- Senate Panel Approves Bill That Rewrites Education Law
- Mayor Talks Budget, Schools in Chevy Chase
- Upcoming FOCUS Workshop
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Mayor Talks Budget, Schools in Chevy Chase
The Northwest Current
By Staff
October 26, 2011
Mayor Vincent Gray told the Chevy Chase Citizens Association Thursday evening that the District expects to record a surplus of between $100 million and $125 million for the just-completed 2011 fiscal year. He also discussed issues in education, public safety and job creation, as well as health care for the city’s less fortunate. Establishing a stable fiscal environment, Gray told the group, is one of his four top priorities, especially as the city has not had a truly balanced budget for several years. The city’s fund balance, he said, fell from $1.6 billion to $800 million during the Fenty administration.
Most of the remainder cannot be touched, he added, as it is required either for protecting outstanding bonds or by order of Congress. Thanks to the city’s strong credit rating and favorable market conditions, Gray said, the District was able to sell $800 million worth of short-term bonds at an interest rate of 0.27 percent to finance its expenses until tax revenues are received. But Gray stressed that those revenues must be collected fairly: To applause, the mayor said he disapproved of the idea of taxing out-ofstate municipal bonds that had been purchased prior to the legislation taking effect, as it is inappropriate to have a retroactive tax.
Gray also touted his bona fides in promoting education reform, particularly early-childhood schooling. “People doubted my commitment to education reform” during the mayoral campaign, Gray said, in spite of “shepherding education reform through the city council.”
The mayor pointed out he had pushed legislation through the council for all District 3- and 4-yearolds to have access to preschool, noting that key brain development takes place before age 5.
Answering a question about ensuring the quality of the programs, he said the programs would increasingly fall under the auspices of public or charter schools rather than nonprofits, which have offered inconsistent results. “There was a group of very nice people who were not prepared,” Gray recalled. The mayor said he plans to expand the city’s offerings to include a program for children as young as six months. The children will be read to and enjoy what children from better educated families receive, said Gray, adding that nonprofits could be very helpful in this area. “If you reach the kids earlier, you’re going to do better. ... Hearing words is how you build vocabulary.” The city, he said, will reap the benefits 10 to 15 years down the road.” Gray also announced progress in special-education spending.
By next September, he said, the city will reduce expenses by $25 million to $30 million; it now spends $160 million on private schools plus $90 million on transportation. The savings, he said, will be reinvested in education. Gray also boasted of an area in which he has increased spending — reopening the city’s police academy, which was temporarily shut down due to budget cuts when Gray entered office. Now, the academy will train 300 new officers to more than make up for the 120 who leave the system each year.
By year’s end there will be 3,200 officers; the goal, he said, is to have 3,800. Despite those hires, the key to ending the city’s 11 percent unemployment rate lies in the private sector, said Gray, who added that he is personally calling on firms to come here and to stay here. And one project — stalled in that pipeline for years — is already doing so, he noted. After a massive infusion of capital from the government of Qatar, construction is finally under way at the site of the old convention center.
According to projections, CityCenterDC will lead to 3,000 construction jobs and 3,000 new permanent jobs. And there’s more good news in Shaw, Gray noted: The O Street Market development will break ground in mid-November. Gray also reported progress in keeping residents healthy. Asked about health care in wards 7 and 8, he said there soon will be three new clinics east of the Anacostia River. With only 3.2 percent of the District’s children not covered by some kind of insurance, “the problem is access, not coverage.”
Senate Panel Approves Bill That Rewrites Education Law
The New York Times
By Sam Dillon
October 22, 2011
Legislation rewriting the No Child Left Behind education law finally gained traction this week, and the Senate Democrat whose committee passed the bill said on Friday that progress became possible because lawmakers were irritated by the Obama administration’s offering states waivers to the law’s key provisions.
“Some of us on both sides of the aisle were upset with them coming out with the waiver package that they did, so that spurred us on,” Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, who heads the Senate education committee, said in an interview. “It gave us a sense of urgency.”
Mr. Harkin’s committee voted 15 to 7 on Thursday to approve a bill that would greatly reduce Washington’s role in overseeing public schools. It was co-sponsored by Senator Michael B. Enzi, the Wyoming Republican who is the committee’s ranking minority member. Mr. Harkin called it “a good compromise bill” that would have bipartisan support in the full Senate.
But Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who had long criticized Congress for failing to rewrite the law, on Friday criticized the Harkin-Enzi bill, saying it compromises too much, particularly on teacher evaluations and student-achievement goals. “There are huge — significant problems with the current draft,” he said. “Though there are some things in this that I consider positive, others are quite concerning.”
The movement in the Senate came less than a month after Mr. Duncan and President Obama announced they would waive the school-accountability provisions for states that promise to follow their school improvement agenda, citing Congressional inaction as the prime motivation. Forty-one states have told the Department of Education that they intend to seek the waivers.
The Harkin-Enzi bill is the first No Child rewrite to gain committee approval since Congress began trying to overhaul the 2002 law four years ago. It would continue to require states to test students in grades 3 through 8 annually in reading and math, but would eliminate most provisions in the law that put the federal Department of Education in the position of supervising the performance of the nation’s 100,000 public schools. The department would continue to closely oversee how states manage their worst-performing schools.
Though the waivers were aimed at releasing states from the mandate that schools be deemed failures if all their students were not proficient in reading and math by 2014, administration officials said Friday that Harkin-Enzi’s most serious weaknesses were that it would not require states to set any student achievement targets, and that a requirement that schools evaluate teachers based on student test scores and other methods had been dropped.
Civil rights and business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said the legislation would so thoroughly eviscerate the federal role in school accountability that they could not support it. But powerful groups representing superintendents, principals, teachers and school boards said they were delighted.
“We couldn’t be happier,” said Bruce Hunter, a lobbyist for the American Association of School Administrators. “The current law is so toxic, and they’ve had a hard time in Congress for a long while coalescing on how to fix it.”
Earlier this fall, Mr. Hunter said he had given up hope for Congressional action any time soon. On Friday, he said there were good possibilities that the Harkin-Enzi bill would gain Senate approval, and that Republicans in the House might gain approval for their own package of bills overhauling various portions of the law — all before the presidential primaries make further progress a remote possibility.
Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president at the Fordham Institute, a Washington research group, who has also been skeptical on chances for a No Child rewrite, said he now saw a 50-50 chance that Congress could pass a bill before the presidential election.
“It still could be derailed, but you can see the contours of a bill now that would pass both chambers,” Mr. Petrilli said.
Charles Barone, a director of Democrats for Education Reform, said that senators of both parties seemed so eager to trim back Washington’s role in public schools that many were turning their backs on half a century of federal commitment to improving educational opportunities for poor children.
“Right now, they seem pretty determined to get a bill passed before Duncan can issue any waivers,” Mr. Barone said.
FOCUS Workshop: Parent Engagement Strategies
November 1st, 4-7pm
This session is designed for school leaders and parent coordinators or counselors. The focus will be on helping you to understand how to engage parents in a meaningful way in your school program.
Cost: $50 for VSP schools, $100 for non-VSP schools.
Click here to register or go to www.focusdc.org/workshops.
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