer is this: It might be very hard for Congress to work out an omnibus deal before Friday. And even if they're able to pull it off for some programs, it's possible that federal K-12 aid could be frozen in limbo for the foreseeable future, thanks to non-education issues that have an impact on the K-12 budget process.
Some background: A key aspect of the Bipartisan Budget Agreement of 2015, the name of the current temporary budget deal, is that it ends most of the mandatory spending caps on non-defense discretionary federal spending, including funding for K-12, for fiscal years 2016 and 2017. Those caps collectively are known as the sequester, which kicked in for the 2012-13 school year. A budget deal from 2014 largely restored sequestration's cuts in federal aid to school districts, but Congress is still dealing with sequestration's long-term presence in the budget.
But the recent Bipartisan Budget Act did not spell out specific appropriation levels for various federal programs including those for K-12. So it's still up to members of Congress to act before this coming Friday to decide exactly how much money will be provided to the nation's public schools, and which programs would get what levels of funding.
So what are funding advocates hoping for? K-12 funding fans like those on the Committee for Education Funding hope that in addition to the elimination of the sequester cuts to K-12, there will be funding increases for high-profile education programs such as Head Start, the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, and TRIO programs.
The Bipartisan Budget Act, if it's backed up by an omnibus budget deal, would allow for $33 billion inspending increases in fiscal 2016, and the same amount for fiscal 2017. But the portion of the budget dealing with education, as well as other programs under the Department of Labor and the Department of Health and Human Services, wouldn't see any of that increase if Congress applies a continuing resolution to it, said Joel Packer, the executive director of the Committee for Education Funding.
Why might Congress do that? It's because education funding could get tangled up with fights that don't deal with K-12 but impact other parts of the budget that fund schools. For an example, think of the Republican effort to eliminate federal funding for Planned Parenthood.
One possibility that Packer's heard goes like this: In order to put those kind of budget fights on hold, K-12 programs would be funded by a continuing resolution that would last until next March. That would lead to "four more months of uncertainty about how much money programs would get," he said. And even after that, in the middle of presidential primaries and with President Barack Obama releasing his own proposed fiscal 2017 budget, it's unclear when exactly education programs would get off the "continuing resolution" track and onto the "omnibus" track.
"It would just not be good," Packer said.
Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12.
NJ Spotlight - FEDERAL MONEY ENABLES LOW-INCOME DISTRICTS TO OFFER FULL-DAY PRE-KINDERGARTEN
MEIR RINDE | DECEMBER 7, 2015
Towns like North Bergen and Galloway need all the help they can get with insufficient school budgets, but what happens when funds dry up?
This is the fourth story in a continuing series about New Jersey's public and private preschools.
When North Bergen Superintendent George Solter looks around at his neighboring towns, he sees school districts similar to his own, with high poverty rates and disadvantaged students who desperately need extra resources to succeed.
But he also sees one big difference: West New York, Union City and Jersey City are all Abbott districts with state-funded school budgets, while North Bergen’s student population is considered not quite poor enough to merit that designation. The district is far below “adequacy,” meaning its budget is too small too meet its educational needs as defined by a formula in the 2008 School Funding Reform Act.
“That’s my dilemma as a superintendent,” Solter said. “We're one of the most under-adequacy districts in the state.”
This year, though, his budget and his students got a rare boost. Thanks to a four-year federal grant, 17 low-income districts including North Bergen received funding to create or expand preschool programs that will prepare thousands of 4-year-olds for kindergarten and elementary school.
The districts have already begun turning half-day programs into full-day, hiring properly certified teachers, creating new bus routes, and enrolling more children. North Bergen and others are working on plans for new school buildings to house their expanded programs. Previously, most had only offered preschool to special-needs students, as required by law, along with a few regular education students chosen by lottery.
Other families had to keep their children at home until kindergarten, or if they could afford it, pay for private childcare programs that may or may not have educational value.
The new classrooms meet the teacher qualifications, class size, curriculum, and other standards of the Abbott program. Research shows that those preschools have measurable benefits for low-income kids lasting at least through fifth grade. The children remain academically more advanced than their counterparts who did not attend Abbott preschools, are less frequently assigned to special-education classes, and are held back a grade less often.
