School Funding CenterCentral source of expertise on school improvement issues

One state legislator in Pennsylvania has had enough with the states education cuts. The governor, Republican Tom Corbett, is pushing for another $1.4 billion in cuts as part of what he calls an attempt to right-size the states system.

The legislator, Republican State Senator Jake Corman, has announced that hes going to resist these budget changes. According to an article by Laura Olson in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

The chairman of the state Senate Appropriations Committee says Pennsylvanias colleges have shouldered their fair share of budget cuts, and he will be pushing to keep funding for those schools at current levels.

Corman, who chairs that panel, expressed concerns during a hearing this morning with the state education secretary that continued cuts will force Penn State, Pitt, Temple and Lincoln universities to alter their missions. Reductions in the current year already have made them into state-barely-related universities, he said.I think higher education has done enough, said Mr. Corman, whose district includes Penn States flagship campus.

Corman, who graduated from Penn State, has pointed out before that state cuts to higher education tend not to result in the state universities really finding ways to cut costs; the primary result is just that these schools function more like private colleges. This means significant price increases for Pennsylvania students.

Corman says his goal is to eliminate Corbetts cuts from the budget. He has not said where he will find the money.

There are more than 34,000 PGCE and under graduate teacher training places for 2012-13

More than 300 university-based teacher training courses in England could face closure or merger, as funds are switched towards school-based training.

The body which funds teacher training says secondary school courses with 10 students or fewer are “potentially unviable” and there are no guarantees of funding for them from 2013.

The government says fewer secondary teachers are needed, but universities will continue to play a “vital role”.

Academics warn expertise will be lost.

They say student teachers on university-based courses typically spend two-thirds of their time in schools and argue that the distinction being made between the two routes into teaching is false.

Universities which run teacher training courses have received a letter from the Training Development Agency (TDA), which says secondary courses with small numbers of students will only be funded if they are delivered through “school-led programmes”.

‘No guarantee’

The number of places universities can have for teacher training is set by the TDA.

There are now about 330 secondary school courses which have been allocated 10 places or fewer.

The letter from the TDA says: “The reduction in secondary school places and the Department for Educations strategy to increase school-led provision may result in some providers having to consider their involvement in initial teacher training.

“There are a number of cohorts that have been identified as potentially unviable due to their small size.”

It goes on: “We are informing providers now that there is no guarantee that they will be allocated any places in the identified small cohorts for 2013-14 onwards”.

The TDA expects universities to merge courses either within or between institutions, so, for example, one university in a region might agree to train geography teachers and another history teachers.

The Universities Council for the Education of Teachers (Ucet) has written to the Education Secretary Michael Gove to “express concern”.

The groups executive director, James Noble Rogers, said universities and their partner schools were best-placed to say whether or not courses were viable.

He said it was essential that in allocating places, the Department for Education and the TDA did not “inadvertently jeopardise the high quality infrastructure that currently exists”.

“The loss of that infrastructure would do considerable damage to the education that our children receive and would inevitably lead to teacher supply problems in the future,” he said.

Falling pupil numbers

Mr Gove believes more teacher training should be school-based and says schools should be more involved with what is taught on university-based courses.

Under the Graduate Teaching Programme, graduates can opt to train “on the job” in schools, usually on a one-year programme.

Around 100 outstanding schools have already been selected to be “teaching schools”.

A spokesman for the Department for Education said: “Funding is provided to train up the required number of new teachers.

“The fact is that pupil numbers are falling sharply in secondary schools so its common sense that the number of new teachers required also declines – the taxpayer would rightly ask questions if we continued to train people who had no jobs to go to.

“Universities play a vital role in much of the best teacher training and will continue to do so.”

Simon Gibbons, from the National Association for the Teaching of English (Nate), said: “The worry is that moving teacher training from universities to schools is going at such a pace, university departments will be under threat and in a position where they cant sustain their courses and will have to close.

“Ofsted says university-led courses are good and I fear the loss of expertise these changes will bring. The shift has the potential to take away outstanding provision and there is also a wider threat to research and on-going training for teachers.”

The TDA said it was giving universities notice of the changing funding arrangements so that they could plan future courses.

A spokesman said: “The identification of smaller cohorts is not an automatic signal that these places will necessarily disappear next year; rather that these are the obvious cohorts to be reviewed.

“It is possible that some larger cohorts will also feature in this process”.

GENESEE COUNTY, Michigan — It was a legal battle that could have easily been called Taxpayer v. Taxpayer.

However, when two Genesee County school districts settled their lawsuits against each other out of court this week, the details of the settlement were not made available to the public.

