Education Week - December 5, 2012 - 25

EDUCATION WEEK

DECEMBER 5, 2012

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GOVERNMENT & POLITICS

POLICY BRIEF

Fights Loom on Mich. K-12 Overhaul Bills
Aid, power balance at heart of proposals
By Andrew Ujifusa
A series of education proposals in Michigan could make students, not schools and districts, the hub for state education spending and shift a great deal of power over low-performing schools into the executive branch. The possibilities arising from these ideas have triggered both hope and predictions of catastrophe among K-12 officials and observers. To a certain extent, the proposals highlight the goals of Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican who asked policy experts to come up with a plan to overhaul the state’s 33-yearold School Aid Act. He also is interested in expanding the Education Achievement Authority from Detroit to the entire state. gressive education and collective bargaining initiatives, has said expanding the state’s voucher program is one of his priorities for 2013. Those two governors might have a particular impetus for moving quickly, even compared with the other 28 Republican governors. The gop controls both chambers of the legislatures in Michigan and Wisconsin. “If you’re a Republican governor with a Republican legislature in a traditionally Democratic state, you don’t have time for incrementalism,” said Dick Carpenter, an associate professor of educational leadership at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. One way to view the proposed Michigan laws is that, ostensibly, they would put more power in the hands of students and the state’s executive branch, while reducing the relative influence of school boards, administrators, and the state education department.

W. Va. Chief’s Firing Prompts Pushback
The aftershocks continue from the firing of West Virginia state schools chief Jorea Marple, whose dismissal at two separate state board of education meetings last month took many in that state by surprise. The state board of education voted 5-2 at its Nov. 15 meeting to fire Ms. Marple, who had been in her position Jorea Marple since March 2011 and previously served as a deputy superintendent. No official cause was given, since she was an “at-will” employee, but the board’s president, L. Wade Linger Jr., said in a subsequent statement: “The West Virginia board of education believes this is a time for a change in direction. As such, we think it is important for new leadership.” After the vote, a petition filed by Mountain State Justice, a public-interest law firm in Charleston, W. Va., on behalf of two parents, argued that the vote violated West Virginia’s open-meetings law because a decision regarding Ms. Marple’s position as superintendent was not listed on the public agenda available prior to the board’s meeting. A lawyer for Mountain State Justice said the court was due to issue a ruling on the petition after Nov. 30.
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Bellwether?
Mr. Snyder’s explorations of big policy changes could herald similar efforts by other gop governors. In nearby Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker, who beat back a recall effort this year sparked by his ag-

Finance Model
A draft version of the Michigan Public Education Finance Act of 2013 would replace the School Aid Act of 1979, based on a model proPAGE 29 >

College Access, Immigration Issues May Catch Fire
By Alyson Klein
College access and immigration issues may leap-frog high on Washington policymakers’ postelection to-do lists, thanks to the critical role that the Latino and youth vote played in helping President Barack Obama secure both the national popular vote and majorities in key swing states in winning re-election. Advocates for young voters want lawmakers to make funding for college financial aid—including student loans and Pell Grants for lowincome students—a priority as they try to cope with the “fiscal cliff,” the automatic spending cuts and rise in taxes set to go into effect early next year unless Congress and the administration are able to come up with a way to avert them. Advocates also are hoping that policymakers can shore up the Pell Grant program, which faces a $7 billion shortfall, and act to avert a planned rise in student-lending interest rates. For their part, Latino activists want to see comprehensive immigration reform, along with a renewed focus on the needs of English-language learners, minority students, and other special populations in discussion of the long-awaited reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Seventy-five percent of Latino voters supported Mr. Obama, compared with 23 percent for his Republican opponent, former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, according to a poll of 5,600 Latino voters conducted Nov. 2-5, on the eve of the presidential election, by ImpreMedia and Latino Decisions, a polling firm based in Seattle. Such voters proved important in critical states won by Mr. Obama, including Colorado, Florida, Nevada, and New Mexico. In fact, if 35 percent of Latinos had voted for Mr. Romney, the president would not have won the popular vote na-

Marvin Joseph/Washington Post/Getty-File

President Barack Obama poses for photographs with students after a campaign speech in September at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. Young voters, along with Latinos, were among the constituencies that proved crucial to the president’s re-election. That support could help put issues such as college aid and immigration reform higher on the agenda.

tionally, according to the poll. In the survey, Latinos ranked education as the third-most-important national issue, behind only the economy and immigration. That ranking could strengthen the hand of Latino groups when it comes to negotiating the renewal of the esea, whose current version is the No Child Left Behind Act, said Raul González, the director of the education policy project at the National Council of La Raza, a Latino advocacy group based in Washington. “We hope they listened and paid attention to what happened on Election Day,” he said, referring to both Congress and the president. “We would hope that they don’t start with last year’s bills. … We cannot go back to the community and say we support a bill where you cannot easily find Hispanic and ell kids and [understand] how their needs are going to be addressed.” Mr. González and other advocates for Latinos expressed concern with

the direction of the esea-reauthorization discussions in Congress after both the House and Senate education committees approved bills that would have given states and districts much more leeway in setting goals for students in particular subgroups, including Englishlearners, disadvantaged students, and members of racial and ethnic minorities. The bills would also have largely left it up to states to decide how—and whether—to intervene in schools that missed the mark for those populations.

‘The Fight for 2013’
Immigration is also poised to take center stage in the next session of Congress with many advocates pushing for legislation that would include a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who are already living in the United States. “We feel strongly that this will
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Mr. Linger then acknowledged concerns about the procedure leading up to the vote, and announced that the board would reconsider Ms. Marple’s dismissal on Nov. 29. At that meeting, the board voted again to fire Ms. Marple by a 6-2 vote, despite protests by some who attended. Ms. Marple said after the Nov. 15 vote that she was surprised by the decision and had overseen progress in the state education department, particularly in expectations for student achievement and behavior. The two board members who voted not to fire her, Priscilla Haden and Jenny Phillips, announced after the Nov. 15 vote that they would resign from the board, effective Dec. 31. An efficiency audit of the state’s public K-12 system, published in January at the request of Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, a Democrat, had criticized the department for its bureaucracy and for not pursuing significant changes in —ANDREW UJIFUSA K-12 policy.

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Education Week - December 5, 2012

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