Think tank pushes higher education accountability

Inside Higher Education has the story:

The Center for American Progress has impeccable credentials for the Obama era. In the same way that the right-leaning Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute had the attention of the Bush administration, the Center for American Progress, headed by the former Clinton confidante John Podesta, is the think tank for the current White House. Time magazine called the center "Obama's idea factory" after his election last year.

Which makes the center's new white paper on higher education all the more interesting -- and, perhaps, all the more concerning to some college leaders.

The document, "Putting the Customer First in College," calls on the U.S. Education Department to create an Office of Consumer Protection in Higher Education that would (1) pressure colleges to produce significantly better data on how well they serve students, (2) develop a system for making that data available for students to use in choosing a college, and (3) direct students unhappy with their colleges' educational practices to federal, state, or accrediting officials who can help them resolve their complaints.

Read the full article here, and the full report here.

King at Prichard

CPE President Bob King addressed the Prichard Committee at yesterday's fall meeting. From my notes, here are some of his thoughts on how to move forward on postsecondary achievement.

• The Kentucky Community and Technical College System is increasingly moving toward the technical side of its combined mission. We need to get a renewed focus on getting students to stay for associate degrees.
• The comprehensive universities have not fully engaged the 1997 call for a distinct focus at each institution. That concept could use sharper implementation, perhaps with one school being the premier place for education leadership, another arts, and another on STEM education.
• The research universities need new attention to the goals for graduate study and research.
• For students taking developmental courses, we have got data on how they persist, but we’re not devoting enough high quality resources to those students. We should add a much stronger push to graduate those students and to do that in fewer years.
• Kentucky has very high performing students who are not considering Kentucky public institutions, and we need to get those students to see our schools as serious options.

Disability results?

One of my most regular readers asked, and at least one more wants to know, so I'll quickly post the answer.

When will revised Kentucky Core Content Test results for students with disabilities be available?

I still don't know. At the October 8 KBE meeting, we heard that districts would have extended time to report on students who may have been improperly counted as having disabilities (see blog-post here). There wasn't yet a schedule for announcing revised results for the state and individual schools. I haven't heard an update on that since.

Commissioner at Committee

Commissioner Terry Holliday spoke at the fall Prichard Committee meeting yesterday. From my notes on his remarks, here are some points of interest, organized by topic.

STANDARDS
November 13 is now the scheduled date for the Common Core project to release grade-by-grade draft standards. (A draft for end-of-high-school is already available here, and under validation review as described here).

February is now the likely date for Kentucky to adopt mathematics and language arts standards.

Sixteen states can adopt the Common Core by next June, but others have legal requirements that will take longer.

ASSESSMENT
The early-adopting states are looking to begin work on common assessments early in 2010, and looking to the federal $350 million as a source of support for their work. Those efforts will:

• include a major design role for teachers in participating states.
• include both accountability assessment and formative assessment elements.
• look to writing, problem-solving, and teamwork as part of what higher education consistently says students need for college success.
• aim to use technology far more effectively than past tests.

EDUCATOR EFFECTIVENESS
Student performance data must be part of teacher evaluations, but we should never measure anybody by a one-day one-shot view.

The evaluation process should be designed and used as a growth instrument, not to be used for dismissals. Action plans are the right tool when dismissal is being considered.

That approach should apply both to teacher effectiveness and principal effectiveness, and Kentucky's approach will also include superintendents and school boards. (No, school councils were not mentioned.)

TURNAROUND STRATEGIES FOR WEAKEST SCHOOLS
The Commissioner expects to propose legal changes to allow very strong action for the lowest five percent of schools. The words "charter school" are likely to be included, but not as a blanket endorsement. Instead, KDE is looking for "restrictive language" to tackle the situations that most need to turned around.

KCCT standards in perspective (retro edition)

From 1999 to 2006, we used one version of the Kentucky Core Content Tests, but in 2007, we switched to a new version. Some folks call it the change from "old CATS" to "new CATS" or from "CATS I" to "CATS II." The differences included revised core content, increased weight on multiple choice questions, a new system of scale scores, and a new definition of the scores needed to be considered proficient.

