federal funding waiver doesn't live up to the hype

 I entirely understand how it is that people might have missed this, but if you do pay attention to school funding, you may have caught U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon touting "returning education to the states" through approval of a waiver for Iowa for combining federal funding, in essence, block granting their funding. As the Department's release says: 

Today, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) approved Iowa’s Returning Education to the States Waiver, empowering state education officials to have more discretion over their federal education dollars. Iowa is the first state to apply for and receive such a waiver, which will allow state leaders to focus federal dollars on work that best improves the achievement of Iowa students.

Iowa’s waiver permits the state education agency to combine four federal funding streams into one. Iowa leaders seek to focus more federal resources on improving student achievement rather than federal compliance. This waiver’s flexibility will reduce compliance costs, allowing nearly $8 million to be redirected from bureaucratic red tape to the classroom over four years. State education leaders will use the redirected funds and the greater flexibility they afford to expand support for evidence-based literacy training, strengthening their teacher pipeline, and narrowing achievement gaps.

If you know anything of how much federal funding flows to states, you may have had that *record scratch* sound in your head when you to the bit about "nearly $8 million" up here. 

Excellent work from Mark Lieberman over at EdWeek gives a more clear eyed assessment on this one: 

 ...in contrast with proposals the state put forward roughly a year ago, the new federal approval touches only 5% of Iowa’s overall allocation of federal education funds, the part that’s set aside for the state education agency. The bulk of federal dollars that flow to school districts each year—$900 million worth—will retain their current structure and spending and reporting requirements.

This announcement could signal an acknowledgment from the department that its legal authority to flatten discrete funding programs and implement unrestricted block grants without congressional approval is limited, said Anne Hyslop, the director of policy development for the nonprofit advocacy group All4Ed, and a former senior policy adviser at the Education Department who helped implement the Every Student Succeeds Act.

It also foreshadows an uphill battle for other states aiming to convert federal education funding to block grants, including Indiana, which submitted a request for that flexibility, along with relief from certain school accountability requirements, in October.

I realize that it isn't going to surprise anyone that the Trump administration is being less than forthcoming on what they're actually doing, but it's always worth calling these out. 

Board of Ed for November: proposed amendments to educator licensure

 strikethrough of proposal is here
memo is here

alternative licensure pathway
revised subject matter knowledge requirements
updates in various sections

Board of Ed: charter schools

charters are taking up in February
Wulfson: reminding process of charters applying for new
if he recommends either or both applications, will receive additional information next month

Bentley Academy waiver request
under the MGL, the accountability plan is supposed to be approved the teachers' union
union has taken no action
Sagan: "I think this makes sense; puts off a what will be likely be a very ugly reckoning, but we'll have it when we have it."
Doherty: "union didn't vote any way...also played no role, and were not asked to play a role in developing the plan...aren't going to vote to approve or disapprove a plan they played no role in developing"
Doherty abstains, motion carries

to put Paulo Freire under probation
Wulfson; we have high expectations in the Commonwealth, school is not meeting those expectations
new leadership's acknowledgement of problems
"give schools every opportunity to improve and also signal the seriousness of the problem"
Primary concern is they were severely underenrolled
potentially financially unsustainable
Moriarty talks about location of school and enrollment area
McKenna: all concerned about this; we've seen the numbers
charters are put in place because they offer a choice, they're financially sustainable, people want to go there
"at the moment, we don't have any of those things"
Sagan: we'll take the Commissioner's recommendation and uphold them as well.
vote in favor

What's in the Every Student Succeeds Act?

Okay, we're going to do this as the act itself actually reads; as always, h/t to EdWeek that keeps up with this all the time.Other than that, the below is entirely my work, page by page. 

Waivers: NCLB waivers expire August 1, 2016, however the plans dealing with lowest performing schools and subgroup achievement gaps are still in play until new plans are submitted for the 2017-18 school year. Those are "needs improvement, corrective action, or restructuring" schools and "priority or focus" schools.

