BoardBuzz

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April 26, 2007

Big bucks for Ed in '08

Yesterday the multibillion dollar duo of Eli Broad and Bill Gates teamed up to create the Strong American Schools campaign through the work of their respective Eli and Edythe Broad and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations. Together they pledged to spend $60 million. That’s right. You heard BoardBuzz right -- $60 MILLION over the next 18 months for the sole purpose of making education the hot topic among the presidential wannabes. The campaign will feature TV and radio spots in key battleground states to push three major education themes 1) American Education Standards 2) Providing Effective Teachers in Every Classroom and 3) Giving Students More Time and Support for Learning.

BoardBuzz certainly agrees with the billion dollar moguls that education must once again take its place atop the national policy agenda. Whether school board members will rally around their priorities remains to be seen.

For now, though, we want to point out some issues with some of the ways they characterize the problem on the campaign’s website www.edin08.com. Beyond the bold claim that “Today’s students are losing out,” the site reports state-by-state data as well as some nationwide measures. Since BoardBuzz is not so good with numbers we had our friends at The Center for Public Education take a look at the data and provide their thoughts.

The Center could not track down where all the data came from, (Is it too much to ask for sources??), but they did find the numbers were fairly consistent with other measures of similar indicators. However, the Center wanted to remind Bill and Eli to read their guide to high school graduation rates. If they had, they would have known that just because a student doesn’t graduate from high school in four years with a regular diploma doesn’t mean he or she is necessarily a dropout. The student may have graduated in five years, graduated with a certificate of completion/attendance or even earned a GED. Instead of the 25 percent or 1.1 million students the site claims dropout each year, the number is likely more in line with the 10 percent or approximately 500,000 dropouts per year reported by the Department of Education. BoardBuzz is well aware that 500,000 dropouts are still way too many but exaggerating the problem doesn’t help to solve it. However, the Center also offers guidance on things that do help in its drop out prevention research review.

So here’s a qualified BoardBuzz shout out to Bill and Eli for attempting to put education on the campaign map. And remember to watch your numbers.

Posted April 26, 2007 3:15 PM

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