U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently recognized 269 schools as 2012 National Blue Ribbon Schools just before beginning his cross-country back-to-school bus tour.

National Blue Ribbon Schools

In an announcement at Arlington Traditional Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia, Secretary Duncan shared that the Department will honor approximately 219 public and 50 private schools at a recognition ceremony on November 12-13 in Washington, DC. In its 30-year history, the National Blue Ribbon Schools Program has bestowed this coveted award on nearly 7,000 of America's schools. The Department website has a list of the 2012 National Blue Ribbon Schools.

The National Blue Ribbon Schools award honors public and private elementary, middle, and high schools where students perform at very high levels or where significant improvements are being made in students' levels of achievement. The program recognizes schools in one of two performance categories. The first category is "Exemplary High Performing," in which schools are recognized among their state's highest performing schools, as measured by state assessments or nationally-normed tests. The second category is "Exemplary Improving," in which schools that have at least 40 percent of their students from disadvantaged backgrounds demonstrate the most progress in improving student achievement levels as measured by state assessments or nationally-normed tests.

To select National Blue Ribbon Schools, the Department requests nominations from the top education official in every state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Department of Defense Education Activity, and the Bureau of Indian Education. The Council for American Private Education (CAPE) nominates private schools.

Cross-Country "Education Drives America" Back-To-School Bus Tour

Secretary Duncan and his senior leaders are crisscrossing the country in September 2012, leading a series of events that reinforce the message that Education Drives America.

Stops include:

September 12 – Redwood City, California
September 12 – Sacramento, California;
September 12 – Reno, Nevada;
September 13 – Elko, Nevada; 
September 13 – Salt Lake City, Utah; 
September 14 – Rawlins, Wyoming;
September 14 – Rock Springs, Wyoming;
September 14 – Cheyenne, Wyoming; 
September 17 – Denver, Colorado; 
September 17 – Limon, Colorado; 
September 17 – Topeka, Kansas;
September 17 – Emporia, Kansas; 
September 18 – Kansas City, Missouri;
September 19 – Columbia, Missouri; 
September 19 – St. Louis, Missouri;
September 19 – Mt. Vernon, Illinois; 
September 19 – Evansville, Indiana; 
September 20 – Lexington, Kentucky; 
September 20 – Charleston, West Virginia;
September 20 – McDowell County, West Virginia; 
September 21 – Roanoke, Virginia;
September 21 – Richmond, Virginia;
September 21 – Washington, DC

“In the past three years, I’ve traveled to 47 states, visited hundreds of schools and met with thousands of teachers, parents and students who are finding new and innovative ways to teach and learn,” Duncan said. 

This is the third annual back-to-school bus tour for Secretary Duncan and the Department of Education. In 2010, the back-to-school bus tour included the Delta region in the South and the Northeast. In 2011, the tour covered the Midwest from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin. Additional details, including specific sites, event times and participants, will be announced in the coming weeks on the bus tour blog. Senior department officials are also participating in over 60 satellite events along the bus tour route.

In Topeka, Kansas, Secretary Duncan will join Topeka Mayor William Bunten, educators, and local officials for a series of speeches and a presentation by area students at the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site. The site is an official U.S. National Park Service site, which is celebrating Constitution Day from September 16 to 18 this year. The site's education department provides resources and activities for educators and parents on the U.S. Supreme Court case, the Civil Rights movement, topics in social justice, and African-American history, and offers educational opportunities through distance learning activities, outreach programs and museum visits.

For live, up-to-the-minute updates from the road, follow the Education Drives America tour on Twitter using the hashtag #edtour12, or visit the Department’s bus tour blog.

Visit the Department of Education website for more information about these programs.

This fall, a new assessment process called edTPA, which focuses on the skills and abilities of aspiring teachers, will be available nationally. The tool is intended to be used by states, institutions of higher education, and alternative certification programs as one of multiple measures for teacher licensure and to support accreditation of teacher preparation programs.

