Tag: FAFSA

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Latest Edu-Reads

Beth Hawkins has your must-read of the week with the incredible true story of the Rosenwald schools. Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, partnered with Booker T. Washington to build more than 5,000 schools for black communities across the South. Researchers from the Federal Reserve “concluded that the Rosenwald schools significantly bolstered literacy, earnings and South-to-North migration among rural blacks.” Check out the full story here.

“Dallas ISD is in fact retaining its best teachers at rates above the state’s and the district’s retention rates before the implementation of TEI. Overall, the district has kept 93% of teachers rated “Proficient II” or above. The district has retained 100% of its master-level teachers.” That’s from an update on how Dallas is doing on retaining its best teachers.

Education Strategy Group has a new resource on how states can boost FAFSA completion rates.

InsideHigherEd reports on a new study finding that many programs at public and nonprofit colleges would also fail the “gainful employment” test.

A new brief by John V. Winters concludes, “Working in a locality where a greater share of the population has a college degree is correlated with higher wages and better employment outcomes even controlling for individuals’ own education and other characteristics. Studies based on various natural experiments suggest that this positive relationship is causal.” That is, education is not just a benefit to individuals, it also has wider societal benefits.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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Holiday Edu-Reads

This Wall Street Journal story is worth your time. Financial companies buy their way into teachers lounges with offers of free food or other perks, only to sell teachers on expensive, fee-laded 403(b) plans. Meanwhile, state and national teachers unions are willing middlemen who get kickbacks from these deals. Lest you don’t trust the Wall Street Journal, here’s a similar story from The New York Times and many more horror stories from the nonprofit 403bwise.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is this ProPublica story from New Jersey, where health plans for school employees cover the full cost of out-of-network expenses. The results are what you might expect:

In recent months, teachers across New Jersey have been protesting, even striking, for higher wages and more affordable benefits. Meanwhile, a state analysis shows, the glut of out-of-network payments has consumed hundreds of millions of dollars in the past four years. That’s money that experts say could have helped fund the teachers’ demands. And New Jersey residents are also pitching in to pay the bills: Homeowners in the towns where the schools are located are chipping in through higher property taxes.

Health care costs can be controlled with more aggressive oversight. Here’s a story about a Boston union and how they did it:

It required union members to make a trade-off that many, at first, found unpalatable — giving up access to some of the city’s best known, and most expensive, hospitals.

In return, however, workers not only kept their insurance premiums under control, they saved so much money that housekeepers like Rajae Nouira saw their hourly pay increase from $16.98 to $23.60 in five years, a 39% jump.

 

Evan Coughenour is not Catholic, but he has a growing appreciation for Catholic schools.

Tresha Ward has some tips for principals on how to lead autonomous schools, and how that’s different than leading any other school.

Elizabeth Ross and Kelli Lakis look at licensure rules for teachers crossing state lines.

The FAFSA is about to be simplified, here’s Evie Blad on what that means for students and Lamar Alexander’s favorite prop.

Matt Chingos surveys the landscape on free college proposals and explains why, “A plan that simply pays whatever colleges are charging would bail out states like Vermont at the expense of states like Wyoming — and encourage states to raise tuition to capture more federal money.”

EdSource has a deep dive, with a cool map, into community college transfer rates in California. About 40 percent of community college students in California eventually transfer to the state’s university systems, but those rates vary widely based on geography.

Nat Malkus is worried about screen time for kids. As a parent, I wish my kids’ school would send them home with some homework this holiday season. Or at least extra library books. Instead, all I got was a reminder of my kids’ login for online learning platforms so they could spend their break with MORE screen time. No thanks…

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

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Latest Edu-News

The edTPA is “a high-stakes assessment that’s expensive, discriminates against people of color, is vulnerable to cheating, and forces schools to teach to the test.” That’s Mike Antonucci summarizing this article by Madeline Will about new research on edTPA… Oh, and the edTPA is also not a great predictor of teacher effectiveness. But other than that…

Justin Trinidad interviews Felicia Butts, the Director of Teacher Residencies at Chicago Public Schools, about their bilingual teacher residency program.

When a traditional school district is losing the competition for students to… other traditional school districts. It’s weird how the word “charter” doesn’t appear in the piece at all!

