Karen Herzog:

School districts have known for months that their state aid would be significantly cut for the new fiscal year that begins July 1. Today, reality hits home.
General state aid estimates were released this morning for school districts to plug into budgets until final numbers are available in October.
As expected, 410 of the state’s 424 public school districts will receive less aid for the 2011-’12 fiscal year than for fiscal 2010-’11, according to the state Department of Public Instruction, which is required by law to provide general state aid estimates to school districts each July 1.
Many school districts handled the cuts by increasing employee contributions to health care and retirement when contracts expired this week, as part of the state’s new collective bargaining law.
Kaukauna School District, which is expected to lose $2.75 million in state aid, was able to swing a $400,000 budget deficit into an estimated $1.5 million surplus by asking workers to pay more for health insurance and contribute pay toward their pensions, the Post-Crescent in Appleton reported. That district plans to hire teachers and reduce class size.

Charles Barone:

>Most of the inside-the-beltway chatter this week was around Secretary Arne Duncan’s announcement on Monday, via Politico, that if A.: Congress did not act soon to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, he would B.: proceed to “develop a plan that trades regulatory flexibility for reform.” I can’t confirm this, but the rumor is that the plan arrived at OMB last night, and will be finalized in August. At any rate, it doesn’t seem like they’re playing games on this one. All signs suggest that they plan to follow through.

Rebecca Vevea & Crystal Yednak:

When the Chicago Board of Education meets Wednesday to vote on a scheduled 4 percent raise for teachers, one figure will be crucial to the debate: The $724 million deficit the Emanuel administration says Chicago Public Schools is facing for the upcoming year.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel and CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard have repeatedly cited the almost $720 million deficit, and Emanuel mentioned it again Monday when he called on the state to give CPS the roughly $300 million it is owed in back payments. But a Chicago News Cooperative review of the district’s funding sources shows that the calculations are inconsistent and CPS’s actual deficit is still unclear.
There is no question CPS is in a large financial hole. The extent of the deficit, however, depends primarily on how much federal stimulus money the district has available and whether late payments from the state are taken into account.
CPS has come to rely on hundreds of millions of dollars in federal stimulus funds, which are drying up. In the administration’s most recent budget presentation, in March, officials said CPS will have exhausted $260 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and $104 million from the federal Education Jobs Fund.

Christina Collins:

The Atlantic just published a long opinion piece by Joel Klein, including a repetition of his long-standing argument that New York City’s charters perform miracles with “students who are demographically almost identical to those attending nearby community and charter schools,” and that anyone who claims differently is a blind supporter of the “status quo.” A closer look at Klein’s own numbers, however, tells a very different story. According to the progress reports released by his Department of Education just last year, New York City’s charter sector did not outperform similar district public schools. And the Harlem Success Academy — the school which he specifically holds up as “almost identical” to neighboring district schools — actually serves dramatically lower proportions of the city’s neediest students and of English Language Learners than other Harlem schools.
As most observers of the city’s schools know, each year the Department of Education releases progress reports with “grades” for each of its district and charter schools, which take into account the progress that students at each school made when compared to students at “peer schools” (those with similar student bodies in terms of poverty, Special Education status, and the proportion of English Language Learners, as well as other factors.) On the newest school Progress Reports, which were released by Klein’s office in 2010, 58% of district schools got an A or a B in 2010, compared to only 34% of charters. In Districts 4 and 5 in Harlem, more than half of district schools got either an A or B (27 out of 53), compared to only 8 out of the 21 charters in those neighborhoods.

Angie Mason:

Candidates for York Suburban School Board are all focused on one thing: finances.
The district started with a more than $3 million deficit and has spent months whittling down expenses. A proposed budget for next year includes a 1.4 percent tax increase. Here’s a look at what the 10 candidates, vying for 5 spots, had to say about the district’s budget picture:
Jennifer Clancy, a current board member, said the funding formula needs to be addressed at the state level, and state mandates need to be addressed, too. Locally, she said, the board has invested a lot of time in trimming expenses.
“If there was anything called fat, we’ve eliminated that,” she said, noting the next step should be to look at the largest spending area — salaries and benefits — and work on that.
Ellen Freireich, also running for re-election, said the board needs to continue monitoring revenues and expenses to be fiscally responsible. Board members and taxpayers need to contact state legislators and express the urgency of the financial crisis, she said.

The Economist:

LILY, who is three-and-a-half, loves her nursery school in Queens. Her mother calls her “the sponge” because every day she comes home with new nuggets of knowledge. But not every child is as lucky as Lily. A new report by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) shows that states’ preschool funding is declining, which means fewer children will have access to early education, which most agree is essential especially for children living in low-income households. The study looked at the 40 states which fund programmes for three- or four-year-olds. “State cuts to preschool funding transformed the recession into a depression for many young children,” says Steven Barnett, author of the NIEER report.
State preschool spending per child decreased by $114 to $4,028 last year. This is almost $700 less than in 2001-2002. Were it not for the additional funding provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, it would be much less. Worryingly, the funding situation may get worse. The stimulus money helped keep many states afloat, a cushion that no longer exists. Only three states (Connecticut, Maine and Vermont) increased spending per child by more than 10%. Nine (Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Ohio, and South Carolina) cut spending by at least 10%. Ohio, once a leader in early education, now has one of the lowest percentages of youngsters enrolled. It cut funding more than any other state.