The preschool expansion grant thus offers struggling non-Abbott districts an opportunity to give their community’s poorest children the kind of help that their counterparts in neighboring towns take for granted.
“Whatever money we can get to help us bridge that gap along the way, that's what we're looking for,” Solter said. “We look for grants everywhere that we can. We need help with technology, we need help with everything. So I'm not afraid to take a grant.”
The expansion has some limitations. Although the preschools in Abbott districts enroll both 3- and 4-year-olds, the federal money only covers 4-year-olds, even though two years of preschool has greater long-term benefits than one. The new funds also only pay for low-income children, while the Abbott districts enroll all kids in their towns regardless of family earnings.
In addition, the federal grant may only be renewed for up to four years, and the fate of the expanded preschools is undetermined beyond that point.
A welcome windfall
New Jersey is one of 18 states that were awarded a total of $226 million last year from the U.S. Department of Education’s Preschool Development Grants program. Two months ago Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the second year of grants to the same states, totaling $237 million.
New Jersey has been receiving $17.5 million in federal funds a year and contributing $13 million in state money annually. Some of the districts are also chipping in local funds. The grants are expected to be renewed for all four years, though Duncan noted that House and Senate committees have written spending bills that would eliminate them entirely.
“Republicans in Congress have put forward a budget that would shut down preschool for 100,000 kids,” he said during a press conference at a Virginia elementary school. “There's a growing bipartisan understanding in states that we must expand educational opportunity, starting with our youngest learners. For the sake of our kids and our country, I hope that bipartisan consensus will make its way to Washington sooner rather than later.”
The original grant decision was hailed by educators and advocates. Cecilia Zalkind, executive director of Advocates for Children of New Jersey, the Newark nonprofit that helped craft the state’s preschool standards, called the funding announcement “incredible news for New Jersey’s children and families.”
“This means that thousands more New Jersey children will have access to a quality preschool that can help them arrive at kindergarten ready to learn,” she said last year.The federal money falls well short of meeting all of the state’s early education needs, but anything that leads to the growth of high-quality preschool is welcome, said David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center in Newark.
“Any little federal money that we can get, we should take it and use it,” he said in an interview. “And what's good about this money is that it goes right into the Abbott framework, so we don't have to build a new program. We have the program; we just have to get the money for it, and expand it.”
Ellen Wolock, director of the Division of Early Childhood within the state Department of Education, said the agency was proud of the state’s high-quality preschools, while acknowledging the calls for a bigger expansion beyond the existing Abbott districts.
“Our efforts to expand such high quality supports and trainings to programs serving high needs preschoolers in other districts is developing more slowly,” she said in an email. “However, with a solid infrastructure in place, and with funding from the federal Preschool Expansion Grant, we are poised to meet our goal: To bring the components of the high quality preschool program to 17 high-need communities to maximize the learning and development of eligible 4-year-old children, including preschoolers with special needs, English language learners, and other vulnerable populations.”
The expanded preschools debuted this fall with 1,485 students, according to the DOE. The initiative aims to increase the number to 2,300 by 2018. Most of the districts had already been receiving state funds from two programs called Early Childhood Program Aid and Early Launch to Learning Initiative, but those programs do not require schools to follow all the Abbott requirements. They included many half-day programs and were allowed to have slightly larger classes, among other differences.
The expansion is proceeding gradually. Solter said North Bergen has 287 4-year-olds and 25 3-year-olds enrolled, about the same as last year. But before they were all in half-day classrooms; now 75 of the students stay for the full day, and that number will increase in coming years along with total enrollment.
He said his goal is to eventually double the number of preschoolers, which should not be difficult as families learn about the new free service available to them.
“We have parents that can't use half-day pre-K, because we're in a working-class locale. A parent can't pick up their kid at 12:30 or bring them to us as 12:30, so a full-day is where we have to go. We'll probably see a rise in the enrollment, because our parents are (currently) paying for full-day daycare,” Solter said.
“Give them to us,” he said, “and we would love to get them ready for kindergarten.”
The space race
Another beneficiary of the expansion grant, Galloway in Atlantic County, is receiving $1 million in new funding annually and has so far added about 10 children, Superintendent Annett Giaquinto said. The district already had full-day classes but it now offers busing for all children, a service that was previously only offered to special-needs students.Ninety-nine of the children are housed at Pomona Preschool, a two-story former elementary school about a mile from the Atlantic City International airport, and another 11 are at a federally subsidized Head Start childcare center that recently joined the program. The district plans to continue adding another 15-student class every year until enrollment reaches 180, Giaquinto said, and is considering enrolling middle-income children whose parents are willing to pay tuition.
