Riverside school trustees hear grim budget report

[ilbegone]

Large Urban-Suburban Gap Seen in Graduation Rates

By SAM DILLON
Published: April 22, 2009

It is no surprise that more students drop out of high school in big cities than elsewhere. Now, however, a nationwide study shows the magnitude of the gap: the average high school graduation rate in the nation’s 50 largest cities was 53 percent, compared with 71 percent in the suburbs.

But that urban-suburban gap, which in part is due to hundreds of failing city schools that some researchers call dropout factories, was far wider in some areas.

In Cleveland, for instance, where the gap was largest, only 38 percent of high school freshmen graduated within four years, compared with 80 percent in the Cleveland suburbs, the report said. In Baltimore, which has the nation’s second-largest gap, 41 percent of students graduate from city schools, compared with 81 percent in the suburbs.

New York also had a large gap, with 54 percent of freshmen graduating within four years from schools in the city, compared with 83 percent from suburban high schools.

The report, titled Closing the Graduation Gap, was commissioned by the America’s Promise Alliance, a nonprofit group that works to reduce the nation’s dropout rate. The alliance is headed by Alma Powell and her husband, Colin L. Powell, the former secretary of state.

The graduation rates cited in the report were for the class of 2005, the most recent year for which Department of Education data were available, said Christopher B. Swanson, director of the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, the Maryland-based group that produced the study. The report builds on research begun in a previous study released a year ago.

Some big city school districts that have worked to improve their graduation rates have made significant progress since the middle of the last decade, Dr. Swanson said. Philadelphia public schools, for instance, raised the graduation rate to 62 percent in 2005 from 39 percent in 1995, the report said.

As a whole, the nation’s graduation rate improved by a few percentage points over the same decade, to 71 percent from 66 percent, the study said.

But Marguerite Kondracke, the executive director of the alliance, said the pace of progress remained disappointing.

“We don’t have time as a nation for incremental change,” Ms. Kondracke said. “Just over half the students in our big cities are graduating from high school, and that’s unacceptable.”

For decades, high school graduation rates were routinely overstated in official statistics, with the Department of Education putting the nation’s rate above 80 percent and some states reporting rates above 90 percent. Behind the false data were a host of faulty reporting methods, including labeling dropouts who obtained G.E.D. certificates as graduates.

The No Child Left Behind law signed in 2002 did little to improve the problem, allowing states to use dozens of different reporting methods. New Mexico, for example, was allowed to define its rate as the percentage of enrolled 12th graders who received a diploma, a method that grossly undercounted dropouts by ignoring all students who left school before 12th grade.

In 2005, the Department of Education joined a trend toward standardization by publishing an official federal estimate of state graduation rates, and governors agreed to adopt a uniform calculation method. In one of her last official acts last year, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings ordered states to calculate their graduation rates using the formula the governors had agreed upon by 2013.

Several provisions of the economic stimulus law signed in February may help improve graduation rates, including one that requires states to ensure that all schools, city or suburban, rich or poor, have equal access to qualified teachers, Ms. Kondracke said.

“This urban-suburban graduation gap has developed partly because teacher quality is not the same from classroom to classroom,” she said. “So improving teacher quality is crucial to raising graduation rates in these inner-city schools.”

The study found that the Indianapolis public schools had the lowest graduation rate of any large American city in 2005, with only 30 percent of freshmen graduating on time. Several large Western cities, in contrast, had graduation rates that exceeded the national average. The Mesa Unified District in Arizona had the highest graduation rate of any large city, with 77 out of every 100 freshmen there graduating four years later, the study found.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/ed...22dropout.html

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State next to bottom nationally in per-pupil spending, report says

By George B. Sánchez
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona 01.10.2008

Arizona ranks worst in the nation when it comes to education funding, according to a new report.

Only Utah spends less per student, according to Quality Counts 2008, an annual education report by Education Week, a non-profit organization based on the East Coast. But when other economic variables are considered, the study concludes Arizona is worst in the nation.

The effects are clear, the report says, with Arizona ranked near the bottom for student chance of success, K-12 achievement, teacher pay and school finance. The state did place in the top 10 for education standards and accountability, though.

The results weren't surprising to local and state education leaders.
"The bottom line is there are no surprises," said Roger Pfeuffer, superintendent of the Tucson Unified School District. "It validates that we are below average when it comes to school finances."

"Where we do poorly is financing, and that's really no news," said Tom Horne, state superintendent of public instruction.

Fewer than 5 percent of Arizona students are in school districts with annual per-pupil expenditures at or above the national average of $8,973. Nearly 50 percent of the nation's students receive at least that much funding per year. The average annual funding per student in Arizona is $6,232. Utah's per-pupil funding is $5,463.

The report also took into account state spending on education as a percent of taxable resources, district funding and local property wealth, and disparity in district- and student-spending across the state.

Arizona teacher wages fare poorly compared with the rest of the nation, too, according to the report. The median annual U.S. salary is $45,000, said Chris Swanson of the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center Inc., which conducted the research for Education Week. Arizona teachers average about $39,957 a year, said Carole Vinograd Bausell, project director at Quality Counts.

"That's a real slip over the past few years," said John Wright, president of the Arizona Education Association, the union that represents Arizona teachers and classified employees. "Five years ago, we were in the top two-thirds for pay."

The only section of the report with a high score for Arizona was state standards and accountability.

"The standards and accountability is the area, in general, where all states did best," noted Vinograd Bausell. She said the high scores likely were due to the influence of the standards-based reform movement.

Arizona ranked eighth in the nation in that section.

