Philadelphia Inquirer--Top colleges look to enroll more low-income students
Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster is helping to lead a new national effort aimed at recruiting 50,000 talented students from low- and moderate-income families to the nation's top 270 colleges.
Currently, 430,000 low-income students as measured by those who receive federal Pell grants attend the top schools, which have six-year graduation rates consistently above 70 percent.
Under the American Talent Initiative, that number would rise to 480,000 by 2025, nearly a 12 percent increase.
The initiative, announced Tuesday, includes a core group of 30 public and private colleges, including four Ivy League schools - Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth - and other heavy hitters, such as Duke and Stanford. Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., is part of the effort, as well as several state flagship universities, including Ohio State and North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and smaller private colleges, such as Amherst and Vassar.
The colleges will work together at recruiting and graduating students and sharing information on efforts that work, said Daniel R. Porterfield, president of F&M, who was honored at the White House this year for his work on increasing college opportunity for students from low-income families.
The colleges will explore how best to provide financial aid to the students and help them succeed.
Susan Snyder, Staff Writer| Updated: December 13, 2016 — 1:07 AM EST
NY Times--It Turns Out Spending More Probably Does Improve Education
If you spend more on education, will students do better?
Educators, politicians and unions have battled in court over that crucial question for decades, most recently in a sweeping decision this fall in Connecticut, where a judge ordered the state to revamp nearly every facet of its education policies, from graduation requirements to special education, along with its school funding.
For many years, research on the relationship between spending and student learning has been surprisingly inconclusive. Many other factors, including student poverty, parental education and the way schools are organized, contribute to educational results.
Teasing out the specific effect of money spent is methodologically difficult. Opponents of increased school funding have seized on that ambiguity to argue that, for schools, money doesn’t matter — and, therefore, more money isn’t needed.
But new, first-of-its-kind research suggests that conclusion is mistaken. Money really does matter in education, which could provide fresh momentum for more lawsuits and judgments like the Connecticut decision.
The study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in July, was conducted by the economists Julien Lafortune and Jesse Rothstein of the University of California at Berkeley and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach of Northwestern. They examined student test scores in 26 states that have changed the way they fund schools since 1990, usually in response to a lawsuit like Connecticut’s, and compared them with those in 23 states that haven’t. While no two states did exactly the same thing, they all had the effect of increasing funding for the poorest districts.
KEVIN CAREY and ELIZABETH A. HARRIS DEC. 12, 2016
Education Week-- Congress Faces Range of Education Issues in Next Session
ESSA regulations may get scrutiny
With President-elect Donald Trump waiting in the wings, the Republican majority in Congress will have the opportunity to tackle a host of education issues when its next session begins in 2017, from funding for disadvantaged and special education students and college access and affordability issues, to student-data privacy and career and technical education.
At the same time, there will be significant turnover in some key positions: In addition to Trump's selection of school choice advocate Betsy DeVos to be education secretary, the House education committee will have a new leader, Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C.
But what's probably at the top of the list for leading GOP lawmakers is deciding which regulations from President Barack Obama's administration pertaining to the Every Student Succeeds Act they may wish to overturn through the Congressional Review Act. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn. and the Senate education committee chairman, has indicated his intent to toss out final ESSA rules from the Obama administration if he decides they go beyond the scope of the law.
The outgoing administration has yet to release final ESSA spending regulations that could shift more state and local money to disadvantaged students. If it does before leaving office, the odds are that GOP lawmakers—many of whom have said the proposal represents federal overreach—would use the review act to get rid of them.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/12/14/congress-faces-range-of-education-issues-in.html
By Andrew Ujifusa|December 12, 2016