Title I:  (for a numbers rundown, see this from the American Association of School Administrators) Most of the sections of Title I are level funded through FY20, with "the sense of Congress" being that this would revised if discretionary spending levels are adjusted. Note also that School Improvement Grants are no longer a separate program; they are folded into Title I, with the specification that the current 4% of Title I set aside for school improvement is increased to 7% of their Title I funding (of that, 95% of it needs to go to districts directly). As before, such funding may only supplement, not supplant, funding the district is otherwise receiving.

State plans: States are still required to submit plans to the U.S. DoE. There remains a peer review process, and states can appeal a rejection of their plan (but it's to the Secretary, so I'm not sure how that helps). As part of that, states must "provide assurance" that they have adopted "challenging academic achievement standards," but they are not required to submit those standards to the Secretary (this is how they're resolving the question of federal requirements and the Common Core). States must have state standards for "mathematics, reading or language arts, and science" and have English language proficiency standards; they may have standards in other subjects.

...and just in case we were unclear on the Secretary's authority:

FEDERAL CONTROL.—The Secretary shall not have the authority to mandate, direct, control, coerce, or exercise any direction or supervision over any of the challenging State academic standards adopted or implemented by a State.

Testing: In their plans, the states have to demonstrate that they have "in consultation with local educational agencies,...implemented a set of high-quality student academic assessments in mathematics, reading or language arts, and science." Emphasis there mine; has anyone been consulted? The tests must (and I'm pulling the language here, because I think this is going to come up):

(ii) be aligned with the challenging State academic standards, and provide coherent and timely information about student attainment of such standards and whether the student is performing at the student’s grade level; (iii) be used for purposes for which such assessments are valid and reliable, consistent with relevant, nationally recognized professional and technical testing standards, objectively measure academic achievement, knowledge, and skills, and be tests that do not evaluate or assess personal or family beliefs and attitudes, or publicly disclose personally identifiable information; (iv) be of adequate technical quality for each purpose required under this Act and consistent with the requirements of this section, the evidence of which shall be made public, including on the website of the State educational agency...

Students must be tested in math and ELA one a year in grades 3-8 and once in grades 9-11, and in science once in grades 3-5, once in grades 6-9, and once in grades 10-12. Schools still need to have a 95% participation rate in testing, but what happens to the schools that don't is up to the state.
The tests also must:

(vi) involve multiple up-to-date measures of student academic achievement, including measures that assess higher-order thinking skills and understanding, which may include measures of student academic growth and may be partially delivered in the form of portfolios, projects, or extended performance tasks; (viii) at the State’s discretion— ‘‘(I) be administered through a single summative assessment; or ‘‘(II) be administered through multiple statewide interim assessments during the course of the academic year that result in a single summative score that provides valid, reliable, and transparent information on student achievement or growth;

States are required to provide individual "interpretive, descriptive, and diagnostic" student reports with information that allows "parents, teachers, principals, and other school leaders to understand and address the specific academic needs of students" and they have to do so in a timely fashion. There are parallel reporting requirements for reporting out on subgroups (and no "supersubgroups" as in the waivers; each needs to be broken out, so long as it's of a statistically significant size).The test items are "(xiii) be developed, to the extent practicable, using the principles of universal design for learning."
All ELL students must be annually assessed in their English proficiency. The states have a few options on what to do with newly arrived students (in the U.S. for less than 12 months) on the other tests; they can have the student not take the tests, or they can exclude their results from accountability (but report them).
Local districts can choose a different "nationally-recognized high school academic assessment" with state approval. Regarding opting out:

Nothing in this paragraph shall be construed as preempting a State or local law regarding the decision of a parent to not have the parent’s child participate in the academic assessments under this paragraph.

In other words, they kicked this one back to the states.

More on state plans: They have to include four indicators, of which three are state testing proficiency rates, ELL student proficiency, another subgroup proficiency and one more; high schools get five, adding graduation rate. The other options include student engagement, educator engagement, access to and completion of advanced coursework, post-secondary readiness, school climate/safety, or something else. For those working on other ways assessing schools, this is a crack in the door that should be pushed on! States are still required to identify lowest 5% of performing (how we get there is going to look a little different) plus high schools failing to graduate one-third or more of their students AND other schools at the state's discretion. What exactly they do with those schools is up to the states.

