CAPSO Midweek E-Mailer

The California Department of Education has released an updated letter addressing public school districts' obligation to provide private school officials with timely and meaningful consultation regarding opportunities for participation in federal education programs funded by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The letter appears on State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson's letterhead, and bears the signature of Deborah V. H. Sigman, a Deputy Superintendent at the CDE. Hard copies of the document have been mailed to contacts at all California public school districts, and electronic copies of the document are to be sent via e-mail to all nonprofit private schools that filed an affidavit for the current school year. A PDF copy of the letter can also be accessed, here.

While it is the legal obligation of the public school district in which a private school is located to initiate "timely and meaningful consultation" with private school officials, private school leaders may wish to take the initiative to ensure the timeliness of the process. If available funding for the coming year is to be designated in a planful manner, consultation should be taking place now. If your school has not yet been contacted by a representative of its local public school district, the district's federally funded programs director should be contacted, and the CDE letter should be referenced. As the document states:

"For consultation to be meaningful, and private nonprofit school participation to be equitable, private school officials need timely, clear information about fiscal resources and services. To allow for timely private nonprofit school needs assessment and program design, it is recommended that consultation begin prior to the new school year."

The letter also explicitly addresses the following matter:

"Private nonprofit school participation requirements cannot be satisfied simply by inviting private schools to participate in programs and/or activities designed for public school students, teachers, or other education personnel."

If, for example, a district refuses to provide - or contract a third-party provider of service to furnish - professional development programs and/or activities that are designed to meet the particular needs of a private school, the CDE letter should immediately be cited.

The new CDE letter also contains links to several additional documents that can be useful to private school officials as they engage in the process of consultation with their public school district colleagues. The U.S. Department of Education's Non-Regulatory Guidance for Title IX, Part E, Uniform Provisions, Subpart I - Private Schools can be found, here. The CDE's Guidance Document for private school participation in ESEA can be found, here.

It's the Law: Tdap Vaccinations

A statewide law passed last year (AB 354) requires all students entering grades 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 to receive a pertussis booster vaccination prior to school entry in the 2011 - 2012 school year. The required vaccine is called Tdap, an acronym for tetanus, diphtheria, and acellular pertussis. After the coming school year, the Tdap booster will only be required for students entering the 7th grade.

Private schools offering instruction in the relevant grades must require students to furnish proof of vaccination as a condition for admission prior to the commencement of classes in August or September. This one-page flyer lists acceptable forms of vaccine documentation, which must include the following information:

Student's Name
Date of Birth
Vaccine Type
Date of Vaccination
Name of Provider or Clinic

An online FAQ resource specific to the Tdap immunization requirements can be found, here. A suggested checklist for schools can be accessed, here. Sample letters to parents (in English and Spanish) can be viewed/downloaded, on this webpage. Finally, a one-hour webinar addressing the implementation of the new law can be viewed, here.

If your school hasn't already done so, the time to inform your parent body and staff about the new vaccination requirements is now.

Grading Schools of Education

Teachers aren't the only ones subject to increasing public demands to provide evidence of the quality and effectiveness of their work. An ambitious project co-directed by the National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News & World Report is now endeavoring to evaluate all 1,400 schools of education in the United States. The results will be published in the magazine, not in the form of rankings, as is the publication's tradition, but by the assignment of letter grades ranging from "A" to "F."

The evaluations will rely, largely, on externally conducted reviews of teacher training course syllabi. The NCTQ has developed a 20-page document establishing the standards against which teacher preparation programs are to be judged. The document's final two standards are of particular interest:

"Standard 16: Selectivity. The program selects candidates of high academic caliber using a screen that enables comparison of their academic achievement to that of college-attending peers.

"Standard 17: Outcomes. The institution collects data related to its graduates' performance in the classroom."