A new study (introduced here) maps each state's 2005 and 2007 proficiency standards to NAEP scale scores. That gives us a helpful, if indirect, way to think about how our standards changed in 2007.

In fourth grade reading, the study shows:

• 206 as the NAEP score identified as equivalent to our "old CATS" proficiency standard.
• 205 as the NAEP score equivalent to our "new CATS proficiency standard.

In eight grade mathematics, the study shows:

• 285 as the NAEP score equivalent to "old CATS" proficiency.
• 279 as the NAEP score equivalent to "new CATS" proficiency.

In effect, the report gives us a formal demonstration that we lowered the proficiency bar in 2007. The reading change was quite small, but the math change more substantial.

The report also shows Kentucky's 2005 standards to have been quite high in national perspective, with only 21 percent of the included states having higher standards in either subject.

KCCT standards in perspective

Kentucky's reading and mathematics Kentucky Core Content Tests have higher proficiency standards than many other states, according to a new analysis from the National Center for Education Statistics (here).

The report worked out what NAEP scale score was equivalent to each state's proficiency cut score. Using that method, the 2007 portion of the study shows that:

• Only 35 percent of states with reported data had higher fourth grade reading proficiency standards than Kentucky.
  
• Only 29 percent had higher eighth grade reading standards.
  
• Only 29 percent had higher fourth grade mathematics standards.
• Only 23 percent had higher eighth grade mathematics standards.

The report also showed that state proficiency standards are almost all lower than NAEP proficiency standards. The only exceptions are Massachusetts grade 4 math, Massachusetts grade 8 math, and South Carolina grade 8 math.

The proficiency standards set in 2007--and used in this NAEP comparison--are scheduled to stay in use through 2011. In 2012, Kentucky will launch new tests required by Senate Bill 1, including new definitions of what scores qualify as proficient.

For number-lovers, the chart below gives the numbers behind the percentages above:

KTIP for new teachers (Quality agenda item 1.5)

In my working list of key ways to build teaching quality, item 1 is getting teacher preparation focused on practice, and item 2 is getting teaching careers organized around collaborative, data-based work to raise achievement. The Kentucky Teacher Internship Program, known as KTIP, fits in between.

KTIP provides each new teacher with mentoring from a veteran teacher and an education professor, and it's important. It's a state initiative that can make a big difference. It's also a state initiative that's being undermined by funding troubles that are reducing funding for the needed mentors.

I'm going to toss out an idea for others to kick around. How would it work if the state redefined KTIP as a district cost, tasked EPSB to set the stipend schedule and approve mentor qualifications, and reallocated current KTIP funding through the SEEK formula?

Tentatively, hesitantly, I think it might ensure that KTIP is permanent and non-negotiable. I'm sure districts will have a problem with carrying any cost increases and with the years when they have an unusually high number of new hires to support, but I wonder how that minus compares to the lasting negatives of having underprepared teachers.

Where is Kentucky child poverty?

23 percent of Kentucky children live in poverty, according to the American Community Survey's most recent three-year average, combining results from 2006, 2007, and 2008. Nationwide, the figure is sharply lower at 18 percent.

However, Kentucky child poverty is distributed very unevenly. The ACS data is also broken down into thirty microdata areas of roughly similar size, including five for Jefferson, two for Fayette, one for Kenton, and the other twenty-two each combining multiple counties.

The highest child poverty rates are found in one part of Jefferson County and in a set of Appalachian counties:

• 50 percent in western Jefferson
• 41 percent in Bell, Harlan, Knox, and Whitley combined
• 38 percent in Breathitt, Knott, Lee, Leslie, Letcher, Owsley, Perry, and Wolfe combined
• 33 percent in Floyd, Johnson, Magoffin, Martin, and Pike combined
• 32 percent in Adair, Casey, Clinton, Cumberland, Green, McCreary, Pulaski, Russell, Taylor, and Wayne combined

The lowest child poverty is found in other parts of Jefferson County and in relatively suburban areas adjacent to Louisville and Cincinnati:

• 5 percent in eastern Jefferson
• 11 percent in Boone, Carroll, Gallatin, Grant, and Owen combined
• 12 percent in central/downtown Jefferson
• 12 percent in Bullitt, Henry, Oldham, Shelby, Spencer, and Trimble combined
• 14% in Kenton

Combining its five microdata areas, Jefferson has an overall child poverty rate of 22 percent, slightly below state average. Combining its two areas, Fayette county's overall rate is 21 percent.

