School-of-Thought

One of the highlight of the school board conference in Washington was a presentation by Education Secretary Arne Duncan.  It seems to me he touched on the concerns of just about every school board member from across the country, including the concerns of school board members from rural states. 

 What are those rural concerns?  Well, there’s many. But primarily, it’s about money and fairness.  With federal dollars moving away from “formula funding,” in other words, funding based on the number of children that qualify for a particular federal program all across the country, to instead moving toward funding that’s “competitive” between the states, where dollars are no longer received on behalf of “all” American children, there’s concern that rural states like South Dakota will be at a competitive disadvantage when lined up against states with more money to spend on fancy educatonal grant writers, as well as the concern that the needs and challanges a rural state faces in educating it’s children will not be viewed as importantly by the Feds.

 Today Duncan addressed that.  He said, “the president wants to give rural schools a competitive advantage because he understands they problems they face.”

 Hmmm. Rhetoric, or is there a plan? 

 I decided to ask. 

 When Duncan finished his talk, I moved to the microphone to pose the question. 

 His response?

 He said funding for the special needs of rural states will be addressed in three ways:

1. Matching funds for technology.
2. Set-aside money for rural states.
3. Relationships will be developed with corporations to drive private money to rural areas.

 As with everything in education, the devil’s in the detail.  Forgive me for being skeptical; after all, we’re dealing with the federal government.  The rhetoric sounds good.  Now let’s see what happens.

The National School Board Association’s (NSBA) annual convention concluded yesterday. During the convention, President Norman Wooten said “As the job of a school board member has become more complex, it has become even more important for us to obtain training.” NSBA Executive Director Anne L. Bryant added, “Professional development is more critical than ever.”

If any readers would like to learn more about the convention, NSBA’s School Board News has developed a great resource highlighting presentations from each day. It can be found here.

This past week I spent several days in Washington DC at the 35th annual Federal Relations Network (FRN) Conference. The FRN is national advocacy and lobbying branch of the National School Boards Association. I was honored to be invited to participate by our South Dakota school board association.

The conference started a little early for me with a Pre-K (pre-conference) Legislative Committee meeting. The meeting dealt with Pre-K advocacy. As you may know, some 40 states currently provide voluntary Pre-K (South Dakota isn’t among the 40). With the onset of NCLB, preschool has emerged as a national strategy to increase school readiness and improve student achievement. Currently, five federal bills have been introduced to fund and improve the quality of national voluntary programs. This year marks the first time there has ever been any serious effort on a national level to do something about Pre-K.

Following the Pre-K meeting, the next 1 ½ days were spent in conference or committee. We learned about national education issues and received advocacy training in preparation for our trip to Capitol Hill. Then on February 5th, 900 school board members (including our group of six from South Dakota) made our way to the Hill to visit our lawmakers. The message we brought them was to support education by: Continue reading “Lobbying for Education in Washington DC”