Interestingly, if a district has only had a student for less than half the year, the student's test score can't count against the school's accountability level. Likewise, a student who doesn't graduate counts for the high school that has had that student for the majority of high school.

Schools indentified as underperforming still need to submit school improvment plans, and the process looks fairly parallel to now (group of stakeholders analyzing local data, plan has to include "evidence-based interventions" and consider resources, and has to be approved locally and monitored by the state). The state has to establish exit criteria for this. The state is also to analyze resource allocation and provide technical assistance for any district having a significant number of schools falling into underperforming.

The bill is also speaks at length, forbidding the Secretary to specify quite a number of things, including the evaluation methods of teachers and other school professionals and forbidding data collection beyond what already happens in other sections of federal law.
States are also required to specify how they will assist local districts in increasing early childhood education; ensure that disadvantaged students are not served by inexperienced teachers, reduce bullying, reduce out-of-school suspension, reach all students, stabilize the education of students in foster care, and support homeless students. And if that sounds like a hodgepodge, that's because it is! Likewise, there are a list of assurances the states are required to submit (starts on page 109, if you're interested).
Both states and local districts must issue annual report cards.
Districts need to have annual school improvement plans as well (and what needs to be included starts on page 134). As part of that plan, districts:

shall notify the parents of each student attending any school receiving funds under this part that the parents may request, and the local educational agency will provide the parents on request (and in a timely manner), information regarding any State or local educational agency policy regarding student participation in any assessments mandated by section 1111(b)(2) and by the State or local educational agency, which shall include a policy, procedure, or parental right to opt the child out of such assessment, where applicable.

"where applicable"...hm...
Districts are also required to post on their website what assessments are used, where it comes from, how long it will take, what it will test, and when they'll have results available.
As they're still talking about "low income," the bill offers the following for how to measure that:

a local educational agency shall use the same measure of poverty, which measure shall be the number of children aged 5 through 17 in poverty counted in the most recent census data approved by the Secretary, the number of children eligible for a free or reduced price lunch under the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act, the number of children in families receiving assistance under the State program funded under part A of title IV of the Social Security Act, or the number of children eligible to receive medical assistance under the Medicaid Program, or a composite of such indicators, with respect to all school attendance areas in the local educational agency

Secondary school calculations may be based off estimates from the elementary schools.
Federal funds are still required to supplement not supplant local (and state) spending; it also retains the "hold harmless" provision on funding (page 199; note that it isn't entirely harmless), and the requirement of state's maintenance of effort (states have to keep funding education themselves in order to received federal funds).

Innovative assessments: As part of the Title I B assessment grants, the bill provides for "innovative assessments" in up to seven states for the first three years of the law. Those have to report out, and at the end of that time, the Secretary may extend that "demonstration authority" further.

There's a provision for local districts to enter an agreement with the Secretary for a local weighed per-pupil funding system, allowing for substantially more funding to go to their neediest student bodies. Districts can bundle their Title I, Title II, Title III, and parts of Title IV and V to do so.

Title IIA: (teacher development) There's a list of provisions for which these funds may be used starting on page 336. It does allow for pay-for-performance, but it also allows the funds to be used to reduce class size. Several mentions in this section of "human capital management"

21st Century Learning grants are in, but not for any substantial boost back up in funding.

Charter schools and magnet schools: For those who like to compare these things, the grant to expand charter schools is funded at a higher level that the grant to fund magnet schools ($270M rising to $300M versus $94M rising to $108M).

Promise Neighborhoods are in, but funding isn't specified; the same is true of community schools.

National readers note that there is a substantial section on Native American education, including a requirement that the Secretary of Education report on student suicides.

Federal impact aid is level funded until FY2020.

