a strong voice for kids 2nd Congressional District
a strong voice for kids 2nd Congressional District
We have a draft of the rules for the Closing the Achievement Gap (CTAG) Program. Once schools are identified as having a “significant achievement gap,” they are eligible to participate in the program, if their school district wants. The proposed rules design the program as consisting of a team to visit the schools to help them design an improvement plan. There will be a hearing on these rules at the December 8 meeting.
The Office of State Planning and Budgeting, which is part of the Governor’s office approved the budget request for CDE. It contains some items we wanted, such as funding for libraries and additional staff, but not for the CELA (Colorado English Language Assessment). Districts have told us that CELA, required by NCLB, is 10 times more expensive than the English language assessments they currently use. We will have a chance to ask for the CELA funding when we meet with the Joint Budget Committee on December 15.
The bill that changed the “improvement rating” on the SARs (School Accountability Reports) to a longitudinal “academic growth rating” also requires a longitudinal growth model to be developed to predict individual students’ growth on CSAP; the model would enable teachers to intervene with students who are not on track to become proficient by 10th grade. A technical advisory committee has worked on the methodology so that this year’s SARs will have the academic growth ratings on them. The TAC has also been working to develop the longitudinal growth model. They have determined that it is not statistically viable to predict how students in 3rd grade will do on CSAP by 10th grade, so they have changed to model to predict within 3 years.
GRADUATION AND DROPOUT RATES
We had a great deal of testimony in our public hearing regarding the proposed rules for calculating graduation and dropout rates, and it raised a number of questions on issues such as how to get parental notification for students who transfer out of a school, how students who get a GED should be counted, and whether to consider the cohort for the graduate rate as starting at the end of 8th grade or the beginning of 9th grade. Therefore, we decided that passing the emergency rules at this meeting was inadvisable, and we extended the public hearing to the December 8 meeting. We will have no choice but to pass them at that meeting. CDE staff will collect all the additional input and present us with a chart showing the proposed changes, with the pros and cons of each. Everyone is urged to get their comments in to CDE by November 28 in order for staff to prepare the chart. One particularly interesting comment was made that at the same time there is a push to reduce administration and put more money into the classroom, the state is requiring more data collection, which has to be done by administration.
We finally agreed on the wording of our new Legislative Priorities for 2006. The priorities include funding for CELA, capital construction, special education, closing the achievement gap, full-day kindergarten and early childhood education for at-risk children, and supplementary online courses. They also support action to reduce the deterioration of the local share of state funding, to increase the permanent fund of the School Trust Lands, to expand Post-Secondary Education Options, to give the SBE more flexibility in dealing with underperforming schools, and to allow the SBE to have the authority to implement legislative directives through rules rather than having state statutes specify the details, such as with the SARs.
We updated our administrative policies on procedures for charter school hearings. The parties in an appeal will now have to submit their briefs electronically. Since recent legislation eliminated the requirement that we hold a public hearing on the first appeal, staff recommended that we eliminate it. I was opposed to this, as were several other SBE members, and we decided to keep that hearing. (I opposed its elimination because I believe the Board gets valuable insight into the issues with proposed charter schools from the public hearing, which are not always obvious from reading the briefs.)
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