A full chart, sorted by poverty rate is below, and the original data was downloaded today from this site.

Ugly stuff

Years ago, I heard a legislator say out loud, "Some parents are just dumb and lazy." And I thought to myself, "Anyone who said the same sentence about teachers would be out of office in a matter of months, if not hours. "

Why is there a difference?

It isn't because the sentence about parents is true and a matching sentence about teachers (principals, superintendents, school board members, KDE staff, or legislators) would be false.

It's because it's safe to insult the weakest of parents, and not safe to insult the weakest members of the other groups. The other groups stand up for their own.

Parents, though, are comfortable with insulting other parents. We do it ourselves, and we let other people do it. We think that we can bond with educators and other people with power if we join them in speaking rudely about other parents and people without power. I can't remember having made my own cracks like that, but I can certainly remember hearing others do it and letting them think I agreed.

I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't side with the strong against the weak.

Neither should Signe Wilkinson. Her recent education cartoon, siding with teachers and administrators and against parents, is out-of-keeping with her usual efforts to support a respectful and inclusive society.

Getting smarter off each other (Quality agenda item 2)

In a nutshell, the title summarizes what happens in professional learning communities: the member-teachers become more effective at their shared craft "off of" each other. When I heard the "getting smarter" phrase in a WUKY report on a new UK multidisciplinary program on muscle health, it struck me as perfect for many other collaborative endeavors.

When PLCs work on becoming "more effective," they apply a concrete understanding of what counts as effectiveness. Their discussions are focused directly on individual student learning, in a steady cycle of data-teaching-more data. They harness the power of assessment for learning, and get the potent learning benefits that come from that data-driven approach.

The PLC model offers a solution to the giant puzzle of best practices. The puzzle, of course, is that nearly all teachers have read about and talked about the research-based methods that promise the biggest improvement in student results. That happens, I think, because teachers have been asked to implement those methods in the isolation of their separate classrooms. Adding collaborative support can be the difference between trying an idea once and trying it repeatedly with increasingly robust understanding of what needs to be done--and the difference between a quick failure and a sustained success at applying a new approach.

What can be done at the state level to push toward making professional learning communities a standard feature of educators' work lives? Three levers will be especially important:

• Honest evaluations followed by strong help to improve current skills, including KDE monitoring how local board evaluation procedures are implemented.
  
• Strong scrutiny of school improvement plans submitted to KDE by schools that miss their achievement gap goals, with primary focus on the quality of professional growth activities.
• Scholastic audits and reviews that focus intensively on the quality of evaluations, professional development, and instructional leadership.

Notably, state laws and regulations already call for all those steps. While the legal language may need some refinement, the main shift needs to be in the priority given to this work. Even when the Department wants mainly friendly relations with school and district leaders, KDE must speak honestly about failings in these areas. Even when budgets are shrinking, this work must be funded.

Other blog links: read more about PLCs here, and more about assessment for learning (a core part of "balanced assessment") here.

Teaching quality: Carroll County eWalks

Carroll County is using the eWalk method to take a systematic look at teaching practices across the district. Administrators are touring classrooms with notebook computers, noting what they see in a ten-minute observation, and collating results to get a system-wide picture.

Last week, the Madison Courier reported on findings discussed at the Carroll County board meeting:

Administrators also evaluated the time used in the classrooms. They found 62 percent of classrooms surveyed were paced well and 71 percent of the classrooms had students engaged in the materials. To help gauge this information, administrators also talk to students from the classes to ask how the material is taught, the pace of information and if the work is challenging enough.

"We're not going to see everything in 10 minutes," [Assistant Superintendent Bill] Hogan said.

