LANSING – The next Legislature will come into office with some new ideas on how the state should structure and fund schools.

The State Board of Education laid out a schedule to develop the policy proposals at its meeting Tuesday, with the goal of having a report completed in November 2014.

While the board wants to have a role in upcoming policy discussions, board President John Austin (D-Ann Arbor) said it also wants to avoid having its proposals wrapped up in election year politics (board Vice President Casandra Ulbrich (D-Rochester Hills) and member Dan Varner (D-Detroit) will likely be on that ballot).

Having the report slated for approval in November would “take it out of the election year, but have it be something people are expecting,” Austin said.

A November recommendation could also give some fodder for action in the legislative lame-duck session, after the election, Austin said.

The goal of the work is to develop new policies that all members of the board (currently 6-2 Democratic) could support.

“There are big structural issues and unintended consequences about the way we organize and fund education that are beginning to affect achievement,” Austin said as the driving idea behind the exercise, which will include bringing a variety of speakers and reports over the next few months as a basis for the policy discussions.

Among the key issues to address, Austin said, is a funding system that takes into account declining enrollment. He noted that two-thirds of traditional districts and a third of charter schools are seeing enrollment fall.

Superintendent of Public Instruction Mike Flanagan said it was important to develop a system that would give those declining enrollment districts a “soft landing” as they adapt to the loss of students and related funding.

“They can’t handle these changes in enrollment overnight without decimating your staff,” he said. “Once you decimate your staff, you’re in jeopardy on the academic side.”

But the discussion cannot be entirely about finance, other board members said.

“I do not think the system is broken,” board member Richard Zeile (R-Dearborn) said. “We’re spending more on education than ever. We do witness demographic shifts.”

Zeile agreed there was room for improvement on the current system particularly if policies could accommodate those demographic shifts.

But he said funding and achievement are not always directly related.

“We want to make this as friendly to a common nonpartisan history as we can,” board member Eileen Weiser (R-Ann Arbor) said.

Weiser said the final policies also need to accommodate all avenues of school choice: inter-district as well as charter schools. She noted that Ann Arbor Public Schools, one of the districts that had been resistant to choice in the past, was opening up 750 seats to students from other districts for the upcoming school year.

“That’s just as disruptive to school planning,” she said of students moving to neighboring districts.

The final document said the board was working on measures that would alter school finance and organization with an eye toward student achievement.

SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT: Schools and districts will have a few less things to look at when they develop school improvement plans under a new framework expected to be approved next month.

The School Improvement Framework, first developed in 2005, is designed to ensure that schools not only have the right elements in their improvement plans, but that they also have the structure to implement those plans, Linda Forward, director of the Office of Education Improvement and Innovation, told the board.

“This framework is intended to help you have a discussion about the processes and procedures that should be in place in a school building if you want to have success,” she said.

Though it sounds more complex, Forward said separating frameworks for districts and schools is actually simpler because the current version confuses some building officials.

And both districts and schools will have fewer things to look at in developing and supporting a plan, she said.

The current framework was five strands and 12 standards with 19 benchmarks for districts and 26 benchmarks for schools and, for schools, 90 key characteristics of a good plan.

The rewrite drops to four strands and 10 standards with 26 indicators of a good school plan and 10 indicators of a good district plan.

Approval by the board in February as expected would allow the new framework to be in place for the 2014-15 school year, Forward said.

SCIENCE STANDARDS: School districts will also see new science standards by the end of the year.

The department is planning to have a final version of the Next Generation Science Standards to the board by November, Flanagan said.

Some board members raised concerns that the time was excessive given that the board, through presentations and public comment, had been discussing the issue for several months, but Flanagan and others said there was still work needed to be sure the new standards would align with the Common Core State Standards and other things going on in the state.

Weiser said there had been concerns raised not only that the standards did not align with the Common Core, but that their narrowed focus left out some topics students would need for college. She said those and other questions would need to be answered before the board should approve them.

Flanagan said there were concerns at the department level of having the time to get those questions answered given the other issues staff are addressing if the deadline was moved up, particularly considering recent trends of both the board and the Legislature adding items to the department’s task list with shorter deadlines.

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