a strong voice for kids 2nd Congressional District
a strong voice for kids 2nd Congressional District
There is increased receptivity to the goals of accreditation and NCLB in the districts. They are recognizing all the interwoven elements of the components of effectiveness, steps to be taken, building for improvement. It's a tall order to meet the expectations of all the accountability requirements. CDE's main interest is not in comparing districts but in helping them move forward. Districts are becoming more insightful and focused on the school and district improvement plans. Encouraging districts and schools to include in their plan an accurate profile of where they are at the moment. Collecting data is step one. Then looking at what will cause the greatest improvement in learning. The third element is how to measure progress made and determining what actions need to be taken. There is good research now to take us there. The Large District Accountability Committee is working on helping CDE revise the handbook. They brought up the question about the difference between the district's accreditation contract and the Educational Improvement Plan. The accreditation contract is the umbrella for following all state and federal requirements, and the Educational Improvement Plan feeds into the contract; then each school has a School Improvement Plan. Accreditation is based on multiple indicators, not just CSAP.
I asked if the Board would support having a statewide conference for members of district and school accountability committees, to help educate them on their role in working on the Educational Improvement Plan. Morris Danielson has spoken about institutional memory being lost at a time when accountability committees' role in accreditation is so vital. Roscoe Davidson and Gary Sibigtroth confirmed that the accountability committees have a vital role. There is also the added issue of parent involvement required by NCLB, which includes parent involvement contracts. There is a need to work on alignment of different accountability laws and rules and determine how the parent involvement components are supposed to mesh. DeHoff suggested that we might be able to include this conference as part of the Standards and Assessments Conference in Breckenridge in June.
There is obviously a need for alignment altogether of NCLB and Accreditation and SB 186. Each district's consolidated federal programs application includes its plan for accreditation goals, parent and community involvement, closing the achievement gap, professional development, and highly qualified teachers and paraprofessionals.
The Colorado School Finance Project put together principles to guide the allocation of state funding to school districts through the School Finance Act. They also commissioned a study by Augenblick & Myers, Inc., on what would be an adequate amount of base funding to school districts to adequately implement the requirements of NCLB as well as of the state - including standards, CSAP, safe schools, accreditation, and basic literacy - and to make what the public perceives as successful schools. There were two different approaches used to come up with what funding is adequate: the professional judgment approach and the successful schools approach. For the former, classroom teachers, CFOs, administrators, and school board members participated in focus groups for different-sized districts (very small, small, moderate, large, and very large). They determined what resources would be needed in the different types of districts in order for students to achieve a specific set of objectives and to produce high-quality schools. The successful schools approach sought "to infer a base cost figure from the actual basic spending of districts determined to be successful because they meet the standards used by the state to evaluate student and school performance."
The adequate base fundings that each group came up with are different. The professional judgment approach came up with $6,815, and the successful schools approach came up with $4,654. "One reasonable explanation for the difference is that the professional judgement panels designed schools that would fully meet state standards, including those associated with NCLB, while the successful school districts may have met many of the state's accreditation standards but failed to meet the expectation that all students are at least partially proficient on all CSAP tests. In 2002, an average of only 70.4 percent of all students were at least partially proficient across the five CSAP tests used to set the baseline for state compliance with NCLB in 2002. In fact, 70.4 percent of the professional judgment base cost figure $6,815 is $4,798, which is almost equal to the successful school district figure of $4,654 in 2000-01 inflated by 3.0 percent to 2002." [Quotes are from the Executive Summary of the A & M report.] The base figure used here excludes adjustments for and additional funding for teaching special education students, English language learners, at-risk students, cost of living variations, and varying sizes of districts.
There are about 30 states that have done adequacy studies, for a variety of reasons. The Colorado study was done to be informative and to help policymakers understand the effects of the standards-based approach on needs for funding. Maryland came up with a six-year plan to increase their funding to what they determined as adequacy. There were some states that had a legal settlement requiring adequate funding, but they haven't been as successful because they didn't have full buy-in. Polis said that school finance is very political, not necessarily determined by "the facts."
The SBE agrees that we must keep this in mind as we look to possible future changes in school finance.