Evaluators found that 77 percent of the information taught was in the acquisition area, which reflects low-level learning, while 22 percent was application, 6 percent was assimilation and 1 percent was adaptation learning.

Hogan said the lower level learning will be primarily seen in the beginning of the school year as students are just learning about new subjects. Adaptation learning might also take more time, which might not be allowed due to class scheduling, he said.

"Over time, you can get a picture of the school," said Pam Williams, elementary instructional supervisor.

Students are also learning more on the recall reproduction level versus the basic application of information. Strategic thinking levels are just at 3 percent of the classes surveyed and 1 percent use extended learning. James said the schools are to focus more on critical thinking, so depth of knowledge is crucial to look at.

Guided Teaching Practice (Quality Agenda Item 1)

Thinking about the TEK task force and the Race to the Top application is making me sharpen and restate the main ideas on how to get us to greater teaching quality. This week, I'll work on sharing an agenda of specifics.

Guided practice--what the professionals often call practicum--is essential to effective teaching, but undervalued in nearly all current American preparation programs. EdWeek quoted a key researcher on the needed shift last spring:

“Right now, coursework is in the foreground, and the clinical piece is in the background,” said Barnett Berry, the president of the Hillsborough, N.C.-based Center for Teaching Quality. “What we need to do is reverse that.”

The McKinsey report on Top-Performing School Systems made the point this way:

Research shows that in the United States many teacher education programs have little impact on teacher effectiveness. Frequently, this is because the connection between what the trainee teachers do during their training, and what they are expected to be able to do once they arrive in the classroom, is not strong enough. Angus McBeath, former superintendent of Edmonton's schools in Alberta, noted, "We would never turnout a freshly minted doctor and say, 'go operate on somebody' without three or four years of practice - guided practice. But we turn out teachers, put them in classrooms, and ignore them.

And when U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan called for major change in teacher preparation programs last week, his examples of good models put guided practice front and center:

[Tennesee’s] Board of Regents has decided that all undergraduate teacher candidates will spend their senior year in year-long residencies in P-12 schools.

* * *

Every student teacher in the elementary education program at [Teachers College] completes at least two semesters of student teaching, and unlike some education schools, every student teacher works under the careful supervision of a well-qualified mentor teacher. About half of TC's graduating teachers in 2007-08 ended up in high-needs schools in New York City. Your commitment to research what really works to advance student learning is impressive.

* * *

At Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas, home of the National Teachers Hall of Fame, the Teachers College is the crown jewel of the school. Roughly 80 percent of students are supervised by full-time education faculty instead of adjuncts—and all elementary education professors are in the public schools every day. Senior year is a 100 percent field-based program in Emporia's public schools, where student teachers do everything from assisting with grading to sitting in on parent-teacher conferences.

* * *

Alverno College, a Catholic women's college in Milwaukee, also requires a rigorous field experience in the public schools and has faculty and local principals assess videotapes of student teachers. Eighty-five percent of Alverno graduates are still in the classroom five years after graduation, an extremely high retention rate.

For Kentucky, we will need this new focus on practice to meet Senate Bill 1's mandate to equip teachers to organize instruction around meeting standards, including analyzing individual student progress and making repeated adjustment to keep each one on track.

At the state policy level, people have been talking at and about and around those ideas for at least two decades.

In our education programs, I'm essentially certain that the same talking and talking and talking has been happening in lecture halls--but hearing lectures will not do the job. To apply those strategies well, future teachers need to practice them, hands-on, with feedback and mentoring and opportunity to reflect and opportunity to practice again.

I put practice-driven teacher preparation at the top of the agenda for building teaching quality.

The long view of our challenges

At the Rose symposium, Deb Dawahare shared a article that gives wonderful context both to the litigation twenty years ago and our current challenges. Reformatted only to add paragraph breaks and bullets, here's that report:

An Educational Convention is to be held in Frankfort for the purpose of securing a more efficient public school system than the present one, which was established by the legislative act of Feb. 16, 1839, with a financial foundation of $850,000, increased in 1848 to $1,225,768.42, and in 1850 to $1,326,770.01. The school tax is 22 cents on the $100, and provision is made for an optional district tax of 25 cents on the $100 in ordinary districts and 30 cents in graded school districts. It is proposed to make the machinery of common education more effective and diffusive.