Speaking of definitions that might be useful, here's ESSA's definition of a "well-rounded education" (from Title VIII, page 807):

(52) WELL-ROUNDED EDUCATION.—The term ‘well-rounded education’ means courses, activities,and programming in subjects such as English, reading or language arts, writing, science, technology,engineering, mathematics, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, arts, history, geography,computer science, music, career and technical education, health, physical education, and any other subject, as determined by the State or local educational agency, with the purpose of providing all students access to an enriched curriculum and educational experience.’’

Title VIII also requires the Secretary of Education to figure out how many federal employees worked on programs that no longer exist under this renewal and to cut the department by that many positions (page 813).

Waivers of federal provisions: Both schools and districts can request waivers of the provisions within the law (the schools request of the district, which turns to the state; the district requests of the state which turns to the federal department) (page 816 and following).

"Prohibition against federal mandates" speaks for itself:

IN GENERAL.—No officer or employee of the Federal Government shall, through grants, contracts, or other cooperative agreements, mandate, direct, or control a State, local educational agency, or school’s specific instructional content, academic standards and assessments,curricula, or program of instruction developed and implemented to meet the requirements of this Act (including any requirement, direction, or mandate to adopt the Common Core State Standards developed under the Common Core State Standards Initiative, any other academic standards common to a significant number of States, or any assessment, instructional content, or curriculum aligned to such standards), nor shall anything in this Act be construed to authorize such officer or employee to do so.

Likewise, the federal government can't require local or state funds be directed particular ways. Also nothing in the act shall:

require the distribution of scientifically or medically false or inaccurate materials or to prohibit the distribution of scientifically or medically true or accurate materials

Military recruiter opt-in: Districts are required to provide military recruiters with student information unless the parents specifically have directed the district to not provide it. Districts creating instead an "opt in" provision is not allowed. This came in as part of NCLB.

Free-range kids: The federal government can't make laws regarding parent-permitted school travel, but, then, they also can't limit the abilities of local or state authorities to do so.

Student privacy: There is a "sense of Congress" section requesting that the Secretary review all applicable provisions and ensure student data is protected. As I've seen pointed out elsewhere, there's no teeth in this; on the other hand, it isn't here by accident.

Regarding the First Amendment:

It is the sense of Congress that a student, teacher, school administrator, or other school employee of an elementary school or secondary school retains the individual’s rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States during the school day or while on the grounds of an elementary school or secondary school. 

Posthumous pardon for Jack Johnson (starts on page 914)

Reports: Congress is asking for reports on dropouts, subgroup sample size, access to digital learning resources, and the Title I formula (that's like FBRC federally!). 

Preschool development grants which are being administered through Health and Human Services (as Head Start is).

"Highly qualified" is over.

and, whew! That's it.

New guidance on "achievement gaps" is going to sink things

Rare is the day I say this, but Michael Petrilli is absolutely right on the new federal guidance on state No Child Left Behind waivers.

States can ask to wait a year on using student test scores to evaluate teachers

Secretary Duncan says they can apply to wait. As this is a ridiculous system to begin with, even setting aside the test switch, it would be a start.
UPDATES: Here's the letter announcing the change. Also, here's Duncan's blog post on this, which talks at length on overtesting, and also opens the possibility of further flexibilities.

NCLB comes home to roost

The talk about complying with NCLB waivers from Secretary Duncan may have caused us to forget: there are states that don't have waivers. Because it is now that magic year in which no child is to be left behind--2014--states that do not have waivers, and are thus still under the law, must have every child testing up to standards or have the schools declared underperforming.
No surprise: nearly all schools are getting that tag.
States and schools aren't simply taking this, though. Vermont's Secretary of Education Rebecca Holcombe fulfilled the requirement that parents be informed of their schools "low performing" label with this thoughtful letter, disagreeing with this label and discussing what makes for a quality education.
Washington state, which recently lost its waiver due to disagreements over teacher evaluation, likewise has more clear information coming out to parents along with the required notification: 28 superintendents have signed a letter to parents disagreeing with the label.
A number of the states without a waiver are finding that, labels or not, they are freer and more able to move ahead, as they don't have to negotiate with the Department of Education when making decisions.
I'm sure there's a lesson in here somewhere. 