“The details of the settlement are confidential,” read a line in Monday’s five-paragraph news release announcing the settlement of the lawsuits between the Clio School District and the Genesee Intermediate School District.

Genesee Intermediate School District spokesman Jerry Johnson deferred comments about the confidentiality of the settlement to attorney Rick Coy. Coy, a Lansing-based attorney, could not immediately be reached for comment.

Robin Luce Herrmann, general counsel for the Michigan Press Association, said the details of the settlement would qualify as public record attainable under the Michigan Freedom of Information Act.

“In my view, they are required to provide those agreements under FOIA,” Herrmann said.

Often public bodies are able to meet in closed session to discuss an upcoming settlement, but the details should be available to the public after the settlement is signed, Herrmann said.

And if the settlement involves either side spending money, Michigan’s constitution stipulates that the expenditure of public money is all a matter of public record, Herrmann added.

Even if the settlement is not monetary, the details should be public record available under FOIA, Herrmann said.

“It’s clearly tax dollars that are being used for these law suits, so any type of agreement or settlement should be open to public scrutiny,” said Michael Van Beek, education policy director for The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank that advocates for government transparency and surveys the state’s public schools collecting data on finances and spending.

Keeping the settlement confidential simply isn’t the mark of good government, Van Beek said.

“It’s good public policy for government to be as transparent as possible,” Van Beek said.

The two districts have been locked in a legal battle since October 2010 when Clio became the first and so far only county district to pull out of GenNET because it believed it could get the services cheaper on the private market.

The GISD sued Clio last October, alleging the district violated the terms of its contract, owed an early termination fee and other fees and was using GenNET-owned equipment illegally as its own.

The GISD asked for the $782,000 in future fees, since Clio broke its 20-year contract five years early.

Clio countersued, arguing the district had no outstanding financial obligations to the GISD, given that the district paid an average of $153,300 yearly for 15 years for GenNET services.

In March, Genesee Circuit Judge Judith Fullerton ruled Clio did not owe the $782,000 but the rest of the case was pending.

GISD attorneys sought to have the decision reversed in the Michigan Court of Appeals, but the higher court declined to intervene before the case reached a conclusion in Genesee County.

That ruling set the stage for a trial, which was being planned for this summer.

According to the news release on the settlement, the agreement preserves the GenNET Consortium for the remaining districts involved while allowing Clio to operate independently with the option to participate in various GenNET services.

In December, Clio Superintendent James Tenbusch said the settlement, then still in planning and review stages, would include Clio continuing to operate independent of GenNET. However, he added, the district but would participate in some professional development training provided by the program and Clio would return to the GISD its GenNET-owned equipment, such as network switches and routers.

Tenbusch could not immediately be reached for comment.

If you’re a student who has accumulated a huge amount on your multiple student loans, you must be looking for some option that can assist you in getting out of the debt mire. When your monthly payments are not manageable enough and when you have trouble meeting all the monthly debt obligations, you should be sure enough that you need to take solid steps that could ensure a debt free life. Just as payday loan debtors need to go for payday loan consolidation, the student loan debtors also need to opt for consolidation. Being a student, you’re more responsible to maintain a good credit score as your employers will check your score before employing you within their organization. Here are some benefits that you may reap when you take out a direct debt consolidation loan in order to combine your federal student loans.

• No minimum amount for qualification: When you want to take out a debt consolidation loan from a private lending institution they will ask you for the minimum loan amount without incurring which you can never take out such a master loan. But this is not the same with the direct debt consolidation loan. You can take out the consolidation loan with any amount of money that you’ve accumulated on your multiple student loans.

• Various repayment options: Yes, most students look for the flexibility in the repayment options before choosing a debt consolidation loan. When you take out a direct debt consolidation loan, you may be offered different loan repayment options among which the most common are Income Based Repayment Plan and Income Contingent Repayment Plan. The student borrower can even switch from one repayment plan to another according to their present financial needs.

• A single monthly payment: You just have to make a single monthly payment towards the debt consolidation loan. It becomes tough when you have to split your payments among different lenders and you can effortlessly forget all these hassles when you consolidate through a direct debt consolidation loan. You just have to write a single check to the debt consolidation loan and also remember a single date.

• The monthly payments will be reduced: The monthly payments as the interest rate on the debt consolidation loan will be much lower than what you were paying on the individual student loans. The repayment term of the loan will also be extended so that the borrower can repay the loan without having to fall back on all the other monthly debt obligations.

Therefore, when you’re drowning in high interest debt mire, you should take out a direct debt consolidation loan so that you can easily combine your payments and live off the cycle of debt. However, manage your finances and make timely payments on the debt consolidation loan in order to avoid hurting your credit score.