The defects of the present system are, in part, as follows:

• The Sheriffs are too tardy in the collection of the school tax;
• The teachers are poorly paid, and many of them are poorly qualified;
• The law does not absolutely require a common school to be taught during five months in the year in any district;
• The people are woefully indifferent in two-thirds of the counties of the State to the importance of common schools;
• There is a painful lack of normal school instruction;
• The School Commissioners are, in a majority of cases, not qualified to hold these important positions;
• The State per capita is always an uncertain and variable quantity;
• The school-houses are largely in a poor condition;
• There are many districts without any kind of school-houses;
• Most of the school districts are too large and the school-houses inaccessible to many children, especially in the mountain districts;
• The text-books are changed too often and cost too much;
• The schools do not get all the revenue to which they are legitimately entitled, as from the tax on railroads and turnpikes now diverted;
• No effort has been made to secure new sources of revenue.

The Frankfort convention must grapple with these defects. The foundation of the school system have been laid 45 years; the building has been slowly rising. The bad bricks must come out the walls; the whole people of Kentucky must be put to work on those walls with a will.

That ran in the New York Times on March 30, 1883, having appeared earlier in the Courier-Journal, and the similarities to our current predicament do indeed loom larger than than the differences.

Leadership in a nutshell

"Judge Combs made you want to do things, and made you not scared of doing things.”

That one line is my favorite bit of Debra Dawahare's account of working on the Rose case at Wednesday night's symposium. It may be the best summary of leadership in action I've heard.

(Along with Bert Combs--the former judge and governor of Kentucky--and Ted Lavitt, Deb Dawahare represented the plaintiffs in the litigation. Folks from the University of Kentucky Law School filmed the whole event, and I hope they'll share the video electronically, so I won't try to retell her story.)

What did the Governor just say about SEEK?

At the Rose symposium, Governor Beshear defined his education funding goal as “keeping our hands off of [the SEEK formula] for two more years.” As with similar remarks last spring (blogged here), I think his words were precise.

His goal is to maintain the current formula itself, so that districts continue to be guaranteed a base level of funding per pupil plus add-on amounts for pupils in some categories of added need.

The guarantee, though, isn’t the amount the state pays. The state pays the amount not raised by the 30¢ local property tax (or the equivalent amount raised by other property taxes.

In all years since SEEK began, that local amount has grown, and thus far the Great Recession has not changed that trend. If the total guarantee is the same, and the local contribution is larger, that means the state contribution can be smaller in the coming biennium.

I think the Governor is planning on that and being honest about it.

Most audiences would not want him to take a detour to explain how the “SEEK formula” is different from the “state budget amount for SEEK funding.” For my blog audience, though, I think it’s worthwhile to be careful about following the nuances and limits of his funding commitment.

Governor Beshear at the Rose Symposium

Governor Steve Beshear was at the Brown Hotel Wednesday night, addressing a symposium on the twentieth anniversary of Rose v. Council for Better Education. The 1989 Rose decision declared Kentucky's public school system to be in violation of the constitutional provision requiring "an efficient system of common schools," and directed the legislature to rebuild the system from the ground up. From the notes I took during his speech, here are a few key points.

The Governor described Rose as “much bigger than a legal case” and as important because “twenty years ago, Kentucky really took a stand against failure…. Twenty years ago Kentucky realized it wasn’t prepared for the competitive world we were facing.”

Naturally, he then turned to his new initiative to “rekindle that enthusiasm,” and to remarks quite similar to others he gave this week about how that will work, both in relation to new competitive challenges and in relation to other recent developments like Senate Bill 1 and race to the top. I couldn’t do that description justice, but I will highlight two things.

