From the Editor
Keeping Up With the News
Anne Wujcik — Friday, December 16, 2011
Just a few quick notes this week. It looks like Congress has decided to step back from the brink, working toward agreeing to a set of bills that will fund the operation of the U.S. government for the rest of FY 2012. The current Continuing Resolution is set to expire at midnight tonight. Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle had been quietly working towards this agreement in a largely bi-partisan effort for the past several weeks, but as the deadline drew near, the impulse to self-immolation kicked in and arguments broke out around all sorts of issues. (For you political junkies, there's an interesting story at Politico (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70471.html) that details some of the intricacies of the potential budget agreement.) In the end, however, political realities took over and it looks like something moderately acceptable will be worked out, possibly as soon as Saturday. It's still not clear how the Department of Education's money will be parceled out, but it appears that the overall cut to the Department's budget will be pretty minimal.
In an effort to regain the spotlight, the White House released a new report this week, focused on the benefits that would be realized if the American Jobs Act were to pass. The bill proposes $30 billion for facilities modernization and repair - with $25 billion allocated to K-12 schools, including a priority for rural schools and dedicated funding for Bureau of Indian Education funded schools, and $5 billion to upgrade infrastructure at community colleges across the country. It no secret that districts have deferred maintenance and modernization projects as their budget woes deepened. In many cases, very little more than emergency work has been done on schools building for more than a decade. The report, "Education and the American Jobs Act: Creating Jobs through Investments in Our Nation's Schools," includes a state-by-state appendix that details education investments that the American Jobs Act will make in schools around the nation. You can also explore two interactive maps that display the American Jobs Act's estimated impact on every state and school district in the nation.
It's not clear that in these cash-strapped times there is much hope for this bill's passage, but it never hurts to be sure that local constituencies know what they might stand to gain. Arming potential allies with real figures gives them ammunition with which to approach their Congressional representatives, who will be back in their districts shortly.
The American Jobs Act also included $30 billion meant to support nearly 400,000 education jobs, preventing layoffs and allowing educators to be hired or rehired. Congress voted no on that portion of the bill in October.
An article in Education Week this week reminded me that those of you looking for details about how individual states are approaching their implementation of the Common Core State Standards can find a trove of information included in their waiver applications. Links to each state's application can be found at http://www.ed.gov/esea/flexibility.
States applying for waivers from NCLB requirements are required to show that they have adopted high-quality college- and career-ready standards, have plans to translate standards into instructional strategies and will use rigorous assessments to measure their progress. Since 10 of the 11 states that applied for waivers in this first phase have adopted the CCSS, reading through at least the parts of their applications related to the CCSS will give you a good overview of what they are doing. The problem we've all found around Common Core is trying to track what is still a state-by-state process. The states that applied in this first waiver round were already pretty well organized in terms of their overall plans for education reform. Their implementation plans are likely to be unique, but they will also share a number of common elements. And it's a lot easier to find sections of interest in these applications, even the very large ones, than it is to find the information at each state's web sites, some of which are incredibly organized and informative, but many of which are totally opaque.
