Dive Brief:
- Test scores in math and reading are up, but schools need more funding if they want to continue to keep pace, said President Barack Obama on Monday while meeting with superintendents and schools leaders from the nation's biggest districts.
- The Republican-led Congress is expected to have a budget proposal ready this week, and the president told the Council of the Great City Schools that he will push back if they don't allocate enough funding to education.
- While white and Asian students are still outpacing their black and Latino peers when it comes to graduation rates, the White House released data Monday showing that the latter still increased their numbers between the 2011-12 and 2012-13 school years.
Dive Insight:
Funding has clearly been an issue in many districts across the nation. The expectation that schools make gains on tests and close the achievement gap, but do so without resources, is in fact at the crux of the Pennsylvania lawsuit against former Gov. Tom Corbett and other state legislators. The lawsuit was based on the state's school funding formula, which the plaintiffs claimed doesn't allow for necessary resources to be purchased and discriminates against low-income neighborhoods with high minority populations.
It is interesting that this data on graduation rates surging has only recently come out—last month the White House shared the big news that the nation's graduation rate had hit an all-time high—as the narrative has long been that the U.S. is facing an education crisis. So much policy has been implemented around this idea. The new Common Core-aligned test scores will be coming out soon, and in order to say they are working, the White House (which pushed them) needs to show signs of success.