Declaring Level 4's: "Where everything's made up and the points don't matter"

Title courtesy, of course, of Whose Line Is It, Anyway?
Since we're talking about possibly expanding which schools the state gets to make decisions around, let's take a look at how we're determining which schools the state gets to intervene in now, shall we?

So, let's back up a step: all schools each year get a CPI (Composite Performance Index) for the entire school and for "high need students." If you'd like to know more about how this is calculated, you can go through the state's presentation here. The short version is that it takes four years of data (if we have them) on MCAS scores and (where applicable) dropout and graduation rates, crunches the numbers, and scales them against where schools and districts "should" be. This new system came in with our No Child Left Behind waiver; if it makes your head spin, you're not alone.
Once there is a CPI for every school in the state, the state can make a list of all of the schools in the state, like this. That gives you not only each school's "level" but also the CPI for both the school and the high needs group and the school's percentile. That same information is on this spreadsheet, and, because it's a spreadsheet, one can sort by column.
If 95% of your kids are tested, and you're hitting 75 or higher on your number crunching, you're called a Level 1. Just about everyone else is Level 2.

Now, according to the 2010 Act Relative to the Achievement Gap, Level 3 schools are the lowest 20% of schools (either by school or by subgroup) in the state; the regulations also include not improving on graduation rate or having less than 90% of kids participating in your testing. So, when you line up all of the schools in the state in rank order, and draw a line at the bottom 1/5, that's your Level 3's.
But what makes a Level 4?
Beyond their having to be in Level 3 status, the only other restriction the state law makes on Level 4 and 5 schools is that they can make up no more than 4% of the schools in the state at any one time (per section 3).
So which schools fall from 3 to 4?
The state, in their explanation of the classification of Level 3 schools (that's a PDF) says this:

The state’s lowest achieving, least improving Level 3 schools are candidates for classification into Level 4 at the discretion of the Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education. A Level 4 school may be classified into Level 5 by the Commissioner on behalf of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education if it fails to improve; or if district conditions make it unlikely that the school will make significant improvement without a Level 5 designation.

(emphasis added) 
"...at the discretion of the Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education."

Now, as someone who's been following this all since it was actually just in a bill being rushed through the Legislature to get Race to the Top money, I had the notion that Level 4's would of course be the lowest 4% of schools in the state.
When you take the list of schools and sort them by their percentage in the state*, though, Level 4's aren't the lowest in the state. Nor, at this point, are the lowest all Level 5's. Right now, there are 13 schools that are the bottom 1% within their school type--note that the state rounds to the nearest whole number--and that includes one Level 5, one Level 3, and the rest Level 4's.
It gets even weirder if you move up. There is a Level 5 as high as the 15th percentile within its school type; a Level 4 as high as the 10th percentile.

It would be easy to dismiss this as this year's report, but those scores are calculated off of four years of information: it is by its nature a report that is designed not to be terribly volatile. And while there are some assumptions one can make--not wanting to overwhelm any one community, for example--there certainly are choices that were made on which schools would be declared Level 4 and which would not, and those decisions were not mathematical ones.

I say this not to criticize the Commissioner. An enormous degree of importance is placed on these standings, however, and the most critical ones, the ones that do the most damage to a school's image, the ones that cause the most angst in and about districts are the ones that are not based simply on a calculation (however flawed those might be). They're chosen.

So when we're making assumptions and drawing conclusions about what the levels mean, let's keep that in mind.

*That's this chart sorted by column U. 

"But don't we need field testing?"

I've gotten this question more than once lately: if we're going to have this new test, don't we need field testing of it first?
Sure! Then let's stop doing the former test.
...just like Idaho and Montana.
Yup, turns out, despite the protests that the sky would fall and we wouldn't have any idea what was going on, etc., etc., two states--and California is waiting to hear--are rolling forward with ONLY field testing the new tests this year under their NCLB waivers.

...so don't tell me that this wasn't possible.