The edTPA process includes a review of a teacher candidate’s authentic teaching materials and a 15- to 20-minute video of the candidate teaching to document and demonstrate a candidate’s ability to effectively teach his/her subject matter to all students. Because it asks teacher candidates to demonstrate their performance in the classroom and focuses on student work, edTPA will help candidates develop the confidence and skills they need to succeed in urban, suburban, and rural schools.

History of edTPA Development

Formerly the Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA), edTPA was collaboratively designed by teachers and teacher educators under the leadership of Stanford University, the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity (SCALE), and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE). 

Beginning in 2009 with 30 higher education institutions, the Teacher Performance Assessment Consortium (TPAC), led by AACTE and SCALE, set out to develop a way to assess the readiness of new teachers before they enter the classroom. The result of that work is edTPA, a pre-service assessment process that requires teacher candidates to demonstrate the skills necessary to meet the daily challenges of classroom teaching, such as: 

• Planning around student learning standards; 
• Designing instruction for students based on their specific needs; 
• Teaching a series of lessons and adapting them to respond to student learning; 
• Assessing student work; 
• Developing academic language; 
• Evaluating student learning; and 
• Analyzing teaching through reflecting on how to improve student outcomes. 

Successful Field Test 

In June, more than 160 institutions of higher learning and 7,000 teacher candidates in 22 states participating in a national edTPA field test. Candidates electronically submitted portfolios in 13 content areas. Stanford developed scorer training materials for each area, and Pearson delivered them electronically, which is a new innovation in portfolio scoring. The field test data are being used to fine-tune assessment tasks and scoring rubrics and to set recommended edTPA passing standards.

States Consider edTPA for Licensure

Several states are moving toward using edTPA to license new teachers or for review of teacher preparation programs. Some states are also working with policymakers to position edTPA as part of their program approval process. As part of the release of edTPA nationally this fall, handbooks for the assessment will be available for faculty beginning in September. In January, candidates in participating institutions and states may begin registering for official scoring. 

More information is available at the edTPA website at http://edtpa.aacte.org/.

The Department of Education issued a notice with corrections to the July 11 call for applications for the new Innovative Approaches to Literacy (IAL) program. This program supports high-quality programs designed to develop and improve literacy skills for children and students from birth through 12th grade within the attendance boundaries of high-need local educational agencies (LEAs) and schools.

The Department of Education estimates that it will distribute 30 awards ranging from $150,000 to $750,000 to LEAs and one to four awards ranging from $3,000,000 to $14,000,000 to national, not-for-profit organizations.

IAL applications are available online and the deadline is August 10, 2012. The Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) number is 84.215G.

Below are the corrections listed in the notice:

• The 2012 notice erroneously listed deadline dates for intergovernmental review under Executive Order (EO) 12372 and its implementing regulations in 34 CFR part 79. The Secretary had decided to waive the EO 12372 review of the July 11, 2012 notice, as authorized under part 79, but the notice did not reflect that decision.
• On page 40867, first column, the Ed Department is removing the third sentence, which reads “Deadline for Intergovernmental Review: October 9, 2012”.
• On page 40870, second column, under the heading “3. Submission Dates and Times”, they are removing the last sentence, which reads “Deadline for Intergovernmental Review: October 9, 2012”.
• On page 40870, second column, under the heading “4. Intergovernmental Review”, we are removing the second sentence.

For more information about the Innovative Approaches to Literacy grant program, read the Reading Today Online article or visit the Department of Education webpage.

As the Senate hearing about sequestration on Wednesday (July 25, 2012) approaches, 3,000 organizations, including the International Reading Association (IRA), signed a letter to Congress supporting the bipartisan agreement that sequestration would be devastating to the nation. IRA Director of Government Relations Richard Long reports that the letter points out that the undersigned national, state, and local organizations—representing the hundreds of millions of Americans who support and benefit from nondefense discretionary (NDD) programs—strongly urge a balanced approach to deficit reduction that does not include further cuts to NDD programs, which have already done their part to reduce the deficit. Explaining that NDD programs are not the reason behind our growing debt, the letter cites percentages of cuts to NDD programs over the past few fiscal years. The full letter is available on the Coalition for Public Health website.

