EdLinks: 100 Percent College Acceptance, Opt Out Alternative

Your edlinks from this past week, with summary headlines (new!)

Local

1. SCS $125 million budget cut. Shelby County approves a $974 million dollar budget with a $125 million cut in spending. The cuts resulted from a combination or reduced federal RTTT revenue and declining student enrollment. The budget did increase investment in the iZone turnaround efforts with a $7 million increase and give teachers a much needed step pay increase.

2. Media prioritizes negativity. Local media shows its bias for prioritizing negativity with the stories it chooses to publicize. Case in point, The Soulsville Charter School (my school!) will see its fourth graduation class leave with 100 percent college acceptance. Our kids have so far received 400 letters of acceptance. This comes on the heels of a big fight at White Station High School in the same which, which unfortunately received considerably more media attention.

3. Charter schools struggling with enrollment. Locally, charter schools are struggling to fill their buildings, specifically the ASD. Daarel Burnett notes that priority school enrollment has generally declined over the past few years as more school choice options have come to the city.

State

1. Legislative summary. Chalkbeat provides a great summary of legislative achievements at the close of this session. Highlights include a bill to make it more difficult for districts to sue the state, a “repeal” of common core that isn’t really a repeal, defeat of vouchers, no parent trigger bill, modified teacher evaluation systems and the ability for the ASD to enroll students who aren’t zoned to the ASD.

2. ASD open enrollment(?) Specific to the ASD legislation, Chris Barbic estimates that the ASD might see an increase of 400 or so out of zone enrollments in its schools. This doesn’t constitute open enrollment, however, as the new enrollments could only make up 25 percent of any ASD school’s enrollment at most.

3. Special Ed Vouchers pass. While a more traditional voucher bill failed in the same committee for the third time in five years, the state legislature approved legislation that would provide a $6,600 school voucher to around 18,000 students with severe disabilities. Anti-voucher parties noted the problems inherent in the bill, such as requiring parents and students to give up certain rights in exchange for accepting the bill. Advocates for the vouchers (from the Beacon Center) noted that this legislation is constitutional, will provide choice to parents and contends that the vouchers could save local school districts around $1,000 a year per child.

National

1. NCLB rewrite moves through Senate Ed Committee. On April 17th, the Senate Education Committee passed a NCLB rewrite unanimously. Here’s the Alliance for Excellent Education’s recap, the big differences being the elimination of AYP, and eliminates some sanctions that were in place under NCLB (politico also has a good article here):

2. Arne Duncan implies federal intervention in opt out states. In an interview when asked about the opt out movement, Arne Duncan said that the federal government might have to step into state testing if states aren’t able to get enough students to take state and federally mandated tests. This understandably angered anti-test advocates across the country. Its unclear exactly how the federal government might intervene, but interesting that he even opened up the possibility. While opting out has grown across the country, its unclear what their end game is other than to protest.

3. Alternative for opt out advocates. Robert Pondiscio of the Fordham Institute offers an alternative proposal to opt out parents, who he notes tend to be middle class and white – instead of demanding an end to tests, demand an end to test prep. And not at the state level – do it in the schools themselves. He also notes the importance of testing in making it nigh impossible to ignore the generally poor performance of schools serving black and hispanic children.

Follow Bluff City Education on Twitter @bluffcityed and look for the hashtag #iteachiam and #TNedu to find more of our stories.  Please also like our page on facebook.