Notice of Intent to Apply for a Waiver

The state intents to apply for a waiver on certain federal testing requirements connected to PARCC. You can read the details here.
And it's open for comment now.

Another NCLB waiver

If you're tracking NCLB waivers, you can add Maine to your list.

House Education Committee looking for more information on NCLB waivers

It looks as though the Republicans in the House aren't giving up on the NCLB waiver issue:

Calling it their "duty to conduct appropriate oversight over the waiver approval and implementation process," Kline and Rokita ask for information about

• The number of meetings that were conducted for each waiver application.

• The amount of changes that were requested and approved for each waiver proposal.

• The reasons waiver applications were denied.

• The monitoring process for the approved waivers.

• The top five challenges that states have faced in implementing the waivers.
• The department's plans should a state lose its waiver for noncompliance.

This is a continuation of the questioning Congress has pushed on if the waivers are an overstep of the President's (or Secretary's) authority.

Requesting a waiver

O'Connell giving this to admin now in case we have more snow and need to cancel more school
realizes that it is unlikely
Boone runs through the Commissioner refusing to grant waivers over the past few years

We're currently up to only June 21, so we have time left!

Worcester School Committee meets on Thursday

There is a regular meeting of the Worcester School Committee on Thursday at City Hall. You can find the agenda here.
After a few congratulations (way to go, Ogretta! Nice job, Midland!), the report of the superintendent this week is on the reworking of Title I funding due to the NCLB waiver. The federal government couched this as increased flexibility in the uses of Title I funding, but it appears to largely mean a shifting of such resources to remedial MCAS prep. Worth paying attention to.
We have not one, but two TLSS meetings reporting out this week (and the last one was cut short, so we'll be having another one soon!).
A list of appointments and retirements coming through from administration.
Per Ms. Biancheria's request, we have the full list of vendor contracts.
We have a report coming back on full day preschool naps.
Here's the list of Work Plus participation.
The WEDF mini-grant winners are announced here.
We're asking that we be updated on any changes with parking at the Worcester Public Library, that we talk administrative grant charges with the city, that we discuss our out-of-school suspension policy, that we consider MASC's petition to Congress on weapons, that we be updated on wraparound services, and that we look at bus routes in higher elevations.
We're also being asked to accept a $64,995 grant for North for science equipment, a $500 donation to Clark Street School, and a $50,000 grant for Early Elementary (as part of RTTT; we just got this, so I haven't gone through it yet).
We also have a few prior year invoices to vote through.
And, should the Council vote favorably tonight, we will have $500,000 to allocate for FY13.

Massachusetts asks for a waiver on School Improvement Grants: WEIGH IN!

I'm still working out exactly what this could mean for the Worcester Public Schools, but the state plans, in applying for their next round of School Improvement Grants (you'll remember that this is the money that comes along with Level 4 schools should you follow the state's requirements), to ask for waivers to some pieces of the federal requirements. What I've managed to gather so far:

• They want longer to spend the money they have; they're asking to be able to spend it through 2016.
• They want to be able to have schoolwide Title I programs in schools that has a smaller number than 40% poverty.
• They want to exclude very small schools (because if you have one kid have a bad day, you can send the whole thing skewed).
• Finally (or first, but this is the part I'm still figuring out), they want to stop excluding secondary schools that use Title I funds from the first tier from which Level 4 schools are drawn.

Should you have a thought on any of this, the state is taking comments until January 14. 

California denied their NCLB waiver

As part of the super pre-Christmas edition of "Taking out the Trash Day," you may have missed that California has been denied their No Child Left Behind waiver.

The denial of the waiver request is a really big deal. It means the most populous state in the country, with the biggest congressional delegation, will be stuck with the outdated, much maligned No Child Left Behind as it is for the forseeable future. And next school year is the 2013-14 school year, when all students were supposed to be at the proficiency level on state tests—so there will be many, many schools in the Golden State that will not meet their NCLB goals.

 ...and no word yet on how that's going to work out.

