Worcester School Committee agenda for February 3

You may have heard there's a Worcester School Committee meeting this Thursday!

The School Committee received this at 6 pm Friday evening

At 6 o'clock this evening, the Worcester School Committee received via email from the Superintendent:

• a letter to the Commissioner of Education
• a two page chart of training in testing protocols and procedures

This is not much more than what we already had, actually. It more or less sends back, with dates, titles, and locations, what the Commissioner told the Superintendent she had to do.
Still waiting for a district investigation...

Remember this name: UPDATED WITH FULL LIST

House Chair appointments have just come out, and Representative Alice Hanlon Peisch of Wellesely has been appointed House Chair of the Education committee.
Good news: she served on a School Committee!
(bonus news for those of us who care: though she's from Wellesley, she went to Smith!)
I've seen no word yet on Senate; it's a joint committee.

UPDATED at 3:20pm: Here's the full list

Chairpersons     Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz (D) Boston

                                Representative Alice Peisch (D) Wellesley

Time to start paying attention to value-added assessment

(if you weren't already)
One of the conditions to accepting money from the Race to the Top competition is a shift to evaluating teachers in some part on so-called "value-added assessment." This boils down to "how much did a kid's test scores go up while the student had that teacher?"
Sounds pretty straightforward, right?
It is until you actually see how it works out. The Gates Foundation last month released a study touting how results from two tests corralated with one another (suggesting they worked), but a review of that study argues that it's not nearly so neat as this might suggest. The Answer Sheet has a good summary of all of this, but it boils down to this:

“In other words...teacher evaluations based on observed state test outcomes are only slightly better than coin tosses at identifying teachers whose students perform unusually well or badly on assessments of conceptual understanding. This result, underplayed in the MET report, reinforces a number of serious concerns that have been raised about the use of VAMs for teacher evaluations.”

I'd like something a bit more effective than a coin toss deciding if my children's teachers are doing a good job.

Ch. 70 aid numbers

The state has posted the Ch.70 aid numbers for FY12. Taking a quick look at Worcester:

The state is preliminarily putting Worcester's aid at $201,135,279 for FY12.

(That's with this year's 1.78% inflation factor, plus Worcester's increased enrollment. If you're interested, it's the complete formula worksheet that has all the numbers. Worcester is district 348.)

Last year, Worcester received $187,838,166 in Ch. 70. However, the state also used $3.7 million in federal funds to keep Worcester at foundation. That brings the number up to $191 million, plus the state also is tacking education jobs funds on top of that, bringing it up to $193.4 million (remember that there's a bit less than a million dollars Worcester still has in education jobs funds for use in FY12).
The state is thus calculating Worcester's aid at $7.7 million more than last year. I suspect our budget (once we get there with real numbers) will spell this out a bit differently, as our finance office breaks it down more.

Duncan and the grants, with a note for Worcester

If you're interested in where ed policy is headed nationally in the US, you may wish to give a quick read to the transcript of this conference call that Secretary Duncan had with what the USED refers to as "education funders" (call me a traditionalist; I think of those as "taxpayers"), by which they mean major grant funders.
For example, Duncan has this to say about the Denver conference:

So what we’re actually going to do is do a case study and all of these they’ll be presenting throughout the weekend those that we think have done a great job. And all of this stuff we’re going to be absolutely open and transparent, will be on our Web site.
We’re going to do a case study on each of these districts and not just on the existing contract but on the journey to get to that point.

And--heads up, Worcester! This means you!--this:

And we are also going to track progress of all of the attending districts

aka: the federal government is going to be WATCHING how your union and administration do at "progressing" (by their lights) on your negotiations.

Governor's proposed FY12: this isn't the money you're looking for

Governor Patrick announced his FY12 budget proposal today, including that increase for education he's spoken of earlier.
Don't get too excited, though, as the money is less than the districts had avaliable last year. As spelled out by the always-excellent Mass Budget and Policy Center:

•House 1 proposes to fund Chapter 70 education aid to local and regional school districts at $3.99 billion, a decrease of $81.8 million from current FY 2011 funding levels (which include $221 million in federal recovery money that was available to districts in FY 2011). Not counting this federal money, state funding for Chapter 70 was $3.85 billion in FY 2011. Therefore, while the House 1 proposal is $81 million below the total amount available in FY 2011, it is $140 million above the state’s FY 2011 appropriation, narrowly defined, which is how the House 1 budget describes this proposal.

How to play with numbers, folks!
There's some comparable news on the circuit breaker:

•House 1 proposes to fund the Special Education Circuit Breaker program at $213 million, an $80 million increase from the current FY 2011 budget. This proposal essentially restores the circuit breaker program to the FY 2009 funding level of $215.5 million. While the circuit breaker was reduced during FY 2010 and FY 2011, a comparable amount of additional one-time federal recovery money was available during these years through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which also funds special education services

There are some increases proposed (important to keep that word in mind at this time of year!) for the school breakfast program, for MCAS student support, and for underperforming schools.


And it's definitely lousy news on local aid.