The largest cuts that the Legislature is making in education funding are in higher education; for CDE, the biggest cuts were in the State Library. The Maintenance of Effort for Amendment 23, as introduced in the Long Bill, is at 5%. The amounts that the JBC estimated would be saved by cutting CSAPs in writing, 9th grade reading and math, and the ACT are actually lower according to CTB McGraw Hill, which provides the tests. SB 292, which has the suspensions of CSAP tests, has passed the Senate and will go to the House Appropriations next (it will not go to the House Education Committee, although it did go to the Senate Education Committee, because the Speaker of the House decided not to send it there). There was a total of $305 million of one-time spending in last year's budget that isn't available for this year. Most of this is hoped to be made up by selling future revenues from the Tobacco Fund; however, it is possible that a new lawsuit against Phillip Morris in Illinois will cause the company to go bankrupt, obviating the tobacco settlement payments - this would necessitate additional cuts of $260 million. All state funding for BOCES has been eliminated ($210,000). The Senate reduced school funding by lowering the size factor; the House changed it to eliminating the cost of living factor. However, there is still $5 million for charter school capital construction. There is a proposal to allow charter schools the opportunity to appeal to the SBE if money was withheld by districts that they think was incorrect. We will have to eliminate 10 more full-time staff from CDE (in addition to the 10 eliminated last year). Funding for Talking Book Library will be reduced. There will be an elimination of the regional library system, library services to prisons, and interlibrary loans (which also reduces federal funds by eliminating the state match).
The Colorado State Board of Education believes that our education system should include a variety of opportunities and methods for students to acquire a quality education.
Empowering families to choose schools has several benefits:
We support school choice models that conform to the following principles:
Schools participating in a choice program should require CSAP testing for publicly funded students, and flow reasonable standards for accreditation. Meaningful oversight should exist to measure the success or failure of programs over time in raising student achievement, closing the achievement gap, or achieving other stated educational goals. All schools should conduct background checks on teachers and administrators.
Schools participating in a choice program should conduct their financial affairs in a responsible way, including appropriate documentation of funds, reasonable openness to public scrutiny, and audits.
Schools participating in a choice program should have the same admission requirements as regular public schools consistent with the educational program and philosophy of the choice school.
Choice programs should initially be targeted to benefit those students most in need of educational alternatives, such as those with special needs, in low-performing schools, and from families of limited means.
For the foreseeable future, the vast majority of Colorado children will continue to receive their education through the public school system. Therefore, it is important to take into account the positive and negative impacts on the overall health of this system in assessing the local impact of choice and choice schools.
What is our role in implementing this bill? (It is the voucher bill that requires districts with 8 or more low or unsatisfactory schools to allow a percentage of their poor, unsatisfactory-performing students to attend private schools and to pay 75% of those students' PPOR.) We need to figure out what the department's role is. The SBE surely will have a role in appeal hearings, but perhaps we could take a leadership role in defining some of the fuzzy areas of the bill. CDE will do an analysis of the bill for us. It will be responsible for putting together a list of the eligible students.
These rules have had input from CSEAC. NCLB has initiated interest in rewriting this. UNC and DU are only institutions that give this program.
These rules are out of date. They were written in 1994, and much has changed since then. One issue is that some librarians have a degree in library science but no education or experience in teaching. Having the three designations - Teacher Librarian, Librarian, and Provisional Librarian - expands the opportunities, by allowing alternative preparation and by allowing librarians to be endorsed without having a teaching license first. UCD, DU, and UNC have librarian preparation programs.
I asked to add more specifics on punctuation, capitalization, and other mechanics of writing. The Reading teachers must have two or more years of teaching experience.
These expand the endorsement for Foreign Language to K-12, rather than just secondary education. The original standards were not performance-based.
In 1991-92 school year there were 21 candidates for alternative licensure; now there are hundreds each year. These rules have performance-based standards. One question is whether alternative candidates should have to pass a content test prior to entering the program, or during the next administration, as now. Most alternative preparation programs (24 out of 31) have a waiver on the timing of the test. Another problem is that most districts allow alternative teachers to teach subjects outside of their field.
NCLB has necessitated an alignment of standards in these areas and more focus on literacy.
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