Questions from the Committee

Monfredo:
asks if a student leaves the country, does he count as a dropout? Yes, if we cannot account for enrollment elsewhere
O'Connell:
raises the standard, not lessens them. Achievable standards
"wide range of factors brought to bear in that calculation...this is a standard they can meet...one we expect them to meet"
Union Hill's challenge of absorbing new students
Novick: I'm giving you answers and comments here, rather than my questions
Student Growth Profile: the achievement profile is determined not only by test scores but also by demographics of students
Not clear yet on how the state is working on changes in test as we shift to Common Core and further as we shift to a different testing system
allocation of Title I funds: parents concerned about loss of after school programs, needed for assistance with homework
Boone mentioned already history and science: o
Biancheria:
committee brought together on reallocation of Title I: who is on it?
after school programs: Boone comments "continuous results model"
need to document (increased test scores?) why we chose the intervention that we did
how is administration determining priority schools? Level 3 schools are our first set of priorities
Boone "have some ability to provide services beyond our Title I schools" if they need it
"concerned that our non Level 3 schools will not receive assistance"
(Note: if you're wondering what "level" your school is, you can find the list on the last page here.)

NCLB waiver report

The PowerPoint isn't working but you can find it online here.
posting as we go
Boone: "what the changes are within the state, what they mean for us..."
waivers allowed to be submitted to NCLB this year
no reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, as of yet
"that gives credit for the fine work that's going on in our system"
"current" as it has not been reauthorized or redacted
100% of students proficient by 2014
AYP was determination for schools and districts
MA had rigorous standards, making excellent progress, yet not making bar
waiver granted (as it has been for all but six states)
reduce proficiency gap by 50% by 2016-17
"takes into consideration the progress that schools are making"
No more AYP
Progress and Performance Index: PPI
greater focus on subgroups
2011 is our baseline year for targets going forward
AYP gave no recognition for student growth
multiple years of data, rather than one year of data
this is partial credit model (no longer if you didn't hit one, you didn't hit it at all)
students no longer counted multiple times: everyone counts in aggregate, but there's a SINGLE "high needs" subgroup, where a student may count again; no more than that
movement beyond proficiency is now rewarded
"advanced proficiency is really what we should be targeting"
"haven't abandoned attendance" but no longer part of calculation
What is in PPI?

1. CPI (ELA, math, science)
2. MCAS growth (ELA, math)
3. cohort graduation rate
4. annual dropout rate

These last two for high schools only

Maximum number of 700 points, but points by school vary as elementary schools do not have all indicators (elementary schools have no more than 400)

Needs Improvment and Failing have two options: Low and High (different numbers of models)

new system expects 51-59 student growth percentile points OR 10-14 percentile points in growth OR if the number not proficient decreases by 10 percent

reduce by at least half the gap between a perfect score and the 2011 CPI score

dropout is that we cannot account for their enrollment elsewhere

WPS dropout rate is 3%: bring it to less than 2% in the next six years

graduation rate: the state has set federally approved targets for state to hit

Levels of schools: 

Commendation schools: high achieving, high growth, gap narrowing (all are Level 1 schools)

Title I funds: 25% of funds reserved on a sliding scale to address identified needs of lowest performing schools

Needs of lowest achieving students in lowest performing schools

"uneven performance in mathematics...revised frameworks in the Common Core"

Columbus Park had high performance but could not make AYP

MCAS scores (by school) are out

The statewide MCAS results were released today at Columbus Park School in Worcester. You can find the state's press release here and the Worcester Public Schools' press release here. The full results are up online here. 
Should it be of interest, the report of the superintendent at tomorrow night's Worcester School Committee meeting is on the No Child Left Behind waiver, which necessarily will include information on this year's MCAS scores.

And then there were 35? Maybe?

Texas wants in on the NCLB waivers, but, being Texas:

Texas is not applying for the formal waiver that the department has spelled out, but as is the Texas way, wants to create its own waiver proposal. "This allows us to define the waiver request without agreeing to the strings that were attached to the NCLB waiver," Texas Education Agency spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe told me. (This is the route California wants to take, too.)

Good luck, guys, but Secretary Duncan means his flexibility, not yours.