“whether they’re GreatSchools’ ratings, state ratings, or anything else, let’s make them as accurate and nuanced as possible—but let’s also focus on ensuring they are truly useful and accessible to all families.” That’s David Keeling from EdNavigator about how the families they work with interact with school ratings.

Here’s your regular reminder that colleges determine what “college-ready” means.

A new study finds that housing vouchers boosted math and reading scores in New York City.

Billions of dollars are at stake. There will be only one champion. I’m talking, of course, about the FAFSA Fast Break challenge.

After multiple pauses, Congress has finally agreed to kill the “Cadillac Tax” on high-cost health care plans. This was one of the key funding provisions of the original Affordable Care Act. As I noted back in July, the Cadillac Tax was meant to address a particularly bad incentive baked into our tax policies:

I’d rather Americans didn’t have our health care benefits tied to our employers at all, but we’ve created a particularly weird incentive by not taxing employer spending on health care. That creates a system where the people using health care have little reason to help control health care costs. And, in the long run, employers spend more and more on benefits at the expense of salaries and wages. That’s bad for efficiency, bad for budgets, and, ultimately, bad for workers.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

 

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Latest Edu-Reads

Check out FAFSA completion rates by poverty rate in your state, via this cool tool by Bill DeBaun for the National College Access Network. In my home state of Virginia, for example, students in the highest-poverty schools have FAFSA completion rates that are about 15 percentage points lower than in the lowest-poverty schools. That is, the students who could benefit from the FAFSA the most are the least likely to complete it. Check out how your state looks.

99 percent of public community colleges use standardized tests to determine which students are ready for college-level math, and 98 percent do so in reading and writing, finds a new survey by the Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness.

Mike Antonucci finds that the number of people working in education employed by local governments increased by 8.5 percent last year. That’s not all teachers, but the public education system as a whole is growing much faster than student enrollment.

Do teachers value all forms of compensation equally? I have an interview up today with Barbara Biasi, a Yale economist with a recent paper looking at what happened in the wake of Wisconsin’s Act 10. That bill cut teacher take-home pay (by increasing pension contributions) and made it illegal for districts to negotiate over salary schedules, leading districts to introduce new forms of performance pay. It also led to a wave of teacher retirements, but Biasi was able to exploit variation in the timing of the policy changes to analyze whether the salary or pension changes were most responsible. Perhaps not surprisingly, she found that even late-career teachers were much more sensitive to salary changes than they were to pension changes. While this was an instance where the state was trimming spending, it provides another piece of evidence that teachers value $1 in salary spending much more than they do $1 in benefit spending.

I also have a new column up today for The 74 about New York City’s teacher retirement plans. The city automatically enrolls all new teachers in a defined benefit pension plan with all the typical problems–it’s under-funded, back-loaded, and has a 10-year vesting requirement (which would be illegal in the private sector). Meanwhile, the city also offers teachers a voluntary retirement plan which could offer the city a path forward for a more fiscally responsible, portable benefit for workers.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

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Latest Edu-Reads

Six years ago, California shifted its school funding approach from categorical funding targeted to specific programs and populations, to a flexible approach granting districts significant autonomy in how they served English learners, youth in foster care, and students from low-income households. A new state audit concludes, “In general, we determined that the State’s approach… has not ensured that funding is benefiting students as intended.”

California is also considering making FAFSA completion a high school graduation requirement.

Senator Kamala Harris is introducing a bill this week to help expand before- and after-school programs at 500 low-income schools. Other candidates have similar proposals, but it’s a good idea to address a real need for working parents.

Aaron Churchill looks at Ohio’s progress compared to its long-term goals. So far, the state is mostly meeting its goals in English language arts, but it’s already behind in math, and it’s rate of growth will need to pick up markedly to meet its long-term goals.

This new study by Briana Ballis and Katelyn Heath found HUGE negative effects of special education enrollment targets in Texas. But Matt Barnum has an important caution about how to interpret those results:

But Ballis and Heath identify another potential cause. Texas policy at the time allowed students with disabilities to graduate high school without having passed an exit exam. That meant losing a special education label also raised the bar for earning a high school diploma. And since since finishing high school is a precondition to college enrollment, higher graduation standards could affect college enrollment, too.

