Give grace

Bloodwort in bloom

In the days and weeks ahead, we expect to see the number of cases, the number of deaths, and the number of affected countries climb even higher.
WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock and we are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction.
We have therefore made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic.
Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. It is a word that, if misused, can cause unreasonable fear, or unjustified acceptance that the fight is over, leading to unnecessary suffering and death.
Describing the situation as a pandemic does not change WHO’s assessment of the threat posed by this virus. It doesn’t change what WHO is doing, and it doesn’t change what countries should do. 

World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at the COVID-19 media briefing on March 11

Content warning: coronavirus pandemic, death, trauma

School districts still suffering from economic downturn (with a Worcester connection)

This post from Five-Thirty-Eight just came to my attention, and it's relevant reading for anyone thinking about school funding.

Once the recession ended, however, so did the stimulus — long before state and local governments were ready to pick up the slack. Federal per-student spending fell more than 20 percent from 2010 to 2012, and it has continued to fall. State and local funding per student were essentially flat in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available.

They go on to point out that the problem is particularly acute for urban districts, which get more federal dollars, and thus are more subject to swings in federal dollars.

I've been doing some thinking what effect Massachusetts' foundation formula has on something like this, and, so far as I can see, it's much the same: if the local community can or is able to step in to take up the missing piece, then the district can see the funding remain stable or keep pace. If not, then, while the foundation formula is going to keep us from the worst of the bumps, districts are still at the mercy of larger entities.

This ties directly in, as well, to what our major challenge in Worcester was this year: the inflation factor. For the FY15 budget, the inflation factor is 0.86%. This is well below the current U.S. inflation rate (ending May 2014) of 2.1%; it's also well below the annual cost increases for the Worcester Public Schools, of about 3%. And this is particularly a problem, because the foundation budget inflation factor's actual name is "the Implicit Price Deflators for Gross Domestic Product, State and Local Government Purchases"* That means that it's based on how much state and local governments spend: local and state governments spend more, the inflation factor goes up; local and state governments spend less, the inflation factor goes down. If we have less to spend, the inflation factor goes down, and then we have even less to spend, and the inflation factor goes down, and...Note that it doesn't necessarily reflect actual cost increases, which it might if it were tied to other things, like the inflation rate. It does put us in a vicious cycle, though, unless we rework the formula, step it up locally, or both.
Preferably both.



*Nope, not making that up. See page 68 of the FY15 Worcester Public Schools budget. 

"Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story"*

The current batch of education debates is, purportedly, between those who think you can fix everything about a kid's life and future by "fixing" schools, and those who think that issues surrounding schools have an enormous impact on what goes on inside the schools, and thus those issues must be dealt with as well.
(Note: this is of course a vast over-simplification of both points.)
The "poverty matters" crowd got a bit of a boost this week when the National Bureau of Economic Research published a report to:

examine the effects of state-level job losses on fourth- and eighth-grade test scores, using federal Mass Layoff Statistics and 1996-2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress data. Results indicate that job losses decrease scores. Effects are larger for eighth than fourth graders and for math than reading assessments, and are robust to specification checks. Job losses to 1% of a state’s working-age population lead to a .076 standard deviation decrease in the state’s eighth-grade math scores. This result is an order of magnitude larger than those found in previous studies that have compared students whose parents lose employment to otherwise similar students, suggesting that downturns affect all students, not just students who experience parental job loss. Our findings have important implications for accountability schemes: we calculate that a state experiencing one-year job losses to 2% of its workers (a magnitude observed in seven states) likely sees a 16% increase in the share of its schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress under NCLB.

Decent coverage here.
Two important points:

1. One hopes that this will lower some of the shrillness of rhetoric of those who claim others want to "hold off on fixing schools" until...whenever. It would be helpful if we could acknowledge that a community being under economic duress does change how the community's children do in school.
2. Might perhaps this change how we're dealing with NCLB?

*as oft cited by my dad's former boss, Bob Berkowitz