"If we could get our resources toward the national average, then I feel we'd be among the top states in the country because of our emphasis on academic rigor in the classroom," Horne said.

Overall, Arizona was ranked on the bottom tier for K-12 student achievement. The report took into account fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading scores and proficiency on the National Assessment of Education Progress, a test Horne has criticized for representing only a small portion of Arizona students. The state did show signs of closing the achievement gap when it came to fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math.

Last year's report debuted the "chance for success index," which correlated education with personal achievement by measuring education and income from birth to post-secondary school life. This year's emphasis was on teaching and state efforts to attract, retain and support qualified teachers.

"High-quality teaching matters more to student achievement than anything else schools do," said Lynn Olson, also with the research center.

Based on skills necessary to teach, the report assembled a list of 16 occupations comparable to K-12 teaching. The list included architects, reporters, clergy, computer programmers and registered nurses.
States lack a system to attract, prepare, retain and allocate resources for teachers, Vinograd Bausell said.

For recent college graduates, the pay gap is great when it comes to teaching or entering a career in engineering, technology and business, Wright said.

A uniform starting pay that is somewhat competitive should be in place in Arizona, Wright said, adding that the longer the state takes to address teacher pay, the greater the gap grows between public teaching and the private sector.

The report offers further proof of the need to invest in education, Pfeuffer said.

"We are a growing state. We are an in-migration state, from other states. We have an economy that looks to be future- oriented. We have to have an educated populace, which includes the workforce and people who can make good decisions," he said. "We are not investing in our future."

http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/219900

[ilbegone]

New York, which spends the most, has a drop out rate which varies depending on who's doing the calculating:

New York has reported a 77 percent graduation rate to comply with the No Child law. But the federal department uses a formula that closely approximates the governors’ formula to estimate a graduation rate for all 50 states, and using that method, New York’s graduation rate is 65 percent.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/ed...n/01child.html

**

Utah, which spends the least per pupil in the nation, has a graduation rate of 88%.

Utah State Office of Education release entitled 2008 Graduation Rate [ http://www.schools.utah.gov/assessme...Rates_2008.pdf ]

**

Arizona, which is 49th for per pupil spending, has an overall graduation rate of 69% [ http://www.all4ed.org/files/Arizona_wc.pdf ],

Yet there is a 77% graduation rate in the Mesa Unified School District, which the New York Times declared to be the best of any large city (in the US) [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/ed...22dropout.html ]

**

California has a graduation rate of 68.3% in 2008, according to the state of California [ http://www.cde.ca.gov/nr/ne/yr09/yr09rel073.asp ]



It's hard to find a hard figure concerning cost per pupil in California. You have to dig through a labyrinth of statistics, and everyone with an axe to grind has a different presentation.



George Runner has this to say in his Week In Review, March 27, 2008: Per Pupil Funding in California - What It Is and What It Means:

The average per pupil funding for kindergarten-12th grade California students is more than $11,500 when factoring in local, state and federal funding, according to the Governor’s Budget.

How does California’s investment in students compare to other states?

It depends on who you ask. Here is a look at three different positions:

*

The National Center for Education Statistics ranks California per pupil spending 25th among the states in 2003-04, which is equal to 96 percent of the national average $9,620 per pupil. New Jersey is at the top at $14,917 per pupil, and Utah spends the least: $6,110 per pupil.
*

The National Education Association places California 33rd in the nation for 2005-06, 91 percent of the national average. (NEA also calculates the average teacher salary in California of $59,825 as the highest in the nation – 22 percent above the national average.)
*

Education Week, adjusting for regional cost differences, figures California spending is 46th in the nation.

The non-partisan Legislative Analysts’ Office selected the National Center for Education Statistics calculation and ranking –suggesting a higher level of confidence in that organization’s figures.

One thing is for sure though: More money and a higher rank will not improve student achievement according to numerous studies on the subject. Among the findings and conclusions are:

*

“While comparisons to the national average may have illustrative value, the analytic basis for pursuing the national average as a spending goal is unclear. . . . Research and experience suggest that how we spend available education resources is as least as important as how much we spend on education.” (LAO 2000-01 Analysis)
*

“The relationship between dollars and student achievement in California is so uncertain that it cannot be used to gauge the potential effect of resources on student outcomes. . . . [Data illustrating] API [Academic Performance Index] scores as a function of per pupil spending in 2004-2005 . . . finds essentially no relationship between the two. (“Getting Down to Facts: School Finance and Governance in California,” 2007 [GDTF])
*

"The relationship between spending per student between the ages of 6 and 15 and student outcomes as measured by PISA [Programme for International Student Achievement, an international testing system] is weak. . . . It is estimated that across OECD countries, there is a potential for increasing learning outcomes by 22% while maintaining current levels of resources.” (Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] “Education at a Glance, 2007,” an international comparison of 30 countries)
*

"Lower unit expenditure [dollars per pupil, for example] does not necessarily lead to lower achievement and it would be misleading to equate a lower unit expenditure generally with lower quality of educational services." (OECD, “Education at a Glance”)
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“If we do not know how to achieve a given level of student performance, we cannot estimate the cost of attaining that goal.” (GDTF)
*

“If additional dollars were inserted into the current system there is no reason to expect substantial increases in student outcomes related to state goals.” (GDTF)

You can spend all the money in the world on K-12 education, but until we put more money in the classrooms and less in bureaucracy and act responsibly with what we have, the extra money will be for naught.

http://cssrc.us/%28X%281%29A%28bAN2a...ookieSupport=1

The California Teachers Association says that California ranks 47th in per pupil spending. http://www.cta.org/NR/rdonlyres/3509...QC20091909.pdf