Legislators to superintendents: Spend your money

When Arkansas's House and Senate Education committees heard this week how school districts were spending -- or rather NOT spending -- categorical funds, they were not happy.

Categorical funds, as opposed to the foundational funds discussed in the previous post, are state monies to help schools provide extra support for certain students:

• Poverty (called "NSLA" funds in legislation) monies are distributed to schools based on the number of students qualifying for the National School Lunch Program
• Alternative Learning Environment funds target students with behavior, academic, health or similar issues who do not succeed in the regular school setting
• English Language Learner funds are meant for students whose first language is not English

School districts receive those funds based on the number of students they have in each category.

The Legislative Bureau of Research reported the findings to the committees on Tuesday as they continued their discussions to set future education spending by the state.

On average, by the end of the 2011-2012 school year, school districts only spent:

• 81% of their funds designated to help students in poverty
• 92% of their funds to help English language learners
• 82% of their funds to help students who require alternative education environments, largely due to behavioral issues. 

No doubt, school districts sometimes have good reasons for not spending all their funds in a certain category. Even so, as legislators pointed out, the legislation was designed to give school districts an extra pot of money to spend THAT year.

For instance, poverty funding is meant to pay for things like year-long tutoring, summer and after school programs and transportation to and from those programs -- all geared to help students' achieve higher.

No wonder legislators were appalled that the school districts with the highest amounts of poverty funds remaining at the end of the school year in 2010-2011 also had some of the highest percentages of low-performing students.

Legislators also were upset with the low spending on alternative learning environments.

Alternative schools are meant to be a place where students can learn in a more personalized environment and receive help for specific problems, be they family circumstances, substance abuse or something else. It's meant to keep kids from falling off the educational radar and produce productive citizens instead of potential criminals or deadbeats.

How those schools are set up, run and funded by school districts is very likely to be a topic legislators study in the next General Assembly.

Education Adequacy: Funding it and paying for it 2 different things

Arkansas's Constitution promises an equitable and adequate education for the children in our state, and since the post-Lakeview ruling by the Supreme Court, our legislature has used a school funding formula that stems straight from those two goals.

But it can be more confusing than it sounds.

The important thing to get your head around when listening to school funding conversations is that the legislature outlines a set of expenditures for schools each year that represent the amount it takes to educate each student to an "adequate level." The state then distributes funds to school districts according to that formula.

That process is separate and apart from how school districts budget and spend that money.

For example, Arkansas's House and Senate Education Committees began considering the state's "foundation formula" for schools for the 2013-14 school year. You may hear legislators and educators refer to the "matrix" -- that's the chart that includes costs like average teachers' pay, technology needs, day-to-day maintenance, substitute teachers -- basically everything that goes into providing an education for a child.

The catch here is that those costs, for efficiencies' sake, are calculated for a student in an enrollment of 500. That's fine for schools and school districts of 500 or more, but, in 2010-2011, Arkansas had 36 schools with enrollments less than 500.  That means the money in those districts has to stretch farther.  It seems unfair, but there's a back story.

In the same 2004 special legislative session when the funding formula was developed (and taxes were raised to support school funding) Governor Huckabee and many legislators agreed that some efficiency of spending had to be guaranteed for the state's taxpayers. At that time, Arkansas had well over 300 school districts, many of them very small.

Because it's easier to spend money more efficiently in larger districts, Governor Huckabee proposed an enrollment base of 1,500 for school districts. Smaller ones would be consolidated to make larger ones. The outcry was deafening, with a good bit of it coming from superintendents who were facing the fact that they'd be out of a job.

The proposed 1,500 enrollment base dropped to 500, then to 350. But, remember, the funding formula was based on 500. To keep their small districts open, superintendents at that time promised legislators they could make do.

So that's one piece of confusion that has to be explained each year by legislators like Sen. Joyce Elliott and Sen. Jimmy Jeffress, who were around when all that happened.

The other piece of confusion occurs when the actual expenditures of schools are looked at and don't measure up to the matrix expectations.  For example, the matrix earmarks $209 per student for technology, and the average expense by districts in that category is only $129 per student. The thing to remember here is that the foundation money is given to schools to ensure they have enough funds to provide an adequate education to their students. School district administrators get to decide how they must spend the money to provide an adequate education.

That makes sense.  Just think about the $209 per student for technology.  A school district that has just used a lot of federal money to invest in technology -- Smart Boards and computers and such -- for its schools can use the bulk of those state technology dollars for something more needed, perhaps additional staff or a reading program.

One last point for this long blog posting that was made eloquently by Sen. Elliott yesterday.  The matrix funding is not based on what it takes to build an ideal school and education for Arkansas students, but an adequate one. So while our state can and should be very proud of the strides we've made over the last decade, we need to remember that there's a world of difference between ideal and adequate.

Thank goodness for Smart Core

I don't hear Smart Core -- the state's high school graduation requirements -- being talked about as much as they were during the years I worked at the Arkansas Department of Education. I hope that's because everyone accepts the value of that curriculum whether students plan to immediately enter college or instead find a job.

Even just five years ago, though, it was difficult to convince some people that everyone really benefits from Smart Core. The story that most convinced me was a young man we interviewed who hadn't been encouraged to take challenging courses in high school, found work after leaving 12th grade and realized 10 year later that to have the kind of job that paid the level of income he needed to support his family meant he needed some sort of degree.  He got one, but wished he had done so earlier when it would have been easier.

My thought was why not prepare all students to be ready for higher education (we know the majority of jobs now require it) and let them decide to opt out of college on their own after they finish high school?

This all comes to mind because I'm on a college-visiting trip with my son.  At the first out-of-state public university we visited, I perked up (a little nervously) when the admissions staff started listing the core set of classes students must have on their transcripts to be admitted.

I was thrilled when they practically sang the old Smart Core 3-4-3-4 jingle -- three sciences, four maths, three social studies and four Englishes.  (Of course, this university also required two years of foreign language. Luckily many Arkansas high schools -- including my son's -- require that as well, even though Smart Core doesn't.)

Treating teachers in style

Here's a great event we just learned about that perfectly illustrates the kind of community support and partnership we've been writing about in the last few entries.  Lakeside School District (Chicot County) teachers will be celebrated with a reception sponsored by Simmons First Bank at the local country club.

What a great way to recognize the importance of teachers!

Let us know if your community has something special planned as the first day of school draws closer.

Smart ways for smart communities to help produce smart kids

Smart communities are involved in collaborative, supportive and needed efforts with their local school districts to improve student achievement. That only makes sense.

What are some ways communities can help their schools provide a great education for their students? According to former Arkansas Teacher of the Year Kathy Powers, whose research we featured last week, Arkansas's data suggests the following:

• Offer summer programs for children who are from disadvantaged homes. The gap in learning that occurs during the summer months when school is out is tremendous, she said. Children from families with more income tend to be enriched during the summer through camps, vacations and other experiences that keep their minds active. This disparity in summer learning leads to an increasingly larger achievement gap for students that grows with each grade. By providing quality summer enrichment experiences for youth, communities can help all children stay on grade level.
• Provide books for kids to read. The number of books in the home is repeatedly shown to be a predictor of student success. Community groups could easily donate books or money for books (from teacher-approved reading lists) to children to enjoy at home during the summer or long breaks. Another idea is a mobile library that frequently visits those neighborhoods where students may have less access to the main library, especially during summer months.
• Lengthen the school year. This is what some of the more successful charter schools in the state do. State Senator David Johnson has worked on legislation to get this concept kick-started for everyone else. A major hurdle is that it's such an expensive proposition. Powers said that even if school days are not added, altering the school year to include shorter breaks throughout would minimize the problem. There's be opposition from some segments, no doubt, but it shouldn't cost that much more.
• Provide support for single-parent families. Powers' research shows this as a major risk factor for student acheivement. Childcare, transportation, having enough food -- all these are issues that single parents may face as they raise their children.

Obviously, there are so many ways communities can work with their school districts to improve the outcome for students. First Class Communication strongly believes that these efforts must be made in partnership with the school districts, and that they are most effective when they are planned and implemented in support of school district improvement goals.

If you have examples of smart community-school partnerships, we'd love for you to share them with us. Either respond to this blog or email me at julie@firstclasscommunication.com.

That's what we're talking about!

What do you know? We're in the midst of writing about the importance of community and parent partnerships with their local schools, and a letter in the newspaper nails the point.

Education is the key to succeess, Little Rock elemenary school teacher Beatriz Miyares Kimball wrote in the July 25 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Especially for children like those she works with, who are considered to be "at risk." She's obviously doing her part, but as 2011 Arkansas Teacher of the Year Kathy Powers showed through Arkansas-based research, teachers alone can't make the difference that's needed.

Kimball pleads: "Our communities need to do all they can to support our schools, our teachers and our students. It doesn't take a lot. If you have an extra hour a week, come to a classroom and listen to children read. If your business can afford it, let your employees volunteer in a nearby school for an hour a week. You will be investing in the future and pointing a child along the road to success."

First Class Communication will take that latter bit of advice to heart. What about you?

Student Achievement: Risk factors, Protective factors and Non-factors

A while back, we mentioned the impressive research presentation by the 2011 Arkansas Teacher of the Year Kathy Powers to the Arkansas State Board of Education. The topic? School and community factors in Arkansas that could help or hurt student acheivement.

First Class Communication had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Kathy further about her research, which she performed with husband Ed, a sociology professor at the University of Central Arkansas.

We were even more impressed.

In looking at five years worth of county and school data for Arkansas and correlating that with Arkansas Benchmark literacy scores, here's what they found. Some of it confirms conventional wisdom and national research, some of it is more surprising. But it goes to show that the community-school link is tightly woven. Improving the community will improve the school, and vice versa.

• The biggest county factors in Arkansas that are associated with lower test scores, what the Powers call risk factors, are:
• The percent of female-headed households
• A county's concentration of economically disadvantaged
• Overall poverty of a county
• Unemployment rate in a county
• The biggest school risk factors are:
•  Lack of student attendance (though she said the data on this seemed somewhat spotty; still attendance is sort of a no-brainer indicator for performance)
• The percent of low-income students
• If a school was more segregated than the community it was in
• The biggest county factors in Arkansas that are associated with higher test scores, or what the Powers call protective factors, are:
• Population growth in a county
• Median income
• The percent of residents with a high school diploma
• The increase in Hispanics (this may be a by-product of the positive effect of the overall growth of a county
• Protective school factors:
• The more teachers with master's degrees, the better the students' Benchmark scores. This is surprising because it conflicts the findings of national research. Powers, however, says that it seems logical to her that teachers who are interested in learning are more likely to convey that appreciation for education to their students.
• School size -- larger schools tended to produce higher test scores.

And as for non-factors, which were the most surprising:  whether the community was rural or urban, the percent with college degrees and the percent who didn't speak English in the home.

Powers would love to see communities and schools work in closer partnership with each other to address the weaknesses that have such a significant impact on them both.

We'll follow up with a later post on what some of her suggestions for doing so are, so stay tuned!