"Accurate, transparent data are critical to local decision-making and parental empowerment."

To better understand just how difficult it can be to collect the correct data and report it the right way, picture this: State education department officials from 40 states have been meeting twice a month since fall 2016 to iron out the intricacies involved in complying with a new federal mandate that requires them to publish how much federal, state and local money every school in the country receives.

They call themselves the FitWigs – short for the financial transparency working group – and their job isn't an enviable one: Figure out what pot of money is used to pay for which personnel and what programs at each individual school.

"It's sort of amazing to watch it play out," says Marguerite Roza, research professor and director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, who helped mobilize the group nearly two years ago knowing full well how difficult a reporting requirement it would be for school districts.

"They don't have a lot of capacity," she says. "They have a hard time keeping staff. The work that's put on their shoulders is big and huge."

The mandate is one of the last to go into effect as part of the Every Student Succeeds Act, the federal K-12 law that Congress passed in 2015. Among many other things, the law ramps up data reporting requirements for states, districts and schools. In addition to reporting individual school spending, it also requires, for example, that every school keep tabs on students who are chronically absent.

"They're not in panic mode right now," Roza says of states, adding that most of them already issued guidance and instructions to school districts and some have even tested their data collection system by having districts log into a portal and input it as if they were doing it for real.

"They've rolled up their sleeves and are marching forward," she said. "The biggest loose end that most of them don't have figured out yet is how they're going to display the data. That's the work they have left."

That being said, Roza fully acknowledges that the first year of reporting the spending data won't be perfect.

"There are places where the first years of data are messy, and that's just what its going to look like," she says.

To be sure, data discrepancies aren't solely the result of faulty data input. They can also be driven by incentive to look better, as is believed to have been the case earlier this year when an investigation revealed that 1 in 3 District of Columbia Public Schools students who graduated in 2017 shouldn't have received diplomas due to missing too many classes or improperly taking credit-recovery courses.

There's also the case of breathing life into a convenient statistic that fits in neatly to enforce a narrative but goes unchecked before it's used. That was the case last week when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos during the first G-20 education summit in Chile repeated a claim that 85 percent of the jobs of 2030 haven't yet been invented.

"You throw all of this stuff into a blender and all of sudden I'm not so sure about the things I was sure about this morning," Pondiscio says. "I'm not the guy who says don't use data to inform your decision. And, not to say we shouldn't be trying to get better at this or ignore it, but it should make us more reflective. The incentive you have to make things look better than they really are, you know, this is all a giant study in conflicting interest and data confidence."

However they come about, data discrepancies can have real-world implications for researchers, practitioners and policymakers who make important decision about how to run school systems and ultimately for students who enroll in them.

The revelation that only a fraction of the students the District of Columbia reported as graduating should have been graduating, for example, rocked the education reform community, which for years heralded the District as the fastest-improving in the country and one that was reaping the benefits of more rigorous standards, new teacher evaluation and compensation models, and increased school choice. Indeed, many other urban districts looked to the District as a model for wholesale improvement.

Kowalski is quick to note that the country has only been in a "make-data-useful environment" for about a decade and that demand for data is higher than ever.

A new Data Quality Campaign poll, for example, shows teachers and parents understand the value of data and want to use it to make decisions on how best to educate students.

"I think our polling shows that there is widespread demand and belief that data is a critical strategy for decision-making in education," she says. "That level of belief and demand should drive the resources necessary to get quality data in the hands of those who need it most.

Will Bezos Heed Other Education Philanthropy Mistakes?

The world’s richest man is heading down a path of charitable giving that has tripped up some of his contemporaries.

AMAZON FOUNDER JEFF Bezos is the latest tech giant to splash onto the education philanthropy scene, announcing plans to develop a network of preschools funded through an initial $2 billion commitment.

"The Day 1 Academies Fund will launch an operate a network of high-quality, full-scholarship, Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities," Bezos wrote in a letter posted to Twitter on Thursday morning. "We will build an organization to directly operate these preschools."

In doing so, Bezos follows in the footsteps of other tech giants, like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Laurene Powell (the widow of Steve Jobs), who have all directed through their foundations hundreds of millions of dollars – billions, in the case of Gates – to various education initiatives.

To be sure, Bezos – who also plans to use some of the money to aid nonprofits that help homeless families – is not new on the education scene. The Bezos Family Foundation, founded in 2000 and run by Bezos' parents, focuses solely on education, and earlier this year Bezos gave $33 million to a scholarship program for children brought to the United States illegally, TheDream.us.

But the uptick in philanthropic giving from such organizations has sparked heated debates about the influence they wield over public education and their overall impact.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been involved in education for nearly two decades and has directed billions of dollars into advancing policies that gave rise to the education reform movement.

Some of the foundation's biggest bets have been in its decision to back the Common Core State Standards – academic benchmarks for what students should know by the end of each grade – and its push to reimagine teacher evaluation and compensation systems based in part on student test scores.

But the foundation has been widely criticized for funneling funding into what some consider silver-bullet policies or the latest education fad.

In May 2016, Sue Desmond-Hellmann, CEO of the Gates Foundation, apologized for the foundation's misread of how ready – or not ready, as it turned out – states were to handle implementation of the Common Core standards. And last year, Gates himself offered somewhat of a mea culpa for the foundation's involvement in teacher evaluation.

In fact, in outlining plans for a new $1.7 billion investment last fall, the Gates Foundation made a U-turn from its typical education reform agenda to instead focus on new initiatives that include building networks of schools.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's education philanthropy hasn't been without criticism either. He was excoriated for his first foray into the space – a $100 million investment in Newark public schools in 2010 – for not taking into consideration the community's wants and needs.

