Opposition from local school boards to a proposed change in the BEP fiscal capacity model is growing, with a number of boards passing resolutions to that effect:

Maryville Daily Times, 3/10/2006:

The board passed a resolution that opposes a plan to change the basic education program funding formula that determines how much the state gives each local school system.

Dalton said the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (TACIR) developed a model using 95 counties rather than the 136 school systems as a means for funding distribution.

The redistribution would cause the Maryville school system to lose $3.3 million annually, he said. The Association for Independent and Municipal School Systems is against the proposed changes, Dalton said.

The reason for the formula change is to bring equity to the poorer areas of the state and provide them with more money.

However, Dalton said he has studied the formula and that 14 out of the 15 richest counties would receive more money, and 14 out of the 15 poorest counties would lose money.

“We think there’s some pretty good reasons for opposing it,” Dalton said.

Oak Ridge, Cleveland, Kingsport and others have passed similar resolutions in recent weeks.

Spurred on by national concern about growing childhood obesity rates, the Tennessee Legislature is responding with proposed legislation to mandate monitoring of the physical fitness curriculum, health policies, and nutrition programs of local public schools.

SB2494/HB2522 (Ketron/Baird) would also require public school students in grades K-6 to participate in 150 minutes of P.E. per week; and students in grades 6-8 to participate in 225 minutes of P.E. per week for the entire school year.

Kids need to be more active than they are, both for health and to “get their wiggles out” to improve learning in subjects that require more concentration. The Commercial Appeal has endorsed it; articles have also appeared in the Tennessean and Chattanoogan.

The only problem is this: the State continues to mandate what must be included in the school day, while taking nothing out. Further, there is no provision for funding additional facilities or instructional staff needed to carry out the mandate. It is, once again, a case of adding to the local burden while relieving nothing.

Extracurricular athletic opportunities abound, and parents should assume some responsibility for seeing to it that their children spend some portion of each day on physical activity. Of course, given the state of adults in this country, we shouldn’t wonder why children are following the unhealthy lifestyles of their role models.

Has anyone proposed a fitness regimen for legislators? How about benchmarking their diet and exercise habits first?

Yesterday’s notice that HB3180 was withdrawn from consideration was certainly good news, but I’ve said before that we can’t rest until this ill-conceived scheme is “dead, buried, with grass growing on top.”

Today’s article in the Chattanooga Times-Free Press about Sen. David Fowler’s decision not to seek a fourth term in the State Senate further hints that other efforts by proponents of the TACIR-inspired BEP reform may yet be pending this year… see paragraph six:

Currently he is working to change the state’s school-funding formula that local officials said discriminates against Hamilton County.

He hasn’t filed a bill this year to change it (the deadline has passed), and yet, he’s “currently working” to change it. One might interpret the hints to mean that either his bill from last year may be resurrected and amended, or that he may be planning to amend some other legislation to achieve the same thing — possibly one of the budget bills.

SB0272 (Fowler)/HB0615 (Brown, McCormick, Favors, Sharp) was filed last year and assigned to the Education committees in both houses… but nothing has occurred with these bills since April 11 of last year. The General Assembly runs on a two-year cycle, however, meaning that this bill could be resurrected through the end of the current session.

Unlike HB3180, Fowler’s version does not specify using the TACIR prototype system-level fiscal capacity model; it simply mandates moving to a system-level model by the 2006-2007 school year. Thus, it is not quite as bad, but there is no other model under consideration that I know of. The plain truth is that the fiscal capacity formula is so doggone complicated that very few people really understand it, and even fewer are able to devise a replacement.

Remember the old line about “lies, damn lies, and statistics?” It’s not quite that bad — math by itself does not lie. But choosing which variables to include in a formula that measures ability to pay leaves it open to bias, and the bias in the TACIR formula is based upon the inclusion of the amount that local governments DO allocate to education, but excluding what they COULD allocate.

More to follow shortly.

The News-Sentinel reports this morning on a Knox County Schools proposal to “cluster” students who are learning English as a second language:

Knox County school officials are considering busing hundreds of immigrant students to a small number of schools rather than having teachers travel around the county to teach them English.

The difficulty is that 16 ESL teachers serving 76 schools means that the teachers spend a large portion of their time traveling between schools rather than teaching. There is no question that more instructional time would result in more learning, and it would seem a better use of limited funds to pay these teachers to teach rather than drive.

I admit to have struggled somewhat with the issue of instruction for ESL students, because “immersion” is unquestionably the fastest way to learn a new language. As an exchange student in Venezuela at the age of 14, it took only a few weeks before I was quite comfortable conversing only in Spanish. Why, then, are so many of our immigrant students struggling?

It was a colleague’s comment last week that caused me to look at it in another way: she lived in France for two years just out of high school, working as an au pair (having studied Spanish rather than French). Although she quickly became fluent in spoken French, she did not similarly master the written word, because French, like English, is not spelled like it sounds.

Spanish is much simpler; each letter has only one sound, and therefore, the written language is not very different from the spoken word once one has mastered what sound is produced by each letter.

Thus, students learning English from any other language may learn to converse, but still not meet the standards we expect and demand in our core curriculum.

There will inevitably be debate on the advantages and disadvantages of clustering these students into just a few schools. Maximizing instructional time would be a huge benefit, but the loss of “immersion” through primary interaction with English-speaking students could be a detriment, depending on the amount of time spent with others who spoke their primary language.

It will be an interesting challenge for the Knox Co. school board to decide, but at this point, clustering the students in need of these services seems like a better use of resources.