As in many districts, space is an issue. The district will have to add another classroom -- possibly a prefabricated structure -- in the coming months, and is looking to eventually move the whole school to a one-story building with bigger rooms.
“We face the challenge of not receiving a lot of state aid, so the preschool expansion grant money really was tremendous for us to be able to expand the program and add transportation in,” Giaquinto said during a tour of the school last month. “Although the charm of the school is wonderful, the two stories are a challenge. So we are looking in the future to see if can we move the program to a different facility.”
The building is a stately, white-columned structure with a newer addition in the back. Walking down the central hall, students, staff, and visitors pass under ceiling tiles decorated with multicolored handprints and the names of former students. The bulletin boards are decorated with photos of the preschoolers decorated in Thanksgiving themes.
The building’s older rooms are smaller than preschool standards call for, but they still accommodate bustling classes of up to 15 children, many of them in “inclusive” classrooms with both special-education and regular-education students.
In one inclusive room, teacher Kristen Swanson led her diverse group of 4-year-old students through a phonics session, tapping at an alphabet poster with a wand topped with a pointing hand. The children sat in a semicircle of blocky plastic seats and followed along while an assistant teacher, Katy Beshara, stood to the side and watched.
“K, kite, kk,” Swanson said, tapping at the poster.
“K, kite, kk!” the students sang out.
“Excellent. L, lamp, lll,” she read.
“L, lamp, lll,” they repeated.
“Right, remember L -- you kind of see your tongue a little bit?” she said. “M, man, mmm.”
“M, man, mmm,” the children chanted.
The roar of a plane from the nearby airport filled the room. Swanson moved onto a sound-guessing exercise, asking the children to read her lips.
“Watch. You have to look at my mouth. I'm not going to say it. Austin Brown, look up here,” she said, silently shaping her lips.
“P! B!” the children guessed.
“B! Because how do you know that? It's a what?” she asked.
“A popper,” one said.
“It's a lip-popper. You got it,” Swanson said.
At the other end of the building, teacher Sarah-Ashley Sharpe and two assistants worked in a larger, sunlit room, painstakingly guiding nine special-education students through a series of activities. Sharpe carried a set of cue cards depicting different symbols and actions, and occasionally flashed a card at a student to redirect his or behavior.
One boy stripped off his shirt and walked around, smiling, until Sharpe got him dressed again. Three children went to a Lego play area with an assistant. Sharpe sat down three others at a table and laid out a puzzle and plastic worksheets for them to trace lines on. Assistant Russell Akerlind kneeled at an open-topped water tank with three boys, showing them how to suck up water with basters and shoot at floating turkey cutouts.
“That’s it, Esnol. Squirt!” Akerlind said to one child. “Get that turkey! And squeeze! What does it say?”
“Gobble gobble gobble,” the boy said.
“I got it,” another child said, squeezing his baster.
“Good job,” Akerlind said.
The water table is one of a few sensory exercises common in special-education classrooms, Giaquinto said.
“Part of it is allowing them to follow the directions, to see that when they squeeze the water it will move the turkey, so they do a lot of different things like that,” she explained.
Giaquinto noted that Galloway is in an area that has been hit hard economically. The town’s population, which grew along with Atlantic City’s casino industry, has been battered as superstorm Sandy and casino closures devastated the region. Giaquinto said many low-income children will qualify for the increasing number of preschool slots in the next few years and will benefit tremendously from the teachers’ focused instruction.
“Our goal is to promote the importance of getting the children in early,” she said. “You have all the issues and all the research related to children who live in impoverished homes, so the sooner we get them into school and build the language and all of those other aspects, it helps them in the long run.”
After federal funding
Assuming that federal preschool supports survive congressional efforts to eliminate their funding, the expansion’s next great challenge will come when the grant is renewed for the last time in 2018. The state Department of Education acknowledged that the expansion classrooms’ long-term prospects are unclear.
“We are currently working on the issue of sustainability,” a spokesman said in an email.
