8/3/04 - African Americans don't support vouchers
• A poll of African American voters released July 21 by Black Entertainment Television and CBS News finds little support for school vouchers.
When asked what would do the most to make sure African American children receive a good education, 44 percent favored the option of changing school boundaries so wealthy and poorer schools are combined. Forty percent said more government aid sent directly to public schools would do the most. But only one in 10 African American voters cited vouchers as the best option.
District bills Education Dept. for IDEA costs
• Fed up with the federal government's failure to fund its special education commitment, the Barrington, N.H., school board sent the U.S. Education Department an invoice for $2,081,268 "for services rendered during the 2002-03 school year."
That amount includes the federal government's 40 percent share of the district's costs under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), past due funds for 2000-01 and 2001-02, and interest at the rate of 5 percent.
"There's a high level of frustration on the issue of unfunded mandates," says Superintendent Michael A. Morgan. He says about 20 percent of the district's $12.5 million budget goes to special education. That includes $350,000 to send one child to a school in another district.
Morgan doesn't expect the Education Department will pay up. He says the school board sent a similar invoice two years ago and didn't get a response. "We're doing this mainly to motivate our congressional representatives," he says.
Too many failed, so Oregon scraps test
• The Oregon Department of Education has agreed to scrap the results of a 10th-grade math problem-solving test because the test was too hard.
Eighty percent of the students who took the test failed, compared to a 50 percent failure rate in previous years.
The U.S. Education Department approved the state's request not to include the test results in calculating adequate yearly progress for No Child Left Behind, says Gene Evans, communications director for the Oregon Department of Education. Instead, schools' performance on teaching math will be based solely on a multiple-choice math test.
The approximately 33,000 students who failed the problem-solving test will have to retake it next year in 11th grade.
In throwing out the test results, Oregon Superintendent Susan Castillo said: "It's not that our kids are dumber, and it's not that our teachers didn't do the job they needed to do. It's the test. The difficulty of these [test questions] was not in line with what we'd done before."
Evans says state budget cuts forced the state to cut back on field testing. The field test of the test questions did not include enough items, and the sample was too small. The state spent $350,000 on creating, administering, and scoring the now-unusable test, while a thorough field test would have cost $40,000.
Fewer Americans read books
• Far fewer adults are reading literature, reports a survey by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released in July. Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America finds fewer than half of American adults are now reading literature.
The study documents an overall decline of 10 percentage points in literary readers from 1982 to 2002, representing a loss of 20 million potential readers. The rate of decline is increasing and, according to the survey, has nearly tripled in the last decade. The sharpest rate of decline (28 percent) is occurring in the youngest age groups.
NEA Chair Dana Gioia calls the findings a "national crisis."
"Reading develops a capacity for focused attention and imaginative growth that enriches both private and public life," Gioia says.
"The decline in reading among every segment of the adult population reflects a general collapse in advanced literacy," she says. "To lose this human capacity - and all the diverse benefits it fosters - impoverishes both cultural and civic life."
Literary readers are much more likely to be involved in cultural, sports, and volunteer activities than are nonreaders.
Congress considers new voucher proposal
• A Senate subcommittee held a hearing July 15 on a bill sponsored by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) to create what he calls "Pell Grants for Kids." The bill would provide $500 "grants" (really vouchers by another name) to children from families whose income is below the state's median income level.
Public, private, and home-schooled students would receive the grants, which would cost $2.5 billion the first year. Proponents claim the vouchers would be funded with "new" money, but Alexander suggests Title I remain level funded to offset the "new" expenditures.
The grants would be provided first to children in kindergarten and first grade and eventually would extend to all grades.
Congress is not expected to act on the proposal this year.
NSBA opposes the proposal. Marc Egan, director of NSBA's Voucher Strategy Center, says, "Congress needs to adequately fund existing federal programs, such as Title I and IDEA, not create new programs that divert resources to nonpublic schools."