The Educated Guess � A smarter way to divvy up turnaround money

The Educated Guess � A smarter way to divvy up turnaround money

A smarter way to divvy up turnaround money

Posted in State Board of Education, Turning around failing schools

Doug McRae has a sharp eye and a rational mind. A retired vice president in the publishing division of McGraw-Hill who follows state education policy closely, McRae saw the state’s peculiar recommendations for distributing $316 million in federal money this fall for turning around the worst performing schools and thought, There’s got to be a better way.
So McRae spent a good part of Saturday and Sunday creating a new formula for dividing up School Improvement Grant dollars that strikes me as fair and sound. Instead of giving huge sums – up to $6 million — indiscriminately, for the most part, to 63 schools and goose eggs to a dozen schools in Los Angeles Unified and 18 other schools, he’s come up with a set of reasonable criteria that school districts – even those that would get less than they had hoped – would have a hard time disputing.
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By John Fensterwald on August 2nd, 2010

LAUSD,Oakland may not get turnaround grants

Posted in State Board of Education, Turning around failing schools

Food-fight alert: Los Angeles, Oakland and Stockton unifieds are among the school districts that would get not a penny to turn around their lowest-performing schools, while most other districts – San Francisco, Fresno and San Bernadino among them – would get all or nearly full funding for all of their schools on the 113-school list.
The state Department of Education posted its recommendations late Friday (question that timing) – for the State Board of Education, which has final say over the funding, to consider on Monday. Big money is at stake – between $150,000 to $6 million per school over three years so, expect the losers to complain loudly at the meeting (if officials are not on vacation and are alerted to show up) about the method that the state and the federal Department of Education chose.
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By John Fensterwald on July 31st, 2010

Common core – a commissioner’s dissent

Posted in Common Core standards

Yesterday, I recommended that the State Board of Education on Monday approve the recommendation of the majority of the California State Academic Standards Commission to approve the common-core standards. Ze’ev Wurman was one of two commissioners to vote against the standards. He has asked for one last chance to explain why.

By Ze’ev Wurman

Commissioner, California State Academic Standards Commission

A journalist has the same right to misinterpret motives as anyone else, so I will not enter into argument with John on that (smile). But I will describe the dilemma that the Academic Content Standards Commission (ACSC) faced in a different way. This being a Silicon Valley forum, I will use a few simple engineering terms.
The legislature asked the ACSC to examine if using 100% of Common Core plus limited (up to 15%) supplementation will be able to “Ensure that the rigor of the state’s reading, writing, and mathematics academic content standards, curricula, and assessments is maintained” (SB5X 1). The Governor, State Board of Education president, and Superintendent of Public Instruction, also charged us to verify that they “meet or exceed our own” (May 2009 letter).
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