As might be anticipated, the project has drawn its share of criticism. Following the dissemination of an invitation to participate sent by the NCTQ to school of education deans, two groups voiced opposition in the form of letters sent to U.S. News & World Report. The letter provided by one group, which includes the deans of the schools of education at UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Stanford University, raised the following concern:

"...the materials for the new rating refer often to outcomes: the language for each of the standards suggests a concern with what knowledge and abilities students leave their programs with (for example, that 'teacher candidates gain a thorough overview of student assessments' - Standard 3, or that candidates are 'consistently prepare[d]...in the essential components of effective reading instruction' - Standard 6). However, the methodology described does not in any way allow for such judgments about outcomes to be made. Instead, the rating will take into account only what programs intend to do."

The other group consisted of 35 deans of schools affiliated with the Association of American Universities, and included the deans of the schools of education at UC Davis, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC San Diego, and UC Santa Barbara, as well as the deans of Teachers College Columbia University, and Harvard's Graduate School of Education.

Resistance to voluntary participation in the project has increased. As this Teacher Beat blog post indicates, a number of states have now declined to participate. Just last week, Kentucky and New York joined Georgia and Wisconsin on the "decline to participate" list. Public university officials in three other states - among them, California - have sent letters to U.S. News requesting changes to the procedures governing the project, but have stopped short of indicating refusal to participate.

At present, it appears that the sponsoring organizations are prepared to obtain data from institutions located in states that have refused to voluntarily participate, through open-records information requests. It's a foregone conclusion that the ultimate grading of schools of education generated by the project will lead to much contentiousness and - hopefully - some constructive contributions to a complex endeavor.

Stay tuned!

Quick Takes

Winners & Losers in the 2011 Budget

Now that President Obama has put his signature to a compromise budget that provides funding for the remainder of the current fiscal year, how did various federal education programs fare? Education Week's Politics K-12 blog provides a rundown, here. Among the "winners," were the Race to the Top Fund, which will receive an infusion of $700 million in "new" money to extend the state-level competitive grants program. Head Start funding was increased by $340 million, and the Investing in Innovation Fund - another competitive grants program that has all but shut-out private school participation - will receive $150 million. Notable among the "losers" is Title II, Part D of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which had provided funding supporting the integration of technology. With a cut of $100 million, that program has now effectively been terminated. The most heavily funded of all federal education programs, Title I of ESEA, held its ground with level funding to the tune of $14.5 billion. The same is true of funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which is slated to receive $11.5 billion.

Indiana Senate Passes School Voucher Bill

Last Thursday, the Indiana Senate passed a school voucher bill designed to provide thousands of children from low- and middle-income families with an expanded range of educational options over the course of the next three years. According to proponents of the legislation, as many as 15,000 students could benefit from the program by its second year of operation. HB 1003, which is supported by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, State Education Superintendent Tony Bennett, House Speaker Brian Bosma, and Senate President Pro Tempore David Long, was passed out of the Hoosier State's upper chamber by a vote of 28-22. According to the JournalReview Online, "Under the voucher program, a family of four with an annual income of $40,000 would be allowed to take 90 percent of the state aid per child that would go to a public school and instead put the funds toward tuition at a private school." Some critics of the measure complained that it will divert funding from public schools, while others argued that the legislation, which restricts the granting of vouchers to first-year private school students, doesn't go far enough.

An Invitation from Professor Baker

Bruce D. Baker is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He maintains an engaging blog titled School Finance 101, which features a number of articles relating to private school costs. In 2009, he authored a provocative paper titled, "Private Schooling in the U.S.: Expenditures, Supply, and Policy Implications," in which he rather ingeniously employs financial data gleaned from IRS Form 990 to draw inferences regarding the relative costs of private and public education.
Professor Baker has recently extended an invitation to "headmasters, deans and other administrators and board members at leading private independent schools around the country," to respond to the following two questions:

"What is your perspective on the importance of class size, either from the perspective of "effectiveness" (on student outcomes) or marketing? Do you feel that class size is important? Why? What drives your decisions about class size in your school? Feel free to stray outside these narrow questions.

"What are your thoughts on the recruitment, selection, retention, evaluation and compensation of teachers? (yeah... that's a lot, but feel free to focus on one or two). What is your ideal approach to teacher evaluation? What is the current approach in your school, and what are the strengths/weaknesses? Have you changed that approach over time? Who are the key players in the evaluation process and what are their roles? How are evaluations used (dismissal?). How is compensation structured? Is it performance based and if so, by what types of measures? Feel free to elaborate on other related issues not listed here."

Responses can be e-mailed, here. Hoping to get the ball rolling, I responded to his invitation by sharing some personal thoughts about class size.

Michael Winerip's Left-Handed Compliment

Michael Winerip is a talented man. In addition to being the author of a successful children's book series, Mr. Winerip is a Pulitzer Prize winning education writer for the New York Times. Among his assignments for "The Gray Lady," he has served as the paper's national education writer, and currently writes an op-ed column titled "On Education." As journalistic accomplishments go, Mr. Winerip is top shelf. When a writer of such renown pens a column with the words 'Private Education' in its title, this reader pays heed. The full title of the article is "In Public School Efforts, a Common Background: Private Education." It can be read, here.

The article opens with the following declaration: "Ten years ago, the No Child Left Behind bill was passed by the House of Representatives, 384 to 45, marking the first step toward a major transformation of public education in America." Those familiar with the author's estimation of the federal education law to which he makes reference know that while the first clause of the opening sentence is a statement of fact, the second serves as a prelude to sarcasm in the offing. It comes quickly and deftly: "For the first time, human bias was removed from student assessment and replaced with scientific accountability systems. No longer did teachers' subjective opinions of children distort things. Scores on standardized tests became the gold standard. No longer did a person with a clipboard have to spend days observing a school to determine whether it was any good. Because of the law, it is now possible for an assistant secretary of education to be sitting in his Washington office and, by simply studying a spreadsheet for a few minutes, know exactly how a school in Juneau is performing."

Mr. Winerip's wry criticism falls upon Republicans and Democrats, alike. He observes that when it comes to education policy, "the consensus is that there is little difference between President Obama and former President George W. Bush." He observes that it is not easy to tell the difference between Mr. Bush's Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, and Mr. Obama's Secretary, Arnie Duncan. Indeed, as Mr. Winerip notes: "Those who call themselves reformers are a diverse group, men and women of every political stripe and of every race and ethnicity."

Having teed it up, perfectly, he now takes his swing: "But there is one thing that characterizes a surprisingly large number of the people who are transforming public schools: they attended private schools."

And there you have it. If there's one thing those intent upon destroying American public education share in common - and make no mistake, this is what Mr. Winerip has in mind - it is that they are products of private schools.

There is much that I am tempted to write in response to such regrettable borderline bigotry. But Eduwonk's Andrew Rotherham has already expressed the essence of what bears repeating with the following: "The always constructive Michael Winerip notes that some proponents of education reform went to private school. Unmentioned? Many others didn't. You could, of course, go through the same exercise for critics of reform (and for journalists). That's why the article is a pointless exercise in rhetoric and divisiveness that's beneath the New York Times."

Had Mr. Winerip but considered the backgrounds of the leading education reformers in his own city, as did this New York Post editorial, he would have noted that Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, and current Chancellor Dennis Walcott are all products of public schools.

On The Quick & The ED blog, the Education Sector's staff - who proclaim themselves to be education reformers - conducted a survey to see where each attended high school. Looks like a clean sweep for public schools to me. And Flypaper conducted a poll to see where readers who regard themselves as education reformers attended high school.

Lest I sully myself by adducing further evidence to debunk a proposition that's outrageous on its face, I will conclude by suggesting that Mr. Winerip may wish to resurrect a bill that was introduced in the California legislature in 2001. SB 715, authored by then State Senator Ray Haynes, offered the following modest proposal:

"Notwithstanding any other provision of law, any certificated employee who is employed by a public school shall enroll his or her children who are of compulsory school attendance age in a public school in the school district where the teacher is employed, in the nearest public school district to the employee's employing district that offers instruction for the appropriate grade level, or in the public school district of the pupil's place of residency."

In plain English, the bill would have required all public school teachers to enroll their own children in public schools. The bill never made it out of committee. Its chief opponent: the California Teachers Association.

I guess their leaders must have attended private schools.

Ron Reynolds

Publication Note

The next edition of the CAPSO Midweek E-Mailer will be published May 11, 2011.