A smarter way to divvy up turnaround money
Blog by John Fensterwald/Educated Guess
Doug McRae has a sharp eye and a rational mind. A retired vice president in the publishing division of McGraw-Hill who follows state education policy closely, McRae saw the state’s peculiar recommendations for distributing $316 million in federal money this fall for turning around the worst performing schools and thought, There’s got to be a better way. So McRae spent a good part of Saturday and Sunday creating a new formula for dividing up School Improvement Grant dollars that strikes me as fair and sound. Instead of giving huge sums – up to $6 million — indiscriminately, for the most part, to 63 schools and goose eggs to a dozen schools in Los Angeles Unified and 18 other schools, he’s come up with a set of reasonable criteria that school districts – even those that would get less than they had hoped – would have a hard time disputing. (more...)