Challenges in Urban School Education

The chronic low performance of the nation's urban school systems is one of the most challenging issues facing educators and policymakers today. Not only public authorities but also charitable foundations and businesses have poured their resources, ideas and talents into the task of improving urban schools. Despite these efforts, the future continues to appear bleak for many children in inner-city school districts across the country. 

To be sure, urban schools over the past several decades have had to cope with extraordinary challenges. The students they serve are more than twice as likely to be living in poverty as other children, more likely to have difficulty speaking English, less likely to live in a two-parent family, almost twice as likely to be assigned to special education, far more likely to drop out and more likely to move frequently, disrupting their schooling. In addition, urban schools are subject to deteriorating school buildings, inadequate teaching materials and technology, dwindling financial resources, and shortages of qualified and committed teachers, principals and support staff. 

States and districts have created and implemented a variety of new, and sometimes radical, approaches to how urban districts are organized and managed. These efforts include initiatives to break urban systems into smaller units, to privatize district operations, to redesign and/or privatize the district's top management and to establish private-school voucher programs. States also are using a variety of funding mechanisms to help induce change and improvement in urban schools districts, including financial incentives, new accounting systems, support for restructuring, and increased support for Head Start and other school readiness programs. In addition, nearly half of the states have established accountability mechanisms that allow state officials to monitor more closely school district performance and to intervene directly in the operation of low-performing districts. 


VIA: HERE 

The Significance of the Tennessee School Finance Decision.

The Supreme Court of Tennessee, in "Tennessee Small School Systems, Inc. v. McWherter," declared that Tennessee's method of financing its public schools violated the state constitution. The court's mode of analysis relies on the state equal protection clause rather than the state education clause. Examines implications for school finance cases in other states. (93 footnotes) (MLF)

Thro, William E.

West's Education Law Quarterly, v3 n1 p66-81 Jan 1994

Country v. Town: School Finance Reform in Tennessee.

Three conference papers on school finance reform in Tennessee are presented in this document, with a focus on the disparities between rural and urban public school funding. The first paper examines the nature and size of contributions of various funding sources to the per-pupil revenue in local school districts, analyzes specific problems of the Tennessee Foundation Program (TFP), and investigates state categorical support. The second paper presents an overview of state legislation challenging the TFP's constitutionality. The declaratory judgment handed down in "Tennessee Small School Systems v. McWherter" (1978) held that Tennessee school funding was not uniform and was therefore in violation of the equal protection provisions in the state constitution. The third paper determines the extent to which the TFP equalized funding for all districts and concludes that none of the 1979 Tennessee School Finance Equity Study's recommendations have been implemented. Problems of the TFP included inadequate appropriations, inadequate state funding, and failure to keep up with inflation. References and tables are included with each article. (LMI)

Hirth, Marilyn A.; And Others

Remaking Memphis: Charters, Choice, and Experimentation

Array of strategies aims to transform Tennessee's largest district

By Jaclyn Zubrzycki via Ed Week 

Memphis, Tenn.

With a growing charter school sector, a new state-run district with plans to expand, and a reconfigured central office, Memphis is poised to become the next national center for New Orleans-style school governance.
Even as a commission spent the past two years planning for the largest school district merger in the nation's history—the former Memphis city district and an adjacent suburban system became the unified 140,000-student, 222-school Shelby County district on July 1—the landscape of governance within the legacy city school system was changing rapidly to favor parental choice and more autonomous schools.
The changes underway here include:
• A rapidly expanding array of charter schools. Home to just three charter schools 10 years ago, Memphis now has 41 charters, and more are on the way, including schools that will be part of some of the nation's best-known charter networks.
• A growing Achievement School District. The nation's second state-run school district, Tennessee's Achievement School District oversees 12 schools in the city and plans to run more than 50, most of them within Memphis, over the next five years.
• An "Innovation Zone." Created by the district as the analogue to the state-run district, the Innovation Zone, or I-Zone, encompasses 13 schools that have budget and hiring autonomy.
As a model for the Memphis efforts, district, charter, and state leaders are looking down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, where the state-run Recovery School District has converted most of the public schools in the city to charter status. The goal is to create a "system of schools rather than a school system," said Bradley Leon, the new chief innovation officer for the Shelby County district.

Eight-year-old Laniah Bowdery, front, waits with her classmates to perform at a reading assembly at Lowrance Elementary School in Memphis. Lowrance won state recognition this year for improving its students' reading and math scores.

—Timothy Ivy for Education Week

"Our belief is that Memphis is poised to be either the first or among the first major urban centers to fully and deeply transform public education for all kids—in our case, without having had to suffer a hurricane to get there," said Barbara Hyde, the president of the Hyde Family Foundations, a philanthropy in Memphis that funds some of the efforts.
She referred to Hurricane Katrina, whose destructive path in 2005 opened the way for an accelerated remake of the New Orleans school system, where more than 80 percent of students now attend charter schools.
"We have an unprecedented alignment of human-capital partners, a pipeline of talent, demonstrated high-performing school models, and a pipeline of new charter schools coming into the city," Ms. Hyde said.

Setting the Scene

State and local policy changes over the past few years have cleared the way for some of the shifts in Memphis and helped draw the interest of charter operators around the country.
Then-Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, signed Tennessee's First to the Top Act into law in 2010, which created the Achievement School District. The same year, Tennessee received a federal Race to the Top grant that included funds for the ASD. A separate 2011 state law opened enrollment in charter schools to all students and removed the cap on the number of schools.
"The policy context in the state, with no cap on charters, no collective bargaining, and one of the best authorizers in the country [the ASD] means some of the best [charter operators] are saying, I want to come to Memphis," said Chris Barbic, the executive director of the ASD.

Teachers in the Shelby County district also work in an altered policy environment: Collective bargaining was repealed in 2011; a 2013 state law requires teachers and principals to mutually agree on whether or not a teacher would work at a given school; and Tennessee teachers' evaluations are now tied to their students' scores on the state exams. The merged district has also moved away from seniority-based hiring.
Those changes have made the city fertile ground for the expansion of alternative-certification programs like Teach for America and Teach Memphis, according to Athena Turner, the executive director of Teach for America in Memphis.
Benjamin Fenton, the founder of New Leaders, a New York City-based group that trains aspiring principals and consults on school and district leadership, said the district's focus on school-level leadership, and philanthropic investment from local and national foundations, had brought his organization to the city in 2004 and opened the doors for others since.
The state also sent a signal by hiring Mr. Barbic, the founder of the Houston-based YES Prep charter network, to oversee the Achievement School District schools.

A Proof Point

Mr. Barbic said that Shelby County's schools would prove the benefits of school choice, both for families and for teachers, enabling them to choose the best school from a range of operators. He said he imagines district-run Memphis-area schools and the ASD working together in "co-opetition"—friendly competition—to improve.
Dorsey Hopson II, the district's new superintendent, is equally enthusiastic about the potential for dramatic change. "If we could give all of our schools the autonomy that the I-Zone has and the ASD has and the charter schools have—I think it'd be a recipe for success," he said.
Meanwhile, the merger of the Memphis and Shelby County districts opened up opportunities for conversations about just how the central office should be structured. Some 300 out of 1,000 central-office jobs were cut in the resulting reorganization, according to Mr. Hopson.
"When [the merger] started, initially it felt like a mess. But it turned out to be an extraordinary opportunity to throw everything up in the air and look at how to create a whole new system," said Ms. Hyde.
The changes are not uncontroversial, though.
Standing Together for Strong Community Schools, a nonprofit group in the state, views the state-run district and the growing charter sector as a move away from local control. Its members protest what their website describes as "well-funded special interests intent on dismantling our school systems, diverting public money from public schools, and limiting the voice of Tennessee citizens in shaping education policy through our local elected school boards."
The ASD and the district's I-Zone share the goal of raising the 69 Memphis schools that ranked in the state's bottom 5 percent on state standardized tests into the top 25 percent of schools, and both began taking charge of schools last school year after receiving an infusion of money from the state.
The ASD functions as an authorizer for six schools in the city and operates an additional six Memphis schools as "achievement schools," which are run as though they were a separate charter-management organization within the ASD. The achievement schools took over a feeder pattern of schools in Frayser, a particularly troubled area of the city.
Each school in the achievement district is required to accept all students who had previously been zoned to the school. The rule means charter operators must prove that they can show strong results without "creaming" students, or somehow enrolling an easier-to-teach group of students than the regular public schools do.

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Where Are These Schools Located?

Use the Google Map below to explore the Memphis school district, including its I-Zone schools, as well as the area's charter and achievement schools. (Map by Doris Nhan) (map not included see original posting via Ed Week)

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Innovation Zone

Prominent national charter operators, including YES Prep and the Oakland, Calif.-based Aspire, plan to open schools within the ASD in the next few years.
Mr. Barbic said he anticipates that by 2016, the ASD will run as many as 53 schools—most of them in Memphis—and serve as many as 19,000 students.
The 13 schools in the district's I-Zone are granted some of the same budget and hiring autonomy as a charter school or a school in the ASD. Once a school becomes part of the I-Zone, every teacher must reapply for his or her job. Some schools in the zone have an extended school day, and principals can select which interventions they'd like to use in their schools.
Antonio Burt, who is in his second year as the principal of Ford Road Elementary School, in the Westwood community, said the flexibility allowed him to blend various strategies he'd learned in New Leaders trainings and from colleagues around the country.
His school has an extended school day and a schedule that changes every few weeks to allow for longer blocks of instruction. "The I-Zone helped us maneuver around some red tape," Mr. Burt said.
Despite the longer workday and an atmosphere Mr. Burt proudly described as competitive, the school lost just two teachers last year and was recognized as among the state's most-improved schools.
While the state-run district can technically take over any school in the bottom 5 percent, Mr. Barbic said the ASD hosted community meetings and worked with the regular school district to determine which schools should be taken over.
Superintendent Hopson said that the regular district had been able to keep some schools under its own authority.
"Whenever we've said, hey, for community reasons or historic reasons, we would like to run these schools, and put these schools in our I-Zone, the response has always been, well, show me what your plan is," he said.
The I-Zone schools showed some of the highest gains on reading and math tests in the state last year, higher than both the rest of the district and the ASD. Helping parents navigate the mix of choices in the district is challenging, however.

Changing Landscape

Greg Thompson, the executive director of the Tennessee Charter School Center, which incubates and advocates for charter schools, said his organization was working on a website that would help parents understand what schools are available to them.
But Beverly Goliday, who has six grandchildren in the district, said that at this particular moment, "it is very complicated to find a school."
Although the expansion of the charter schools in other districts, including Philadelphia, has led some district leaders to raise concerns, Mr. Hopson is optimistic.
"Obviously, as more charters come online, enrollment in the district's going to go down," he said. "But the main focus or issue should be on making sure we have as many good schools as possible."
He said there were still some details to work out: For instance, he said, state funding should change to reflect the district's expenses in administering charter schools.
Still, the pace of change isn't slowing anytime soon, both because of the expansion of the ASD and the I-Zone and because of a forthcoming wrinkle in the merger: Six suburban districts in the area are expected to vote to create their own school boards and separate from the merged system this fall.
With that prospect looming, the merged Shelby County district does not yet know whether it will have 80,000, 100,000, or 140,000 students in the next school year. That uncertainty "keeps us on our toes," Mr. Hopson said.

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Coverage of leadership, expanded learning time, and arts learning is supported in part by a grant from The Wallace Foundation, at www.wallacefoundation.org. Education Week retains sole editorial control over the content of this coverage.

Vol. 33, Issue 07, Pages 1,18-19

State of Tennessee: Individuals With Disabilities Act (IDEA)

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is a law ensuring services to children with disabilities throughout the nation. IDEA governs how states and public agencies provide early intervention, special education and related services to more than 6.5 million eligible infants, toddlers, children and youth with disabilities.

Infants and toddlers with disabilities (birth-2) and their families receive early intervention services under IDEA Part C. Children and youth (ages 3-21) receive special education and related services under IDEA Part B.

State of Tennessee IDEA

National IDEA

Amendments in Arizona

POST VIA

PROPOSED

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES AMENDMENTS TO S.B. 1172

(Reference to Senate engrossed bill)

Page 1, between lines 1 and 2, insert:

"Section 1.  Section 15-511, Arizona Revised Statutes, is amended to read:

15-511.  Use of school district or charter school resources or employees to influence elections; prohibition; civil penalty; definitions

A.  A person acting on behalf of a school district or a person who aids another person acting on behalf of a school district shall not spend or use school district or charter school resources, including the use or expenditure of monies, accounts, credit, facilities, vehicles, postage, telecommunications, computer hardware and software, web pages, personnel, equipment, materials, buildings or any other thing of value of the school district or charter school, for the purpose of influencing the outcomes of elections or to advocate support for or opposition to pending or proposed legislation. Notwithstanding this section, a school district may distribute informational reports on a proposed budget override election as provided in section 15‑481, subsections B and C or informational reports on a proposed bond election as provided in section 15‑491, subsection D if those informational reports present factual information in a neutral manner, except for those arguments presented as prescribed in section 15-481, subsection B, paragraph 9.  Nothing in this section precludes a school district from reporting on official actions of the governing board.

B.  This section does not prohibit the use of school district or charter school resources, including facilities and equipment, for government‑sponsored forums or debates if the government sponsor remains impartial and the events are purely informational and provide an equal opportunity to all viewpoints.  The rental and use of a public facility by a private person or entity that may lawfully attempt to influence the outcome of an election is permitted if it does not occur at the same time and place as a government-sponsored forum or debate. 

C.  An employee of a school district or charter school who is acting as an agent of or working in an official capacity for the school district or charter school may not give pupils written materials to influence the outcome of an election or to advocate support for or opposition to pending or proposed legislation.

D.  Employees of a school district or charter school may not use the authority of their positions to influence the vote or political activities of any subordinate employee.

E.  Notwithstanding section 15‑342, paragraph 8, a school district shall not spend monies for membership in an association that attempts to influence the outcome of an election.  

F.  Nothing contained in this section shall be construed as denying the civil and political liberties of any person as guaranteed by the United States and Arizona Constitutions.

G.  The attorney general shall publish and distribute to school districts and charter schools a detailed guideline regarding activities prohibited under this section.  The attorney general may distribute these guidelines through a website or electronically.

H.  The attorney general or the county attorney for the county in which an alleged violation of this section occurred may initiate a suit in the superior court in the county in which the school district or charter school is located for the purpose of complying with this section.  

I.  For each violation of this section, the court may impose a civil penalty not to exceed five thousand dollars plus any amount of misused funds subtracted from the school district budget against a person who knowingly violates or a person who knowingly aids another person in violating this section.  The person determined to be out of compliance with this section shall be responsible for the payment of all penalties and misused funds.  School district funds or insurance payments shall not be used to pay these penalties or misused funds.  All misused funds collected pursuant to this section shall be returned to the school district or charter school whose funds were misused.

J.  An attorney acting on behalf of a public school may request a legal opinion of the county attorney or attorney general as to whether a proposed use of school district resources would violate this section.

K.  All penalties collected by the court for a suit initiated in superior court by the attorney general shall be paid to the office of the attorney general for the use and reimbursement of costs of prosecution pursuant to this section.  All penalties collected by the court for a suit initiated in superior court by a county attorney shall be paid to the county treasurer of the county in which the court is held for the use and reimbursement of costs of prosecution pursuant to this section.

L.  For the purposes of this section:

1.  "Government-sponsored forum or debate" means any event, or part of an event or meeting, in which the government is an official sponsor, which is open to the public or to invited members of the public, and whose purpose is to inform the public about an issue or proposition that is before the voters.

2.  "Influencing the outcomes of elections" means supporting or opposing a candidate for nomination or election to public office or the recall of a public officer or supporting or opposing a ballot measure, question or proposition, including any bond, budget or override election and supporting or opposing the circulation of a petition for the recall of a public officer or a petition for a ballot measure, question or proposition in any manner that is not impartial or neutral.

3.  "Misused funds" means school district monies or resources used unlawfully pursuant to this section."

Renumber to conform

Amend title to conform

                                                JAY LAWRENCE

1172-p1-lawrence

3/16/15

3:40 PM

H:ajs