Some optimism (and caution) on special education funding

Chris Tessone / February 23, 2012

Chris Cerf & Co. deserve praise for trying something new in a touchy, costly program area.

New Jersey is trying something new, and promising, to improve the quality of special education in the state. Education commissioner Chris Cerf recently awarded $1M in grants to districts that had the highest absolute performance and highest growth for their special ed students.

The Garden State's implementation of performance-based funding has serious strong points. In a program area that focuses largely on inputs (i.e., the level of funding and staff dedicated to special ed students), these grants shift the spotlight to quality. The initiative also shows how much good a robust data system can do.

The long-term incentives performance-based funding could provide in this area are a little more worrying, however. A variety of children are lumped under the "special education" umbrella, and measuring performance and growth looks very different in each locale depending on the mix of conditions a district's students face. Will school systems with a high proportion of severely disabled students be left behind, even if they're achieving modest gains in a cost-effective way? What about the dangers of over-identifying high-achieving (or high-growth-potential) students to improve the numbers?

The state-level team in New Jersey deserves praise for trying something new in a touchy, costly program area. Stressing quality over increased inputs in

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Some optimism (and caution) on special education funding

Utah should go big

Chris Tessone / February 16, 2012

The Beehive State is setting a great example with creative approaches to stretching the school dollar. Photo by Brian Swan.

The Utah legislature is considering a big move toward student-based state funding of secondary education, allowing students to apply public dollars not only to a variety of public secondary options, but to college courses as well.

Students could choose to spend that money to attend public schools, including charter schools; take public school online classes; and/or pay for courses offered by public and certain private, nonprofit Utah colleges. School districts and other providers would determine how much to charge for classes and that amount would be deducted from student accounts. Students could use any money left in their accounts after high school to continue their educations.

Providing secondary education services is becoming an increasingly complex proposition, as students add community college courses to their workload, explore virtual education options for foreign languages and advanced math and science content, and often try to take advantage of work or vocational ed opportunities.

The bill is currently in committee, and lawmakers may scale the program back to a pilot. Utah has quietly done some very bold things to stretch the education dollar in recent years. Sen. Dan Liljenquist's 2010 pension reform

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Utah should go big

Attention principals: use your flexibility

Chris Tessone / February 14, 2012

The Shanker Institute's Matt Di Carlo had a great post last week breaking down a recent study by economist Brian Jacob on how principals fire (or don't fire) teachers in Chicago Public Schools. The news that firings correlate with lower effectiveness is nice to hear. But the headline is that, given more flexibility, principals still mostly don't fire anybody:

Given more flexibility, principals still mostly don't fire anybody.

Jacob found that, despite the new policy allowing principals to dismiss probationary teachers at will, a rather high proportion of them didn’t do so. During each year between 2004-05 and 2006-07, principals in around 30-40 percent of Chicago schools chose not to dismiss a single probationary teacher. Further, this phenomenon was not at all limited to “high-performing” and/or low-poverty schools, where one might expect to find a stable, well-trained teaching force. For instance, in 2005, 35 percent of the “lowest-performing” schools (the bottom 25 percent) chose not to dismiss any probationary teachers, as compared with 54 percent of the school with the highest absolute achievement levels (the proportions were similar when school performance was measured in terms of value-added).

In other words, when principals were given free rein to fire for any reason, with virtually no documentation or effort, a significant proportion chose not to use this power even once.

This is quite a challenge to those who believe union obstructionism or onerous due process are the primary obstacles to moving poor teachers out of the profession. Those are worthwhile things to fight, where they are truly an impediment to improving the work force, but

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Attention principals: use your flexibility

Money can't buy happiness...or a good education

Chris Tessone / February 9, 2012

More money means better outcomes for kids: It's an argument heard over and over in state capitals during budget season and in local newspapers leading up to votes on tax levies. At a recent event on Capitol Hill, Thomas Gais, the director of the Rockefeller Institute of Government, made a similar case, claiming that more state education funding reliably leads to better well-being for children. If only it were actually that easy to improve America's schools!

The main problem with this argument is that we as a country tend to invest the most in kids who are already on track to do well—middle-class and wealthy kids, mostly white, largely found in the suburbs. Many are educated in the "public private" schools we profiled a couple of years ago. I believe that these kids have high "well-being," whatever that term means to the Rockefeller Institute, but it's hard to argue that spending state money on these kids' educations got them to where they are.

America's high-spending, high-poverty districts are the exceptions that prove this rule. Washington, D.C., New Jersey's Abbott districts, and a few others spend breathtaking amounts of money per student, much more than affluent nearby suburbs.

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Money can't buy happiness...or a good education