Ballis and Heath found some evidence that points to the higher graduation bar being the main culprit. Students who lost their special education status didn’t see test scores fall, attendance rates decline, or their likelihood of repeating a grade increase. That’s surprising: if the loss of services translated to immediate academic struggles, you would expect to see changes in those metrics [emphasis added].

That doesn’t mean the harmful effects of the cap aren’t real. Those students really did have much lower odds of graduating. But the results don’t clearly show what effect the special education services were having.

Speaking of tales of caution, Mike Antonucci has a rundown of the what changed before and after the Chicago teacher strike.

“The nation is stuck with a bad deal on teacher salaries: salaries insufficient to attract new teachers who can fuel improved schools and yet not even high enough to satisfy current teachers.” Eric Hanushek on how we might strike a better deal on teacher pay.

And did you know counselor quality matters?

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

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Latest Edu-Reads

Texas is in the midst of redesigning remedial courses at the state’s colleges and universities. This Dallas Observer piece has a good overview of what they did and how it’s going. Here’s the key quote: “During the fall 2018 semester, the first after the new model went into effect, the state saw 10,000 more students pass their first college-level course than during the fall 2017 semester.”

This is a super cool data visualization tool on FAFSA completion rates from Ellie Bruecker. You can narrow in on certain geographic regions or search by school name and see how FAFSA completions are trending over time.

“UW-Milwaukee and UW-Madison lie just 80 miles apart, but they might as well be on different planets when it comes to access and outcomes.” That’s from James Murphy in a new brief for Education Reform Now.

Florida has been a leader on teacher retirement policy, but I suggest a couple ways they could do even better.

“The key argument against exit exams—that they depress graduation rates—does not hold for [end-of-course exams].” That and more in this Fordham report on end-of-course exams.

Speaking of Fordham, I’ve enjoyed Mike Petrilli’s summer blog series on big-picture trends in education over the last 25 years. The whole thing is worth reading, but this paragraph from his series finale provides a nice summary:

The achievement of low-performing kids and children of color rose dramatically from the late 1990s until the Great Recession. That was mostly because of improving social and economic conditions for these children, but accountability reforms and increased spending played a role, as well. Over the last decade, that progress has mostly petered out. And the gains we made were, of course, not nearly enough, as they mostly meant getting more kids to a basic level of literacy and numeracy and walking across the high school graduation stage—nowhere near the goal of readiness for college, career, and citizenship that is the proper objective of our K–12 system.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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Thoughts on Latest Edu-News

Newark will no longer pay teachers based on their evaluation ratings and will instead pay teachers solely based on their experience and credentials. This runs counter to the overwhelming finding from the research literature that advanced degrees have little to no effect on student outcomes.

The city will also be making its teacher salaries even more back-loaded. Over the life of the four-year contract, Newark will boost salaries for new teachers by 4.7 percent, while increasing back-end salaries by 6.1 percent. By my read of the union’s materials, the district will ALSO pay longevity bonuses that kick in at 15, 20, 25, and 30 years of experience. I suspect those longevity bonuses are unlikely to have any noticeable effect on retention rates, and my hunch is that Newark’s teacher turnover problems are primarily driven by early-career exits. In other words, Newark is shifting from a pay structure that rewarded good teaching to one that ignores performance and shifts money away from the biggest problem areas. So, not great!

This is a good New York Times piece about states requiring students to fill out the FAFSA in order to graduate. I’ve long been a fan of mandatory FAFSA, and I think the Times piece actually under-sells it. It’s not just that there’s a correlation between FAFSA completion and college attendance; it’s that completing the FAFSA seems to cause more students to attempt college, perhaps because they’re made more aware of the financial aid for which they would qualify. For a number of equity concerns, my idea was to require FAFSA completion in order for a student to participate in a graduation ceremony, not withhold the diploma itself, but states seem to have been careful to design “opt-out” policies to get around those problems. I especially like how Louisiana state chief John White talks in the article about switching the default to everyone should fill out a FAFSA.

Instead of asking “does Head Start work,” Ashley LiBetti says we should be asking which strategies worked, for what population of children, and under what circumstances. Dale Chu asks similar questions about school turnarounds. In a thoughtful essay, he offers three conditions under which school turnarounds might be more likely to work.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman