If the next US ed sec, Miguel Cardona, wants equity in education, he needs to step away from America’s obsession with standardized testing and make better use of the federal education dollars.
To that end, I have the perfect article for him to read, written by my colleague, Andrea Gabor, Bloomberg chair of business journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York. The excerpts below appear as part of a longer opinion piece in the December 23, 2020, Policy and Politics section of Bloomberg.com:
Education Secretary’s First Task: Curb Standardized Tests
Miguel Cardona will need to address public school inequities by making better use of federal aid.
Andrea Gabor
…
States and localities are responsible for the lion’s share of spending on public education; yet, as of 2015, only 11 states had funding formulas where high-poverty schools receive more funding per student than low-poverty schools, down from a high of 22 in 2008. When states cut back on their share of aid during the Great Recession, school funding came to rely increasingly on local property tax revenue, benefiting districts with high property values and hurting those where the values are low.
Though it may sound counterintuitive, an important first step the new CONTINUE READING: First Step in Educational Equity: Move Away from Standardized Testing | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog