Friday Report – February 17, 2017

For years, education advocacy groups and legislators have tried to change North Carolina’s uniquely strict law that mandates when school districts begin and end.

A report from the Program Evaluation Division of the General Assembly released Monday, however, advises the General Assembly to maintain the school calendar law as is — with an exception for low-performing schools and districts.

The report addresses the conflict between state government, parents, teachers, and the tourism and travel industries. School being out for the month of August, the report says, is important for tourism and travel, whereas educators would prefer the semester start earlier so that schools could be done with exams before the holidays and align with community college calendars.

“The disagreement among stakeholders about when North Carolina should start and end the school year can not be reconciled,” the report’s recommendation reads. “This conflict poses a dilemma because no choice can satisfy all stakeholders and any decision will be perceived as favoring the interests of some stakeholders over others.”

Right now, traditional-calendar schools must start no sooner than the Monday closest to August 26 and finish no later than the Friday closest to June 11.

For schools and districts deemed as low-performing by the State Board of Education, the report says calendar flexibility could increase student performance and help with summer learning loss. The report suggests that the Department of Public Instruction evaluate whether flexibility actually does help in struggling schools.

Many lawmakers are filing school calendar flexibility bills for their specific counties — but at least one House bill is trying to modify the law statewide.

Rep. Kevin Corbin, R-Cherokee, a primary sponsor of the bill, said giving local governments authority to decide what’s best is key. “If you look at it strictly from an education standpoint, I firmly believe, and I think every superintendent that I’ve spoken to so far believes, that that flexibility is a positive thing for education,” Corbin said.

Terry Stoops, the director of education studies at the right-leaning John Locke Foundation said he didn’t see why flexibility shouldn’t be extended to all school districts in the state. “If it’s a tool that can be used by low-performing schools and districts to raise student performance, then surely it can be used to do the same in other schools and school districts,” Stoops said.

The John Locke Foundation is part of a coalition called L.O.C.A.L. (standing for Let Our Calendar Authority be Local), along with seven other organizations that cross ideological lines and interests, including N.C. FreedomWorks, the N.C. Justice Center, the N.C. School Boards Association, Professional Educators of NC, the N.C. Association of School Administrators, N.C. PTA, and the N.C. Association of Educators.

Leanne Winner, the director of governmental relations at the N.C. School Boards Association, said the coalition remains in support of calendar revision for all schools. She said long breaks in the summer affect all students. Winner said there are “a litany” of reasons why that revision is needed — from availability of community college courses to high school students, to missed revenue from sports events held before the start of the school year.

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Heath Curtis Vandevender is charged with embezzling $388,422 between Jan. 1, 2008, and Dec. 31, 2015, from Truth Outreach Center Inc., located in Fayetteville. Trinity Christian School, which has received nearly $1 million in publicly-funded school vouchers since 2014, is under the Truth Outreach Center’s umbrella, according to the Fayetteville Observer.

The funds that Vandevender is accused of embezzling over a seven year period are allegedly taken from employee withholding tax money that was to go to the N.C. Department of Revenue.

Vandevender “aided and abetted the corporation to embezzle, misapply, and convert to its own use $388,422.68 in North Carolina Withholding Tax,” according to the Department of Revenue’s press release.

It’s unknown whether or not federal tax funds that the organization is supposed to withhold from employee paychecks and submit to the federal government were also misappropriated.

Trinity Christian School in Fayetteville has received $958,440 in Opportunity Scholarship funds (also known as school vouchers) since 2014. The program allows low-income families to use up to $4,200 annually in state-funded vouchers at private, mostly religious schools. While proponents of the program say it offers low-income families access to better education alternatives than what may be offered by public schools, critics point to the fact that there is not enough accountability associated with the state-funded program.

To continue reading the complete article, click here.

Excerpt from:

Wagner, L. “Employee of state’s largest recipient of school voucher funds accused of embezzling nearly $400,000 in public tax dollars.” A.J. Fletcher Foundation. 2/15/17.

N.C. State University and UNC-Chapel Hill are teaming up to offer a new online teacher licensure program for lateral entry hires.

Lateral entry hires are those who have degrees or training in a particular subject but lack the full teacher certification to be able to work in the classroom.

The program aims to help the state address a growing teacher shortage by providing a new entry path to the profession. The accelerated program, offered online only, is expected to take a year or 18 months to complete. It will cost less than $5,000, according to the announcement Thursday by the two universities.

The program was designed to be online so that working adults could take advantage of the training without leaving their jobs. It will start this fall with 50 students.

North Carolina employs more than 4,300 lateral-entry teachers, according to a 2015 report by the State Board of Education. But they tend to leave the profession at a rate 79 percent greater than other teachers, suggesting that they need better preparation for the classroom.

Faculty from the two campuses will teach the courses, in mathematics, science, English/language arts and social studies, and eventually special education. Students will have mentors. The courses will be designed so that students achieve targets and show their mastery of skills. The competency-based approach, which can move students through more quickly, was awarded a $148,000 grant from the UNC system’s General Administration.

For more information on the program, go to nando.com/lateralentry.

To continue reading the complete press release, click here.

Excerpt from:

Stancill, J. “NCSU, UNC to offer online program for teacher licensure.” The News & Observer. 2/9/17. 

Over the past few years, teachers across North Carolina received highly publicized pay raises. The increases were generally met with few objections and heralded as long overdue.

Left out of the press releases, however, was a shift that reduced teaching assistant positions, something that will hurt disadvantaged students across the state.

After steady, if slight, growth in teaching positions through 2009, the number of positions has taken steps backward in the following seven years. The 21,048 teaching assistant positions during the 2015-16 school year was 30 percent below the number of similar positions in 2008-09.

Image Credit: NCDPI

The downward trend has happened despite legislative promises this decline wouldn’t happen. After approving a pay raise for teachers in 2014, Senate leader Phil Berger said, “The budget will also preserve teacher assistant positions, protect classroom funding and continue to give superintendents broad flexibility to tailor classroom spending to their district’s needs.”

When asked about his comments, Berger’s spokeswoman Shelly Carver said that funding levels stayed the same, but the state did not narrowly dictate that local school boards use the money only for teaching assistants.

“In other words, the General Assembly has maintained the FY 2014-15 level of funding for teacher assistants and stopped local school districts from transferring funds out of the teacher assistant allotment since 2015,” Carver wrote in an email. “Obviously we cannot control fluctuations in federally/locally funded positions or changes due to declining enrollment in some districts.”

This trend has happened at the same time that new research directly links student success with the existence of teaching assistants, particularly for economically disadvantaged students, according to a 2016 study by led by Helen Ladd, a Duke University professor of economics.

Combined with other factors, fewer teaching assistants could lead to more inequities within North Carolina’s public schools.

“The evidence shows that additional teaching assistants for disadvantaged student groups contribute to higher test scores,” according to the study’s findings. “… The consistency of the general patterns suggests that TAs are more productive for the disadvantaged students than for their more advantaged counterparts.”

To continue reading the complete article, click here.

Excerpt from:

Debruyn, J. “Fewer Teaching Assistants Means Fewer Minority Staff In Classrooms.” WUNC. 2/15/17.

For the third time since she was confirmed as education secretary, Betsy DeVos spoke with a Michigan media outlet to discuss her confirmation process and her priorities. And she made it clear she’s looking for ways to reduce the size and scope of the U.S. Department of Education.

In a Tuesday interview on the Michael Patrick Shiels radio program, DeVos said the confirmation was an “interesting and protracted” process, and that she was glad to get started as secretary. Asked by Shiels about the education department’s responsibilities, DeVos noted that it was only her fourth day on the job at the department. Then she said:

I can’t tell you today what is being done that’s unnecessary. But I can guarantee that there are things that the department has been doing that are probably not necessary or important for a federal agency to do. We’ll be looking at that. We’ll be examining and auditing and reviewing all of the programs of the department and really figuring out what is the core mission, and how can the federal department of education really support and enhance the role of the departments in the states. Because really, when it comes down to it, education and the provision of education is really a state and local responsibility to a large extent.

You can listen to the full interview with Shiels here.

DeVos did not specify which programs or policy areas at the department where she might explore or be potentially interested in cuts. Right now, the department has an approximately $68 billion annual budget, and just under a third of that is taken up by discretionary Pell Grants for higher education.

Lawmakers and the Obama administration already cut a number of K-12 programs when they passed the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. That means there are fewer small programs for DeVos to target than there were just a few years ago.

Ujifusa, A. “Betsy DeVos: I’ll Look for Unnecessary Programs to Cut at the Education Dept.” Education Week. 2/14/17.

Students in Ohio’s burgeoning full-time online charter schools perform far worse on state assessments than similar students in brick-and-mortar charter and regular schools, according to a new study from researchers at New York University and the RAND Corporation.

The schools, which deliver instruction entirely or primarily via the internet, tend to attract lower-income, lower-performing white students, then fail to provide those children with the supports they need, the study concluded.

“Students in Ohio e-schools are losing anywhere between 75 days and a full school year of learning compared to their peers in traditional public schools and brick-and-mortar charter schools,” Andrew McEachin, a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, said in an interview.

“If kids are in e-schools for a long time, they’re likely going to fall very far behind their peers.”

The findings are outlined in a study titled “Student Enrollment Patterns and Achievement in Ohio’s Online Charter Schools,” published Thursday in the academic journal Educational Researcher. They closely mirror a nationwide 2015 study of cyber charter school performance by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which found that more than two-thirds of the country’s 200 or so cyber charters perform worse than comparable traditional schools.

The findings are more bad news for Ohio’s e-schools, nine of which are currently being targeted by the state education department as part of an effort to claw back more than $80 million in taxpayer funds. Following a series of attendance audits conducted last year, state officials contend the nine schools were paid for more than 9,000 students who did not complete enough coursework to be considered full-time. The state’s largest e-school, the 15,000-student Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, has contested the results via a lawsuit and administrative appeals.

The new analysis is based on state data covering nearly 1.7 million Ohio students per year from the 2009-10 school year through the 2012-13 school year.

To continue reading the complete article, click here.

Excerpt from:

Herold, B. “Online Charter Students in Ohio Perform Far Worse Than Peers, Study Finds.” Education Week. 2/16/17.

The Burroughs Wellcome Fund has opened its application for the 2017 Student Science Enrichment Program (SSEP) grant awards. SSEP supports diverse programs with a common goal: to enable primary and secondary students to participate in creative, hands-on scientific activities for K-12 students and pursue inquiry-based exploration in BWF’s home state of North Carolina. These awards provide up to $60,000 per year for three years. The application deadline is April 18, 2017.

For more information or to access the application, visit https://www.bwfund.org/grant-programs/science-education/student-science-enrichment-program.