Fast Report

7/12/05 -- House approves funding bill

• If the provisions in the House appropriations bill prevail, the U.S. Education Department would receive the smallest funding increase in more than a decade -- $115 million, or 0.2 percent over this year’s level.

The fiscal year 2006 spending bill for the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, passed by the House Appropriations Committee June 24, would increase Title I by $100 million and special education state grants by $150 million.

The bill would terminate 23 programs, totaling $500 million. It retains several programs President Bush proposed terminating, including vocational education, Title V innovation grants, Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities, and education technology grants. It does not provide funding for the President’s proposed high school reform initiative.

Reaching AYP is tough goal for Mass. schools

• Nearly three-quarters of the public schools in Massachusetts will fail to meet the proficiency goals by 2014 as required by the No Child Left Behind Act, predicts a report released in June by MassPartners for Public Schools.

MassPartners is a coalition of seven state education groups, including the Massachusetts Association of School Committees and organizations representing school administrators, teachers, and parents.

According to Facing Reality, “No one can be served adequately when most schools are identified as failures.”

Massachusetts uses the “safe harbor/gain score” method of calculating adequate yearly progress (AYP), which gives schools credit toward meeting AYP goals if average scores improve, even if those improvements do not push the school score above the state target.

In 2004, 384 Massachusetts schools (22 percent) failed to make AYP under the safe harbor method. By 2014, 1,286 schools 74 (percent) are projected to miss their AYP targets. If the state didn’t use the safe harbor method, 90 percent of its schools would fail to make AYP in 2014.

States underreport graduation rates

• The Education Trust issued a report in June that criticizes the way states calculate and report graduation statistics.

Getting Honest About Grad Rates: How States Play the Numbers and Students Lose also rebukes the U.S. Department of Education for failing to exert leadership by demanding that states get honest about graduation rates.

“Some states rely on ludicrous definitions of graduation rates,” the Education Trust charges. “Others make little effort to accurately account for students who drop out of school. And others still provide no data at all.”

For example, New Mexico, which claimed to have a graduation rate of almost 90 percent, only reports the percentage of high school seniors who graduate -- thus ignoring students who drop out in grades 9, 10, and 11.

Pentagon amassing database on students

• Privacy advocates are concerned about a Pentagon project under way to create a military recruiting database containing personal information on millions of young Americans, including high school students as young as 16.

The information, including Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, and ethnicities, will be used to help all branches of the armed services meet their recruiting goals.

The marketing initiative, managed by a company called BeNow Inc., augments the names and addresses of students compiled under No Child Left Behind with databases from commercial data brokers, state motor vehicle departments, and other government agencies.

A coalition of privacy advocates led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center says the recruiting database “represents an unprecedented foray of government into direct market techniques previously only performed by the private sector.”

Six senators asked the Pentagon to terminate the database. In addition to expressing concerns about privacy and identity theft, they raise concerns that the database “may be an inappropriate effort to profile students based on ethnicity and other personal factors.”

NCLB is huge windfall for private sector

• The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has proven to be a huge windfall for private companies, concludes a policy brief published by the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University’s College of Education.

In the brief, No Child Left Behind: Where Does the Money Go?, author Gerald W. Bracey, an associate professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., estimates the annual flow of money to private sources -- due to NCLB -- is $2.29 billion for test development, scoring, and reporting; $1.1 billion for curriculum adoption and Reading First; and $2 billion for choice and supplemental services.

And he says unknown amounts of money will flow to private companies for various forms of restructuring, services to monitor cheating, the development of student-tracking databases, and professional development.

“Even without firm figures,” Bracey says, “it is clear that several billions of taxpayer dollars will be spent each year, and it is equally clear that, at present, no real process of accountability is in place to monitor where the money is spent or how effectively it is spent.”