________________________________________  THE VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT December 02, 2002 Vol. 2, No. 48 ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯  Covering education news in Vermont and beyond... Informative, provocative, unique... Published by Vermonters for Better Education  VBE is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization whose mission is to enlist parents and the public at large in achieving quality educational opportunities for all the children of Vermont by monitoring the state of education in Vermont; promoting the value of educational freedoms for all parents; and giving parents the evaluative tools with which to identify excellence. Libby Sternberg, executive director: MAILTO:LSternberg@aol.com NEWS & ANALYSIS... RFP FOR CHOICE STUDY SHOULD BE READY THIS WEEK The Vermont Department of Education should be ready this week to issue a call for proposals to study the state's nascent and extremely limited high school choice program, according to Policy Analyst Peter Thoms. The department has been working on the RFP for several months. The public school choice law went into effect recently and only allows a handful of students from each public high school to choose another public high school with whom the sending school has formed a collaborative agreement. According to the law, a study of its impact is to be presented to the legislature in January 2005. That report must include recommendations on financial arrangements between school districts "that would not adversely affect any district;" recommendations about changes to average-daily-membership "weighting" as numbers change; a recommendation for districts that designate high schools to be included in a choice region; an evaluation of how the quality of educational services and opportunities has been effected; and an examination of whether choice should be increased and extended to lower grades. The Commissioner of Education is also charged under the law with developing and sending to each public high school board in a choice region a request for specific information. This information should include: Whether transportation needs presented a barrier to choice. How many pupils exercised choice and how many pupils wished to exercise choice but were unable to do so. Reasons why students and parents made choice decisions. How choice has affected the stratification of student populations with respect to social and economic factors. How satisfied were those students who chose to attend a different school and those who remained in the assigned school. How satisfied were parents, teachers, administrators and board members with the choice system in their regions. Whether special education students and other students with special needs are receiving equal access to choice and whether their needs were accommodated. The effect of the system on access to technical centers and transition to work programs. Whether the quality of education is improving, decreasing or unaffected in districts experiencing a net loss of students under the choice system. Whether the choice system is affecting support for local school budgets. Whether the choice system is affecting the amount of parental involvement. How the system has affected small schools. The structures of the different regional choice collaboratives. Whether there are any unintended outcomes. The extent to which the implementation of this act adds administrative costs to school districts. The study of the choice program could have an impact on how quickly school choice initiatives move forward in the state.  FINAL NCLB REGULATIONS AVAILABLE Final regulations for the No Child Left Behind Act are now available on the U.S. Department of Education's web site. A summary of the regulations can be found at: http://www.ed.gov/PressReleases/11-2002/112602MEGARegsSummary.doc Another useful web site for parents is available at: http://www.csos.jhu.edu/p2000/nochild.htm. This website is provided by the National Network of Partnership Schools at Johns Hopkins University. NNPS provides manuals, resources, evaluation opportunities, and on-going professional development for strengthening and maintaining programs of school, family, and community partnerships. Summaries are given of four new requirements for reporting to parents and the public on their own child's test scores, changing from failing to better schools, providing supplementary services, and reporting to the public on school status, progress, and trends.  WHAT IS A PUBLIC SCHOOL? A recently-released report on the New Democrats web site takes an intriguing look at what "public" in the term "public education" means. Written by Frederick M. Hess for the Progressive Policy Institute, the report is titled "Making Sense of the 'Public' in Public Education." Here are a few excerpts: "When we say 'public school,' we generally mean state-sponsored schools that are characterized by a reliance on public funds and by formal state oversight. In common usage, however, the phrase public schooling implies much more. It resonates with vague notions of democracy, legitimacy, equal opportunity, nondiscrimination, and shared values. We forget that these notions are not always implicit in government-run schools, a fact readily illustrated by state-run schools in totalitarian states or those that operated under Jim Crow laws in the American south... "It is important to recognize that, in multiple sectors, legislators routinely craft policies intended to address public needs, but then rely upon a variety of public agencies and private firms to execute those policies. In such cases, we generally accept that a public service is being rendered regardless of the agent providing the service..." Hess then describes three definitions of what constitutes a "public" undertaking, but shies away from offering a "correct" definition of public schooling. The purpose of his report, he writes, "is to bring coherence to our discussions about school reform and to encourage policymakers to use a consistent metric when judging whether reform proposals are serving the needs of our children and our nation. The question should not be: 'Does this fit our traditional conception of how schools operate?' We should instead ask: 'Given our shared objectives, what will help educate our children - as individuals and as citizens - most effectively?'" Hess suggests five key questions to help guide policymakers in thinking about public education: What goals are we pursuing? How should we apportion responsibility for each child's education between the state and the family? Who should be permitted to provide schooling? What obligations should schools have to ensure opportunity to all students? What components of schooling should we consider to be public? Hess concludes: "Once we understand what each other means by 'public,' we may find it easier to work from shared purposes. We may find that the opposite sides are not so far apart as they sometimes imagine once we move past the slogans and focus the conversation on how to best serve all of America's children." For the full report, go to: http://www.ndol.org/documents/Public_Ed.pdf  ELSEWHERE... FLORIDA UNION DEFENDS SCHOOL CHOICE FOR MEMBER From The Education Intelligence Agency COMMUNIQUÉ December 2, 2002 On the Web at http://www.eiaonline.com One of the long-standing arguments against most forms of school choice is that public schools must take any child, while private schools are allowed to make their own selections. The corollary is that public school admissions are open and democratic, without the favoritism or arbitrariness that plagues private schools and public schools of choice. But as a number of incidents from across the country have shown, there is a widespread, though underreported, black market in school choice. Parents who seek to place their children in better public schools are manipulating and circumventing the enrollment system, sometimes with the complicity of the staunchest defenders of that system. In Pinellas County, Florida, the school district rescinded an attendance waiver that had allowed Laura Lindsey to enroll her son, Noah, in the same school where she works as a teacher. Noah, who is white, is supposed to attend a school that has an overabundance of minority students, according to a court-ordered ratio. Twenty-five other district employees also lost attendance waivers. Lindsey took her case to the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association (PCTA), which filed a grievance on her behalf, claiming Lindsey's choice of school for Noah is protected by the collective bargaining agreement. An arbitrator disagreed. Even more ironic, the union accused the district of being fearful of civil rights lawsuits and buckling under to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. "I think the school board attorney took the path of least resistance when it came time to stand up for school district employees against the Defense Fund," PCTA Executive Director Jade Moore told the St. Petersburg Times.  *    *    * DO YOU ENJOY THE VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT? For more than a year, Vermonters for Better Education has been publishing the Vermont Education Report and emailing it to our subscribers, providing you with information you can't get elsewhere in the Vermont media about a topic of great importance to the life of the state. Show your support of the VER by making a donation to VBE today! Mail contributions to: VBE, 170 Church Street, Rutland, Vermont 05701.  The VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT is published by Vermonters for Better Education 170 Church Street, Rutland, VT 05701, 802.773.5240 Contact LSternberg@aol.com for more information.

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