The Leading Edge

AASA continues its participation in the IDEA Partnership, a collaboration of organizations dedicated to improving outcomes for students and youth with disabilities through shared work and learning. Once again, a handful of IDEA Partnership member organizations are jointly conducting a survey to capture the extent to which Response to Intervention (RtI) has been adopted and implemented in school districts.

AASA is a sponsoring organization, along with the National Association of State Directors of Special Education, the Council of Administrators of Special Education and Spectrum K12 School Solutions.

Please take a few moments to complete the RtI survey. Responses are confidential and will only be reported in the aggregate. Results of the survey will be available in a report jointly published by the sponsoring groups later this spring or early summer. Thank you, in advance, for completing this survey.

Click here to take the 2010 RTI Adoption Survey

Dan Domenech, AASA executive director, today issued the following press statement on A Blueprint for Reform, the administration's proposal for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Read the Blueprint and share your comments with AASA on this blog!:

“We are pleased that the Obama Administration has released a blueprint for a new ESEA that is a significant improvement on No Child Left Behind. We applaud President Obama for setting a clear and obtainable goal that the United States will lead the world in college completion by 2020.

“We also applaud the administration for recognizing the need to improve current accountability systems and give districts a transition period to develop better assessments. However, schools in the interim should not be required to use assessments that have already been labeled by the administration as faulty. States and districts should be allowed to use their own benchmarking assessments until new systems are in place, including tests that measure growth and progress over time.

“Rewarding schools that achieve the goals set forth in the plan is a step in the right direction, as is moving away from the punitive, all-or-nothing accountability of No Child Left Behind.

"Education is a civil right, as Secretary Duncan has stated. However, a child’s civil rights are not subject to competition. We object to the decision to shift a significantly larger proportion of dollars into competitive grant programs. Rather than maintaining or cutting formula funding under ESEA, we urge the administration and Congress to grow formula grants to provide a more reliable stream of funding to local school districts.

“The blueprint would require schools to collect, interpret and use a tremendous amount of data. Additional funding must be provided to schools for this activity, or the data collection amounts to an unfunded mandate for school districts.

“We also recommend that the fifth turnaround option, to implement a research based intervention model, reserved in the blueprint for Reward districts, be made available to the lowest-performing districts as well.

“The blueprint proposes the option of removing the superintendent from Challenge districts. In fact, this is not needed as superintendents are already held accountable by and can be removed by their boards.

“The administration’s proposal is headed in a good direction, but specifics and clarification are needed on a number of issues. We look forward to continuing to work with the administration and Congress to iron out the details and to reauthorize ESEA this year.”

Related Articles - AASA in the News:

• USA Today:
  Education groups vary in response to White House plan
• Washington Post:
  Obama: Revise No Child Left Behind law
• Associated Press:
  Obama promise: Brighter education futures for kids
• Education Week:
  Administration Unveils ESEA Renewal Blueprint

Please share your comments about the A Blueprint for Reform below.

On Saturday evening, the US Education Department released A Blueprint for Reform, the administration's proposal for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. AASA's Executive Director, Dan Domenech, received widespread media coverage responding to the blueprint, including a frontpage story in yesterday's Washington Post. Here are the highlights:

Obama: Revise No Child Left Behind law
By Nick Anderson, Washington Post, March 14
President Obama proposed overhauling the No Child Left Behind law that was his predecessor's hallmark education initiative, aiming to eliminate several of the measure's controversial mandates on public schools but adding new ones...
On Friday, Education Department officials briefed reporters, governors and interest groups. "From what they showed us, we like it," said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. "It looks like a significant departure from No Child Left Behind and the kind of thing we'd like to see done sooner rather than later."

Education groups vary in response to White House plan
Greg Toppo, USA Today, March 15
The Obama administration's plan to make sweeping changes to the 2002 No Child Left Behind education law is getting mixed reaction among educators: Teachers unions complained that teachers are being scapegoated by the overhaul; a school board leader praised it but called for more flexibility; and an administrators group said it was just glad to see NCLB go away…
Daniel Domenech, who heads the American Association of School Administrators, said he likes the outline he saw, calling it "more realistic, more valid and reliable" than NCLB. "It really makes us feel the urgency to have ESEA reauthorized, the sooner the better, so we can get out from under the restrictions of No Child Left Behind," he said.

Duncan wants 3 ratings for schools in education overhaul
Greg Toppo, USA Today, March 13
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will ask Congress to toss out the two-tiered pass/fail school rating system of the No Child Left Behind education law and replace it with one that labels schools one of three ways: high-performing, needs improvement or chronically low-performing, according to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan...
Daniel Domenech, who heads the American Association of School Administrators, said he likes the outline he saw, calling it "more realistic, more valid and reliable" than NCLB. "It really makes us feel the urgency to have ESEA reauthorized, the sooner the better, so we can get out from under the restrictions of No Child Left Behind," he said, adding, "We're very encouraged by this proposal. This is a view at 50,000 feet and we like it — but the devil is in the details."

Obama promise: Brighter education futures for kids
Associated Press, March 13
ATLANTA — President Barack Obama is promising parents and their kids that with his administration's help they will have better teachers in improved schools so U.S. students can make up for academic ground lost against youngsters in other countries.
The nation's first federal education law — Elementary and Secondary Education Act — was passed in 1965 as part of Lyndon B. Johnson's war on poverty. The law has been reauthorized several times since, most recently in 2001 under President George W. Bush…
It was criticized by educators for focusing too much on testing and not enough on learning. Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, said he is glad to see No Child Left Behind go away. "We're delighted over that," he said. "We have not been a fan of No Child Left Behind."

Administration Unveils ESEA Renewal Blueprint
Education Week, Alyson Klein , March 13
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has released broad principles for renewing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that seek to address perennial complaints that the law’s current version—the No Child Left Behind Act—is inflexible and doesn’t set a high enough bar for academic achievement…
“We’re excited about this and would like to see it pass,” in part to get relief from the current law, said Daniel A. Domenech, the executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, in Arlington, Va. While he cautioned that the “devil is in the details” and said there were aspects of the proposal he would like to reshape, he gave the department high marks for seeking to replace the current accountability system with what he considers to be the more “meaningful” measure of college and career readiness, and for proposing to include a mechanism to reward high-performing schools. 

Today's earlier blog post announced the release of NGA and CCSSO's draft K-12 ELA and Math Standards as part of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, as well as the process for submitting your feedback.

In addition to sharing your feedback with NGA and CCSSO, via the provided on line survey, please send a copy of your comments to AASA's Policy and Advocacy team. We're really interested in what our members think of the draft standards. Are they harder or easier? Higher or lower? How easy will they be to use to develop curriculum and instructional materials? Are they truly aimed at preparing students to be college and career ready?

Please take the time to carefully review the standards. Work through them with your curriculum directors and consider the implications the draft standards will have in your district. The Common Core project has a lot of momentum behind it, and decisions are going to continue to be made. Make sure your voice--and the concerns of your district--are heard and reflected in the final standards.

You have until Friday, April 2 to submit your response to NGA and CCSSO. Once you submit your comments to NGA/CCSSO, please make sure to share them with us at AASA. You can email Bruce (bhunter@aasa.org), Mary (mkusler@aasa.org) or myself (nellerson@aasa.org).

Earlier this morning, the National Governor's Association and Council of Chief State School Officers released the first official public draft of the K-12 standards as part of the Common Core State Standards Initiative. So far, NGA and CCSSO have received feedback from national organizations, including AASA. Any individual or organization interested in the standards is encouraged to provide further feedback by Friday, April 2, 2010 at www.corestandards.org.

You can access the draft standards at the link above; click on 'K-12 standards' in the hyperlink of the first line. From there, you will be able to read/review the draft ELA and Math standards. At the bottom of the website is a link to submit your responses, which are collected via an online survey tool. Rather than an open-ended response, the survey tool is a series of structured questions looking to address, through likert scale items, how much you agree/disagree with statements about the clarity, focus and appropriateness of the various standards.

They do provide text boxes for more detailed responses; please take advantage of the opportunity to submit detailed responses about what you do or do not like in the draft standards. You may want to consider sharing the draft with your curriculum coordinators.

These standards seek to provide a clear and consistent framework to prepare students for college and the workforce. This comment period is your opportunity to make sure the standards do just that, and suggest any changes that you feel would better support this lofty task.

A Cliff Hanger: How America’s Public Schools Continue to Feel the Impact of the Economic Downturn is the 7th survey in AASA’s series on the impact of the economic downturn on public schools.

The results of these surveys have been well-received not only by AASA members, but also on and around Capitol Hill and in the media. Your feedback to these surveys is very helpful in helping Congress, the Department of Education and the general public understand the obstacles public schools are facing in light of the current economic situation.

This survey includes key questions from previous surveys, to provide benchmarking, as well as questions examining the role of competitive funds, given the proposed FY11 budget which calls for a significant increase in the proportion of discretionary education dollars distributed through competitive grants and not formulas.

Please take a few moments to complete this survey. It should take no more than 10-15 minutes. You can access the survey here.

Has accountability become mechanistic and antithetical to good education? Are charter schools sucking the best students and committed parents from both the public and parochial systems? According to Diane Ravitch, the answer to both questions is “yes”. Ravitch, a conservative and highly respected educational historian, is now critical of reform initiatives for which she once was a strong proponent. This is clearly evident in her recently released book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System.

As the assistant secretary of education in the first Bush administration, Ravitch had advocated for national academic standards, promoting testing, accountability, choice and markets. This is no longer the case. Having reversed her opinion on much of what she stood for, she now believes that government backed charter schools are killing the public and parochial systems, and that accountability and other market based reforms will destroy public education if left unfettered. Once a strong supporter of No Child Left Behind, she now believes its requirements for testing in math and reading have squeezed vital subjects out of classrooms and believes a broad national curriculum with top notch art and music education needs to be developed. Believing K-12 education should recapture the strength of the traditional public school system and operate like a family, she is now critical of competition and believes there should not be an educational marketplace.

Ravitch’s desires for a reform do-over comes during an interesting time. The notion of undoing charter laws, performance based pay, testing and results based accountability certainly provokes interesting conversations in light of the current reform efforts driving education today. Certainly her changing perspective is worth reflecting upon as educators begin competing amongst each other in the race to the top.

 Lisa Fry, Grant Wood AEA, Cedar Rapids IA