The number of students hitting the coveted perfect score on the SAT has plummeted (1,000 last year; 238 this year) after the addition of an essay to the college entrance exam, according to the New York Times.

It’s no secret that student writing has declined, although I’m not sure anyone has pinpointed any one major cause. But for students preparing for this test, below are three keys to a better score:

• Longer essays (two pages is the limit) tend to receive higher scores;
• Penmanship counts: essays written in cursive received slightly higher scores;
• Write in third-person: the lowest performing students almost always write in first person, and first person essays score lower.

Speculating on the cause of less-developed writing abilities leads one to wonder about the changes in curriculum: has the material covered in K-12 indeed been added to so often, that it is now “a mile wide and an inch deep?”

Lastly, the essay is only about one-fourth of the writing score; performing well on the 49 grammar and usage questions is critical. For any student preparing for this test, the Harbrace College Handbook is still considered the ultimate authority on mastering the written word.

Included in the materials for last night’s school board meeting was the usual month-end financial statement for the school system, except this was was for the month ending June 30, which is also the end of the fiscal year.

Budgeting is partly an art form; there are always unknowns, such as our approval last night for adding a half-time teacher assistant at the high school to serve one student. Federal funding for such extraordinary IDEA expenses is based on the student count at the end of last year, but this student just moved in. So, we bear the extra cost for the rest of the year, in spite of the fact that it’s a federally-mandated expense. We also added a kindergarten teacher at Woodland, due to the arrival of 23 more students than we expected.
Feel free to download the financial report and study it. The first half of the first page is the school system’s revenues; you can see what we budgeted to receive, what we actually received, the percentage of the budgeted amount, and the variance from the budgeted amount. Under revenues, it’s better to see numbers not in parenthesis… the parenthesis means we got that much less than expected.

Pay attention to percentages that are far above or below 100%. For example, line item 47143 — revenue for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) closed out the year at 56.2%. Not only is the federal government not paying it’s fair share, but we only received a little more than half of what was expected — the unfair share.

The bottom half of the first page is expenditures. Here, it’s much better to see a number in parenthesis at the end… that means we spent less than we budgeted. All in all, we received $394,649 more than anticipated (0.95%), and spent $857,242 less than budgeted (2.1%), so we ended with a small amount that goes into the fund balance.

We’ll need it; we always do, because our budget is inadequate to really put the money into maintenance and repair that we ought to, so when something breaks, the fund balance is where it comes from.

As these are public records, feel free to download or print to your heart’s content.

The BEP Review Committee meets on Wednesday morning in Nashville; I’ll be there. Although I’m not on the committee and have no direct vote, sometimes just being there can make a difference. Like any other public body, knowing that someone is interested and watching can impact what they say and do.

The BEP is Tennessee’s mechanism for directing State funding to public school systems. The “equalization formula” referenced in the link above is actually the Fiscal Capacity Formula, developed by Harry Green of the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (TACIR). Simply put, it’s Tennessee’s formula for providing more state funding to school systems with less local resources, and less to those with more local resources. At this time, fiscal capacity is measured at the County level, which means that all the school systems in Anderson County (Anderson County, Clinton, and Oak Ridge) receive the same number of dollars per pupil from the State.

For a couple of years now, there’s been a push to change the formula so that the larger cities get a bigger share. They do receive less state funding per pupil under the formula, because they have much larger tax bases. In particular, they have very large sales tax bases funded in significant part by residents of surrounding areas, so that’s why they receive less. At the same time, those large cities argue that they have a harder-to-educate population (higher percentages of poor and minority students, as well as those who don’t speak English well); they feel that changing to a system-level fiscal capacity formula would be better, since all the big cities have consolidated school systems, whereas many of the municipal school systems are just outside their borders, and therefore compete for teachers, etc.

Two years ago, the Legislature directed the BEP Review Committee to move toward a “system level fiscal capacity model,” and they attempted to do so last year. The problem is that the new formula developed by TACIR (see David v. Goliath from last February) would have caused great harm to more than half the school systems in the state. Bills to move immediately to the system-level model were defeated in the Legislature last Spring, but the BEP reauthorization resolutions passed late in the year (HR0286/SR0120) directs the BEP Review Committee to develop a consensus recommendation on a system level fiscal capacity model.

Unfortunately, consensus will be difficult — maybe impossible — to achieve if the method is to simply rearrange distribution of already inadequate funding.

At Wednesday’s meeting, the first agenda item pertains to things like “phase-in” and “hold harmless” — in other words, a painstaking death to the losers in the TACIR prototype system-level fiscal capacity formula.

The second item will be a report from the Peabody Center for Education Policy, with an alternative system-level reform model (short-term objective) as well as a “21st Century Education Finance System” (long-term objective). This item is key — has someone come up with a better, more fair system-level formula?

There’s no way to know, except to go and listen to the presentation firsthand. So I shall. And no, fraud-and-waste watchdogs, your tax dollars are not paying for the trip… I am.

There’s been considerable local focus over the City’s decision to not fund the requested amount for Oak Ridge Schools in this year’s budget, which led to painful cuts — the most obvious being a decrease in bus service. However, the City Manager, Vice-Mayor Tom Beehan, and the City’s lobbyist, Bill Nolan, have worked closely with me (and our Superintendent, and the rest of the Board) over the past two years to monitor the State’s actions and proposals to prevent passage of reforms that would be harmful to our school system through reduced or limited state funding.

Be very clear: although there was and is disagreement over the City’s budget allocation this year, we are on the same team.

Look for a review of this meeting on Wednesday, Aug. 30. I hope I have good news.