First, the Governor called for “assessment that measures what employers value,” meaning capacities like problem-solving, teamwork, and effective application of knowledge. He’s right that those capacities are important and undervalued in current assessments. Still, remembering our earlier efforts with performance events, I’m not sure there’s any form of standardized activity—the sort of thing we’d count as a reliable assessment—that can really judge that sort of work. In short, I see an important puzzle with no quick-to-hand solutions. To me, some version of a school inspection system for sound instruction seems more likely to succeed than an attempt to measure student results on those issues directly.

Second, the Governor point out that “added funding” is not on his list of issues for study, saying both that “everyone knows we need to invest more" and we "don't need a task force" to figure that out. Further, "this current recession will not allow that right now. “ The governor's goal will be more modest: continuing to resist cuts to the SEEK formula for two more years, including 2012 when the stimulus money will all be gone. After that, when revenue should rebound to the 2008 level, he wants the TEK task force to have identified priorities for increased education spending and built political commitment to support those increases.

Students who count for SEEK

Here's a way to see the growth in students and student needs recognized by the SEEK formula:

In the graph, the "add-on equivalents" number is one way to get a quick sense of how the "regular" needs generated by attending students compare to the extra needs of students with low incomes, learning disabilities, and other challenges. Think of it as saying that in 2009, responding to those added challenges was a responsibility roughly as large as serving 158 thousand more students. (For number-lovers, I calculated the "equivalents" by dividing the add-on funding total each year by the per-pupil guarantee amount.)

From 2002 to 2009, Kentucky schools added roughly 21,000 students in average daily attendance for purposes of the basic portion of the SEEK guarantee. In the same period, our schools added the equivalent of 25,000 students for the SEEK add-ons for needs based on income, language, or disability challenges.

The graph below give a further sense of where the add-on growth occurred. The limited English add-on did not begin until 2006.

Notes: the funding figures used for this analysis come from the KDE website here. All counts shown above are based on dividing statewide totals by that year's base guarantee amount per pupil. The same results could be calculated by taking the original student counts and multiplying by the SEEK weight assigned to that group. All years shown are fiscal years.

Governor's task force

Original post:

More when I find the press release and media reports--but Facebook is definitely a hot source for news.

Update with the text of the press release:

Governor Beshear launches new education initiative

TEK task force will be catalyst to reinvigorate public support for K-12 education

LEXINGTON, Ky. – In a move to re-energize the support of public schools that nearly 20 years ago sparked Kentucky to implement the nation’s most comprehensive school reform, Gov. Steve Beshear today launched his new education initiative, Transforming Education in Kentucky (TEK). The goal is to create a unified vision of what schools in the Commonwealth need to offer in order to better serve students today and tomorrow.
“Our world has changed dramatically since the reforms of 1990,” said Gov. Beshear. “We must now turn our focus to the future and again to our schools to ensure that our strategies and programs are designed to meet the challenges of the 21st century.”
To that end, Gov. Beshear appointed the TEK Task Force to help develop new strategies while reinvigorating public and business support for K-12 education in the Commonwealth.
The members of the task force include education advocates, teachers, superintendents, legislators, business leaders and others who have been handpicked for their commitment to education and to Kentucky.
The group will examine efforts currently underway in the state, such as the Common Core Standards Initiative, Graduate Kentucky, the Gates Foundation/SREB college and career readiness initiative, the Race to the Top competition and the Governor’s Task Force on Early Childhood Development and Education. Against this backdrop of renewed energy and activity, the panel will recommend ways to channel all of these efforts into an integrated and comprehensive system of education in Kentucky.
In addition, the task force will explore career and technical education, expanded use of technology for learning, increased opportunities for students to earn college credit in high school and other issues that affect student success.
The goal is to formulate recommendations by the end of 2010, for consideration during the 2011 legislative session.
In an effort to build awareness of the initiative and to receive input from citizens statewide, Gov. Beshear is visiting 10 cities across the state for a series of press conferences and town hall forums. The Governor and the TEK Task Force will use this input as guidance for the work of Transforming Education in Kentucky.
“This effort seeks to build off the progress of the last 20 years in order to lay the foundation for the 20 years ahead,” said Gov. Beshear. “Today, I’m calling on our state and our people to recommit ourselves to ensuring the future of our children.”
Gov. Beshear and Kentucky Department of Education Commissioner Terry Holliday will serve as co-chairs of the task force.
Other members of the task force include:

• Sen. Tim Shaughnessy, D-19th District
• Rep. Leslie Combs, D-94th District;
• Rep. Jeffrey Hoover, R-83rd District;
• Rep. Carl Rollins, D-56th District;
• Helen Mountjoy, secretary, Education and Workforce Development Cabinet
• David Adkisson, president, Kentucky Chamber of Commerce;
• Sheldon Berman, superintendent, Jefferson County;
• Mary Ann Blankenship, executive director, Kentucky Education Association;
• Karen Cash, classroom teacher, Louisville;
• Margaret Cleveland, school board member, Woodford County;
• Sam Corbett, chair, Prichard Committee;
• Ben Cundiff, Cundiff Farms, Cadiz;
• Sharon Darling, president, National Center for Family Literacy;
• Betty Griffin, The Griffin Group, Frankfort;
• Tim Hanner, superintendent, Kenton County;
• Trichel House, classroom teacher, Russell;
• Nanette Johnson, superintendent, Hardin County;
• Eleanor Jordan, executive director, Kentucky Commission on Women;
• Robert King, president, Council on Postsecondary Education;
• Nana Lampton, American Life & Accident Insurance Company of Kentucky, Louisville;
• William Lovell, school board member, McLean County;
• Brent McKim, president, Jefferson County Teachers’ Association;
• Bob Porter, mayor, City of Paintsville;
• Johnna Reeder, Duke Energy, Covington;
• Stu Silberman, superintendent, Fayette County;
• Stephen Trimble, superintendent, Johnson County; and
• Diane Whalen, mayor, City of Florence.

*Gov. Beshear has asked Senate President David Williams to recommend two additional members from the State Senate and they will be added to the task force once they have been named.

Fund balances (new concept enters budget debate)

Legislators are considering using local district fund balances as part of a state budget solution for 2011-12 (Courier-Journal report here), making it important to understand the fund balance concept.

In a nutshell, a district's fund balance is calculated by adding up all the money a district has available and then subtracting all the amounts it owes to employees, vendors, lenders, and others. It's "a 'snapshot' of the net amount that remains between assets and liabilities at any given point in time," according to Daviess County superintendent Tom Shelton's new white paper "Budget Contingencies and Fund Balances," available here.

Districts maintain a fund balance for multiple reasons:

• Contingency reserves are one part of the story. Districts must set aside at least at the legally required level of two percent of budget expenses. They are advised to go beyond that and keep the contingency amount at the five percent level. That money is meant to be used for expenses that could not be planned.
• Cash flow is an issues for any enterprise: money you know will flow in next month doesn't let you write checks this month. In school districts, there's a predictable annual challenge while waiting for the current year's property taxes to come in. Districts meet the challenge by carefully keeping a strong fund balance through the spring and then using that money to meet summer and fall payroll before the tax revenue arrives at year's end.
• Saving for other projects can be an additional reason to maintain a fund balance, including the costs of equipping a new school or launching an additional service for students.

Are Jefferson disaggregated results improving?

After my post two days ago on Jefferson County 2009 results for low-income children, I got an e-mail raising the issue of trends. If Jefferson group results are low, are they at least improving? The shortest answer is: mostly no.

For this post, I'm looking at NCLB groups: reduced lunch students, students with limited English, and for white, black, Hispanic, and Asian students. I'll add students with disabilities when those numbers are available.

For reading and mathematics, NCLB reports show us combined results for all grades, and those reports show that in terms of students proficient and above, from 2007 to 2009:

• In reading, all 6 groups had declining results.
• In mathematics, 5 groups had improving results and one (limited English) had a decline.
  

For science, social studies and mathematics, combined results for all grades are not available. Instead, for six groups and three levels of school, we have eighteen results to look at. From 2007 to 2009:

• In science, 11 results declined and 7 improved.
• In social studies, 12 results declined and 6 improved.
• In writing, 11 results declined and 7 improved.

Below, I've organized the reading and math results in graphs, and switched to a table showing changes in science, social studies, and writing results.