Last week the California legislature passed a bill that significantly expanded the opportunity for students to be able to attend a school outside of a student’s district of residence as part of its Race to the Top package. Unfortunately, the state’s current budget woes may end up having the opposite effect of stopping choice from [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'School Finance'
Good Point
Marguerite Roza of the Center on Reinventing Public Education observes that if the great recession forces school districts to cut their personnel budgets under “last in, first out” rules, they’ll end up firing substantially more teachers than they otherwise would, because the last in tend to be younger and lower-paid and thus you have to [...]
Equal Funding for All Low-Income Students
The stimulus proposal recently released by the House of Representatives includes a lot of money for education. That’s a good thing, unless you subscribe to the Petrilli school bankruptcy theory of education reform. But while Mike and his colleagues are wrong to think that financial stress will induce more reform-mindedness, they’re right to point out [...]
Starving the Schools Into Submission, Cont’d
Mike Petrilli responds to the post below and comments from Eduwonk about the Petrilli/Finn/Hess strategy to catalyze a new era of education reform through the financial immiseration of the K-12 school system by concluding:
…if you want taxpayers to provide extra resources, let’s see some serious reforms. And that means not accepting the status quo as [...]
A Great School Depression?
Not to be insensitive (okay, maybe a little), but color me skeptical of Sam Dillon’s new piece in the New York Times, “Hard Times Hitting Students and Schools,” which stitches together a variety of anecdotes and data points related to mortgage foreclosures, rising food and fuel prices and state budget shortfalls into a picture of [...]
Hoosier Taxation
Michele McNeil reports in Education Week:
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, a Republican, who is facing re-election this year along with the entire House and some of the Senate in that state, has made property-tax relief his top priority this legislative year and wants to remove funding for schools’ general operating budgets from the property-tax rolls. That [...]
Mess With Texas
State school finance systems can be horrifically complicated. My first job out of grad school was to be the guy holed up in a back office in the corner of the Indiana Statehouse at 3AM during the legislative session writing long computer programs designed to simulate every tiny nuance and detail of the state’s byzantine [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/19/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on college graduation rates and the NCAA Tournament in the Detroit Free Press.
03/19/10 | Linda Perlstein links to Education Sector's "College- and Career-Ready" event.
03/17/10 | Ben Miller's column on graduation rates and NCAA Tournament eligibility is mentioned on The Wall Street Journal's The Daily Fix.
03/17/10 | Kevin Carey's critique of Diane Ravitch's latest book is quoted in Doublethink's Conventional Folly blog.
03/15/10 | Ben Miller pens an op-ed for US News & World Report on using graduation rates to determine NCAA Tournament eligibility.