In discussions with participating districts, the agency has struck a somewhat more optimistic note, suggesting the grant could be replaced with state funds after it expires.
“Certainly, the state's perspective, or at least the people from the Division of Early Childhood Education, is that when the federal money runs out, if the district has successfully implemented the program there will be consideration for increased preschool state aid,” Giaquinto said.
“Now of course someone saying that in spring of 2015 has absolutely no guarantee four or five years later, but that one of the things we were told,” she said.
So far, the Christie administration has shown little taste for big new investments in education, and has kept overall aid to districts almost flat for five years. Sciarra, who supports a much larger preschool expansion envisioned in the 2008 School Funding Reform Act (SFRA), said he and other preschool advocates do not expect the administration’s position to change.
“There's a very pessimistic attitude, especially under Gov. Christie. Everybody has basically thrown in the towel,” he said. However, “people are looking at what's going to happen when Christie goes off the stage and we get a new governor who hopefully sees the benefit of this program. A lot of the people who are talking about running for governor have already talked about preschool.”
The 2008 law calls for expanding the main Abbott preschool program, which serves 35 districts, to an additional 90 low-income districts, including Galloway and North Bergen. Such an expansion would cost at least $360 million, boosting the total cost of the Abbott preschools to nearly $1 billion a year.
Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester), a likely gubernatorial candidate, has made preschool a central plank of his platform of greater investment in state services, and the Pre-K Our Way coalition of business people and education advocates has begun a lobbying campaign for the larger expansion. The cause is also a priority for President Barack Obama, who has spoken of creating universal free preschools for all low- and moderate-income children, and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
“We can’t say what exactly will happen in coming years,” the DOE spokesman said, in reference to the current expansion’s long-term prospects. “But there is a movement at the national level to invest in preschool programs like ours, as research has shown that investments in the early years (are) good for kids and will save money for taxpayers.”
As helpful as the new 17-district expansion will be for more than 2,000 children, its fate is ultimately tied to the larger project of creating free preschools for some 50,000 at-risk kids around the state, Sciarra argued.
“The federal money is helpful. It gets things moving,” he said. “But at the end of the day we're going to be back to having to get the SFRA expansion funded by the state.
Star Ledger - New bill would end PARCC testing in N.J.
By Adam Clark | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
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on December 07, 2015 at 1:13 PM, updated December 07, 2015 at 3:32 PM
TRENTON — A New Jersey lawmaker is calling for an end to controversial state exams that drew the ire of some parents and teachers.
State Assemblywoman Patricia Egan Jones (D-Camden) introduced a bill Dec. 3 that would require the state to abandon the math and English tests for grades 3-11, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers(PARCC) exams, after this school year.
The bill instructs the state Department of Education to develop and implement a new statewide assessment program that does not use material from the PARCC tests for the 2016-17 school year.
"We are losing valuable instruction time in favor of a test with questionable results," Jones said. "Students of all academic abilities are struggling under the heavy burden of the current PARCC testing schedule and the adverse strain it places on their learning environment."
Six months have passed since PARCC testing ended, and schools recently received their test results, but New Jersey has yet to provide a definitive answer as to how many students opted out.
New Jersey was one of 11 states and the District of Columbia that administered the new PARCC tests last year. Aligned to Common Core academic standards, the tests were designed to be more rigorous than their predecessors.
But the exams were met with opposition from some parent groups and the New Jersey Education Association, the state's largest teachers union, which waged an expensive television adverting campaign against the tests.
Opponents said the computerized assessments were unproven and too confusing and testing took away too much regular classroom time. Parent and teacher criticism of the exams helped fuel an "opt out" movement, and nearly 15 percent of high school juniors refused to participate in PARCC, according to preliminary data released by the state.
Though New Jersey performed better than the PARCC average, no more than 52 percent of its students scored well enough to meet PARCC's grade-level expectations on any of the 18 exams administered.
Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Ohio have left the PARCC consortium since the beginning of last school year, and Massachusetts decided it will use a combination of PARCC questions and its own test questions rather than relying solely on PARCC.
New Jersey has a four-year contract with Pearson, the test vendor for PARCC exams, and Gov. Chris Christie said in May that the state would continue using the tests even as it considers replacing the Common Core standards.