The Impact of Sequestration

A July 20 memo from Anthony W. Miller, Deputy Secretary of the US Department of Education, states that “last November, the Joint Committee announced that it could not reach agreement on a deficit reduction plan. This failure triggered enforcement via automatic funding cuts, called sequestration, for fiscal year 2013, unless Congress prevents this from taking place by sending the President a balanced deficit reduction plan that does away with sequestration before it goes into effect on January 2, 2013.”

The memo continues “The 2012 advance appropriations become available in October 2012 for school year 2012-13. The 2013 regular appropriations become available in July 2013 for school year 2013-14. Most of the funds in the four accounts with advance appropriations—Education for the Disadvantaged (Title I, ESEA), School Improvement Programs (Title II, ESEA), Special Education (IDEA Part B), and Career, Technical, and Adult Education—get distributed by formula to States and then to local school districts or other entities. If Congress does not act to avoid sequestration, and assuming the 2013 appropriations for these four accounts are structured similarly to past appropriations (which they are under the pending House and Senate appropriations bills), the Department will take the sequester from funds that would become available in July 2013 for school year 2013-14, not from the 2012 advance appropriations available in October 2012.”

While Miller states that “most of the harm from the sequestration would not be felt in education programs until the 2013-14 school year, the damage from across-the-board cuts in that year would be severe,” he adds that “the potential for sequestration should not upset planning and hiring decisions for the immediately upcoming 2012-13 school year.” He explains that federal funds have already been appropriated and will be provided for this school year, through grants made in July 2012 and advance funds that will be obligated in October 2012.

Senate Hearing on Sequestration

There is a hearing on the impact of sequestration in the Senate on Wednesday that the general public can listen to via C-SPAN’s Capitol Hearings website. The pending January 2, 2013 sequestration will cut on average 9% from the Title I funding school districts are getting—about one-half the districts say that they have no information on the pending sequestration. The Senate Subcommittee on Appropriations for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and Education will be holding a hearing on the impact of sequestration on education. This hearing was requested by the Committee for Education Funding in a letter to the chairman early this month.

This hearing will have the following witnesses:

Panel 1

The Honorable Arne Duncan
Secretary United States Department of Education

Panel 2

June Atkinson
State Superintendent of Public Instruction
Raleigh, North Carolina

Billy Walker
Superintendent
Randolph Field Independent School District
University City, Texas

Neal P. McCluskey
Associate Director
Center for Educational Freedom
The Cato Institute

Tammy Mann
President and CEO
The Campagna Center

The Coalition for Public Health website has FAQs, videos, and more materials about sequestration. 

Recent reports show that there is some good and bad news for the US Department of Education FY13 budget.

The House subcommittee on appropriations for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education began marking up its bill for the upcoming fiscal year on Wednesday, July 18. Based on a chart released by the Committee for Education Funding, International Reading Association Director of Government Relations Richard Long shares that the latest draft reduces overall education funding by $1.1 billion but includes $159,698,000,000 for Striving Readers.

Level Funding

The committee’s markups indicate that the bill would include level funding for these programs: 

• Title I
• Migrant & Neglected
• Striving Readers
• Charter Schools
• Comp Centers
• Indian Ed
• Promised Neighborhoods
• English Language Grants
• Career & Technical
• Adult Ed
• IDEA (but Part B is increased by $500 million)

Eliminations

Unfortunately, the following initiatives may be on the chopping block:

• SIG
• SEED 1.5%
• Race to the Top (with a rescission of $400 million)
• Investment in Innovation
• Transition to Teaching 

Next Steps

Once the subcommittee completes its markup, it is expected that the full committee markup will be the week of July 23. 

For more information about FY13 budget negotiations, visit the “Budget News” section of the Department of Education website.