Education Week - July 8, 2015 - 13

GOVERNMENT & POLITICS

Budgets, Testing Issues
Took Legislative Stage
State legislatures began their
sessions this year as they did in
2011, on the heels of a year heavy
on state elections--and victories by
Republicans.
But for the most part, their recent
K-12 action hasn't set off shock waves
the way Wisconsin lawmakers did
four years ago when they and gop
Gov. Scott Walker curtailed collective
bargaining for public school teachers
and most other public employees.
Instead, legislatures continued to rebuild and revamp their K-12 budgets
during a modest economic recovery, at
the same time they re-examined how
to deliver educational services and assess students' performance.
As of early July, roughly 40 states
had or were due to have adjourned
their legislative sessions this year.
Thirty legislatures are controlled by
Republicans, compared with 11 controlled by Democrats and eight with
divided power. One is nonpartisan.
Overall, the Common Core State
Standards fared well despite ongoing
political controversy, with no state
voting to repeal them. However, federally funded tests that go along with
those standards did less well.
Legislatures in Missouri and Maine
voted to do away with the commoncore-aligned Smarter Balanced assessment, while Ohio lawmakers did
the same with the Partnership for
Assessment of Readiness for College
and Careers, or parcc. The Louisiana
legislature also voted to limit the
share of test questions from parcc on
future exams.
And Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, a
Democrat, drew headlines when she
signed a bill granting parents the
right to opt their children out of the
state Smarter Balanced exam, de-

spite a warning from the U.S. Department of Education that the measure
endangered some federal aid.
Late last month, Delaware lawmakers approved a similar opt-out
bill, and the legislation appeared to
have garnered enough votes to override a veto by Gov. Jack Markell, a
Democrat who has opposed the bill.

Diverse Growth in Choice
As with 2014 sessions, legislators
this year provided several boosts to
school choice programs. In several
states, parents will have access to
new education savings accounts, or
esas. In others, by contrast, state
leaders will exercise more direct control over some local schools through
new state-run districts.
"They can work hand in hand,"
Adam Peshek, the state policy director of school choice for the Tallahassee,
Fla.-based Foundation for Excellence
in Education, said of the different
policies. His group supports charter
schools and private school choice.
"I don't think they're competing,"
Peshek said. "I do think they're trying to accomplish two different things
fundamentally."
Nevada made the most dramatic
move to expand school choice by allowing all parents of public school
students to use state K-12 funding
toward private school tuition, home
schooling, and other expenses for
nonpublic education. (See Education
Week, June 10, 2015.)
In addition, Mississippi and Tennessee created new esa programs
specifically for special education students, bringing the total number of
states with esas to five.
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, a
Democrat, vetoed a bill to create a
similar esa program, although he

John Locher/AP

By Andrew Ujifusa

Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, center, holds a signing ceremony in Las Vegas for a bill that allocates millions of
dollars for low-performing schools in poor areas of the state.

did allow a bill creating tax-credit
scholarships to become law without
his signature. That brought the total
number of states with tax-creditscholarship programs to 16.
Texas lawmakers, meanwhile, again
rejected bills to create the state's first
private-school-choice program, despite
the efforts of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a
Republican and a former head of the
Senate education committee.
In Arkansas, the legislature created a voucher program for special
education students.
And Alabama adopted a law in
March permitting charter schools,
becoming the 43rd state to do so.

State-Run Districts
At the same time, states are also
showing an appetite for creating or
expanding state-run districts to improve low-performing schools, like
the existing turnaround districts in
Louisiana and Tennessee.

Both Georgia and Nevada have
created state-run districts this year.
And Ohio has expanded the reach,
and ability to authorize new charter schools, of its Academic Distress
Commissions, which run struggling
districts and have three of their five
members appointed by state schools
chief Richard A. Ross.
The ability of the nation's 31 Republican governors to more directly
boost the expansion of charter
schools through these districts could
explain some of their recent appeal,
said Ronald W. Zimmer, an associate professor of public policy and
education at Vanderbilt University's
Peabody College of Education. But
he stressed that state officials need
to ensure these districts work with
community members, such as engaged parents.
"All of this could create some tension at the grassroots level and at
the state level," said Mr. Zimmer,
who studies school choice. "You re-

ally need to do the groundwork to
create local buy-in in order for it to
be successful."