The time allowed for PARCC testing was reduced this school year, and Education Commissioner David Hespe has said last week that he expects the second administration of PARCC to go more smoothly than the first.
Hespe, flanked by representatives from colleges and the business community, said in October that PARCC will provide the most accurate picture yet of students' college and career readiness.
Adam Clark may be reached at adam_clark@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on twitter at @realAdamClark. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
NJ Spotlight - FINE PRINT: NOTED NEWARK SCHOOLS SEEK STATE OK TO GO CHARTER ROUTE…BRICK Academy passes first round of application process, but faces hurdles within city’s public school district
John Mooney December 8, 2015
What it is: The state Department of Education has advanced a proposal by BRICK Academy, an innovative program within Newark’s public school district, to effectively combine its Avon Avenue School and Peshine Avenue School into a single charter school.
BRICK’s leader said the change would give the two schools more freedom and flexibility, saying they have been hindered by the public school district’s bureaucracy and mandated costs and funding limits.
What it means: If the new Achieve Community Charter School is approved, it would be the first time that a public school in New Jersey is converted to a charter school.
RELATED LINKS
BRICK ACADEMY'S APPLICATION FOR ACHIEVE COMMUNITY CHARTER SCHOOL
The change would add fuel to the ongoing and sometime acrimonious debate over the relationship between public schools and charters -- a debate that it perhaps most intense in Newark. What’s more, the proposed switch comes at a time when school district leaders are looking to improve the city’s South Ward schools – including BRICK -- to better serve their neighborhoods.
Not a conversion: The transition is not technically a “public school conversion,” a yet-to-be-used option allowed under the state’s charter school law, state and school officials stressed.
Instead, BRICK Academy has filed a new charter application that essentially would close the two schools, reopening them with the new governance structure under their new combined name.
The money rationale: Dominique Lee, CEO of BRICK Academy, said becoming charters would enable the schools to break away from district strictures that he said amount to required spending of an estimated $3,000 to $5,000 per pupil, money he said is mostly spent on central office personnel and services.
The new charter school would use that money to hire additional teachers while bolstering support services like counselors and social workers.
“We’d be adding a whole different level of services that we can’t now,” Lee said.
The hiring criteria: Charter status would also allow BRICK to hire teachers without having to go through the district’s hiring process, Lee said, a process now even further constrained by Newark’s notorious pool of excess teachers.
What about the union? Becoming a charter would mean restarting without labor unions and their contracts, but Lee says he’d support letting his teachers stay within the Newark Teachers Union, albeit under a separate contract.
“We have no problem becoming a unionized school,” he said, adding he has already reached out to the NTU. “It would be a separate contract with similar working conditions.”
The district’s options: The Newark Public Schools, which have been under the state’s operation for 20 years, would need to sign off on the plans one way or the other, including deciding whether to lease the existing district-owned school buildings to the new charter.
Last year, former Superintendent Cami Anderson blocked a similar bid. This year, the decision will rest with Anderson’s successor as superintendent, Chris Cerf, the state’s former education commissioner. So far, he has not spoken publicly about the proposal, although the BRICK application says the public-school district has provided “their support in seeking to effect that transition.”
An alternative: Cerf has offered an alternative. He and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka last week announced an initiative to remake Shabazz High School and up to three elementary schools in the South Ward to become “community schools.”
The initiative would, through the “community schools,” offer a range of neighborhood services outside the classroom, as well as giving the schools new hiring freedoms and additional budget resources. It would be funded, at least in the first year, by $12.5 million from the Foundation for Newark’s Future, the fund created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift to the city’s schools.
BRICK’s options: BRICK’s Avon Avenue School is one of the schools being considered for inclusion in the Cerf-Baraka initiative. Lee said his organization is keeping its options open. “If we can solve these challenges in other ways, that would be great,” he said.
The union’s role: John Abeigon, president of the Newark Teachers Union, implored the state to block the move and keep the schools in the public-schools district as it pursues the community schools plan for the ward.
“We finally have the mayor and the superintendent sitting down to craft a solution,” he said.
But he wouldn’t rule out the NTU organizing in the new charter school – which would also be a first for the union.
“If and when, we could always sit down and talk about that,” he said.
Next step: The proposal was one of three approved in the first round of the application process. The application now must go through a more rigorous review and interview cycle, with a decision expected by spring.
