Category — Reports

Texas made a strong showing in Newsweek’s 2013 list of America’s best high schools, with a focus on those preparing students for college. Use the sorting tool to find the schools in the state and in your area:

America’s Best High Schools | Newsweek

 How does staffing in open-enrollment charter schools compare to traditional school districts?

Based on TEA data,

Administrators:  Charter schools employ more central office and campus administrators and spend a greater percentage of their operating budgets on district and campus administration than traditional school districts.

Teacher Salaries:  Charter schools pay teachers less, have almost twice the percentage of less experienced (0-5 years) teachers, and have fewer teachers with advanced degrees than school districts.

Teacher Turnover:  Charter schools have a significantly higher teacher turnover rate, almost triple the turnover rate of traditional public schools.

Read more.

The Equity Center posted this recently:  

We want to make sure all EC members are aware of a new report by the Albert Shanker Institute called Revisiting that Age-Old Question: Does Money Matter In Education? The report’s conclusions are similar to those found by the Equity Center’s own publication from 2010 (Money Does Matter! Investing in Texas Children and Our Future). This is an important new report that confirms what we all know to be true, but it cannot be emphasized too much. Here’s one sentence from the report, written by Bruce Baker of Rutgers University: In short, money matters, resources that cost money matter, and more equitable distribution of school funding can improve outcomes. Policymakers would be well-advised to rely on high-quality research to guide the critical choices they make regarding school finance.  

The Texas Association of School Boards recently updated their school finance publication, and you can download it free of charge from the store on their web site.     There is also a printed version of the document available for sale.

The  U.S. Census Bureau released a report last spring that shows Texas ranks near the bottom among the states on per pupil spending for public schools.   Only eight states spent less than Texas in fiscal 2009.

The national average for spending was $10,499 per student in elementary and secondary public school systems.  Texas allocated $8,540 per student.

Expect that 42nd ranking to drop as a result of the funding cuts made in the last legislative session.

School districts are employing fewer staff this year because of state budget cuts and anticipate further staff losses next year, according to a recent Moak, Casey & Associates survey on staffing practices.

Districts reported that they currently are employing 11,833 fewer staff members than they would have if staffing ratios from last year had remained in place this year. Extrapolated statewide, these preliminary data suggest that Texas districts are employing an estimated 32,000 fewer staff today that they would have without the recent funding cuts.

Because many districts will see additional, and in some cases more significant, cuts next year, 61 percent of respondents anticipate that student to staff ratios will increase in the second year of the biennium, compared to 5 percent who think they will decrease and 34 percent who think they will stay the same.

The complete report is available on the Moak, Casey & Associates Web Site.

The Texas Education Agency reported today that Texas students scored well in comparison to their peer groups in other states.

Texas Hispanic and African-American students earned the second highest score among their peer groups on the 2011 eighth-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics test.  The state’s white eighth grade students ranked fourth, missing out on the second place position themselves by less than one point.

Only Hispanic students in Montana earned a higher scale score on hte math test than did eighth-grade Hispanic Texans.  Only African-American students in Hawaii earned a higher average score than did their counterparts in Texas.

See the whole report here.

 If you read only headlines, you are bound to think that Texas public schools have taken a sudden turn for the worse.   Last week the Commissioner of Education released accountability ratings, and those ratings went down for schools all over the state.

What you don’t learn from the headlines in many cases is that it wasn’t the school that changed; it was the rating criteria that changed.   TASB published a guide to what is going on that begins this way:

Accountability ratings are intended to communicate to the public how well one school or district is performing compared to others like it. But, we have multiple accountability systems that have produced inconsistent ratings based on different measures of performance, different student groups and different performance standards. As a result, school district officials have a hard time explaining and the public has a hard time understanding what the accountability ratings mean. The Texas Education Agency’s (TEA) sudden decision to discontinue using the Texas Performance Measure (TPM) in calculating the 2010-11 ratings will make it even more difficult for the public to discern what those accountability ratings are telling us about our public schools.

Read the document here.

We just added a new report to the Resources page:

Tracking the Education Dollar in Texas Public Schools (pdf)

It’s short, readable, and comprehensible. Use this February 2011 update to inform yourself: How do school districts use the money they get?

Looking for facts, figures, and other good sites relating to Texas public school funding? The Resources page has a number of reports, white papers, and links to keep you informed. Look for regular updates.