Path to Funding Formulas
In many states, the slow or moderate
budget recovery for K-12 is continuing.
Still, there are signs that the growth
in spending on public schools might be
a little more sluggish than last year's.
A survey published last month by
the National Association of State
Budget Officers showed that during
fiscal 2015, 16 states made midyear
cuts to their spending on schools.
Although the association projected a
3.1 percent increase in general fund
spending for fiscal 2016, that's below
the 4.6 percent mark in fiscal 2015.
The survey also notes more generally
that education "spending pressures"
often exceed state revenue growth.
"Are legislators trying to get funding back to 2008 levels, or are they
PAGE 18 >

States Struggle With How To Ensure Good Teachers in All Schools
By Alyson Klein
The Obama administration declared last
year with much fanfare that it would tackle the
tricky issue of equitable teacher distribution,
calling on states to revise their plans for making sure that high-poverty schools get their fair
share of qualified educators.
Now most states have answered the call, rewriting plans that initially stemmed from requirements in the No Child Left Behind Act.
But it's an open question whether the work
that went into these updated plans--some of
which are more than 100 pages long and include
an eye-glazing level of detail-will actually lead
to any real progress.
While some states came up with new ideas
for improving teacher quality and distribution,
others simply restated or repackaged strategies
already underway.
And it's still unclear how the U.S. Department
of Education will hold states to their promises.
The good news is that, in general, the plans

are "definitely richer this time around," compared to the original batch of nearly a decade
ago, said Sonja Brookins Santelises, the vicepresident of the Education Trust, an advocacy
organization in Washington that focuses on poor
and minority students.
The real test will be implementation, she
added.
"If a strong plan is put in the cabinet as being
done, if a strong plan is not adjusted and monitored and revisited, it's not going to yield outcomes for kids," she said.
But the department's teacher-equity push,
billed as a "50 state strategy" to tackle the longstanding problem of educator distribution, is
murky when it comes to how it will hold states'
feet to the fire, said Chad Aldeman, an associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners,
a consulting organization in Washington, who
has studied some of the plans.
"I don't see a lot of hard policy changes
coming out of this, either from executive action or legislation," said Mr. Aldeman, who

served in the department earlier in the
Obama administration.
This isn't the first time the federal government has asked states to address the teacher
distribution question. The nclb law called for
states to ensure all teachers were highly qualified by the 2005-06 school year. (States got a oneyear extension.)

Equity Push
But, early last year, an Education Week review found that fewer than half of states had
filed separate equity plans with the department detailing how they aimed to ensure their
most qualified teachers were distributed evenly
among low- and high-poverty schools. Of the
state plans that were filed, many sat on the shelf
for years without an update.
In 2013, the department announced plans
to ask states to address teacher distribution
in order to renew the waivers they may have
had from provisions of the nclb law. But it ulti-

mately scrapped that plan, in part because both
the federal agency and the states already had so
much on their plates due to the waivers.
Instead, the department decided to ask every
state, whether it had a waiver or not, to update
its teacher-equity plans. In addition, the agency
released "equity profiles" for each state to give
officials an idea of the scope of their teacherdistribution problems.
The Education Department has said it will
work with states whose plans don't meet its
requirements, which include steps like scrutinizing data to figure out what's driving inequities and reaching out to districts, educators, and
their unions to find fixes. And it will continue to
release data on teacher distribution every two
years to help track states' progress. That could
put the next data release in December of 2016,
weeks before the Obama administration leaves
town for good.
But it's anyone's guess whether the department
would go further-by withholding federal Title I
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