He's since acknowledged "lessons learned," and has more than doubled down on his investments through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

"No effort like this is ever going to be without challenges, mistakes and honest differences among people with good intentions," he wrote on his Facebook page.

Bezos' big bucks will have a narrow focus, which could play in his favor since he'll likely sidestep messy and expensive fights over things like teacher pay and evaluation. And the spotlight on preschool comes at a time when states are struggling to find ways to provide affordable early childhood education programs, especially to low-income families.

"The space of preschool is interesting," says Jeffrey Snyder, assistant professor at Cleveland State University who has studied the impact of education philanthropy. "Other philanthropies have given to it but have not made it their sole focus. I wonder if he's trying to hollow out a space in which he is a big fish."

Also of interest to Snyder is the specific method of schooling Bezos chose, the Montessori model, which focuses self-directed, hands-on activity with only minimal direction from teachers.

"I would be interested to hear about why he settled on that model, and that question is based on lessons we've learned in giving from other granters," Snyder says, noting that one of the most common failures of recent education initiatives is pushing policies onto a community rather than asking what they need.

"Have they learned the lessons of working with the communities to create a reform that has buy-in?"

Laura Bornfreund, director of early and elementary education policy at New America agrees.

"Certainly the big philanthropic collars are really helpful and important, but community buy-in is also important," she says. "Setting some dollars aside for that community engagement and thinking around implementation and how are we going to have long-term impact is just as important as the overall idea of what kind of change can we bring to the style of education to children in low-income communities."

"Where is he thinking about starting this," she continued, "and how is he thinking about the needs in those communities and talking to families to see how familiar they are with a Montessori type of approach and what does he have in mind to help them think about whether that kind of approach is a good fit for their child and for the community."

Bornfreund says the Montessori approach and other high-quality early childhood styles should be more available in low-income neighborhoods but that it's imperative to understand what type of education those children will then matriculate into after preschool and how to ensure a smooth transition into public kindergarten.

My mind jumps to lots of questions about how this will be rolled out," she says. "It's a lot of money, so I think about things like implementation and wanting to start small and see what really works well and then scaling it up in a thoughtful kind of way."

Snyder says he'll also be interested to see in what way Bezos gives the money – through a traditional philanthropic model, for example, or a limited liability company, like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which can often be less transparent about exactly where the money is going.

Bezos offered few details in the announcement and did not say how he plans to choose the low-income communities for the preschools or who he plans to tap to run the effort.

"I'm excited about that because it will give us the opportunity to learn, invent and improve," Bezos wrote. "We'll use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession. The child will be the customer."

Without knowing much more about Bezos' plans for the preschools, many in the education space were simply happy he was shining a spotlight on an issues that's vexxed states for years.

"From where I sit it's so good to see all this additional attention being drawn to the issue," says Sarah Rittling, executive director of the First Five Years Fund.

"If it's high-quality, then that's what we should be doing," she says. "Getting down the model or the specific curriculum or how it's managed or funded or who the partners are – as long as there is a high-quality setting and children are getting everything they possibly need to leave that program prepared and ready, then that's what they should be doing."

Another Advantage for Wealthy Students

A new study on grade inflation shows that it occurred in schools attended by more affluent students but not in schools attended by less affluent ones

AFFLUENT STUDENTS HAVE major advantages when it comes to K-12 education: Among them, better teachers, more access to advanced courses, resources for counselors and a variety of extracurricular activities, which when combined can lead to higher high school graduation and college-going rates than their poorer peers.

Now those wealthy students can add to that list another advantage their less affluent peers don't receive: grade inflation.

A new study on grade inflation published Wednesday shows that schools attended by more affluent students saw less rigorous grading than schools attended by less affluent ones. While median grade point averages increased in both school types between 2005 and 2016, it increased more in the more affluent schools.

"In other words, it's gotten easier to get a good grade in more affluent schools, but not in less affluent ones," says Seth Gershensen, associate professor at American University who conducted the research and authored the report. "The GPA Gap has widened."

Gershensen used statewide data on all public school students in North Carolina who took Algebra 1 between 2005 and 2016 and compared their grades to scores on the state's end-of-course standardized exam. He also compared their cumulative GPAs to ACT college entrance exams.

Researchers have long documented the mismatch between school grades and their performance on tests, but prior research has been limited to smaller pools of students – those who took the SAT, for example, or those at a specific school. Looking at all public school students in the Tarheel State allowed Gershensen to draw conclusions about the difference in grade inflation between poor and rich students, which until now hadn't been done.

The study showed that the likelihood of receiving an A remained about constant between 2005 and 2016 among students attending the same school and who scored similarly on end-of-year exams. But more and less affluent schools experienced very different trends in that likelihood during the same time period: Beginning in 2010, the probability of receiving an A in more affluent schools increased significantly, while beginning in 2013 the probability of receiving an A in less affluent schools decreased significantly.

An analysis of the ACT scores also shows that grade inflation accelerated from about 2011 onward, mostly in schools serving advantaged students.

"I wasn't expecting to see that, and if anything, you might assume to see the opposite," Gershensen says, explaining that instances like the recent graduation scandal in the District of Columbia, in which administrators fudged attendance data in order to graduate more students, had him expecting to perhaps see the opposite effect, if any.

So who's to blame? Gershensen says he expects the culprits are pushy parents and insistent students.

"Both parents and students from more well-off backgrounds have the social capital and confidence to confront the teachers in the first place," he says. "The classic helicopter parent stereotype. If you think about why parents would be doing that, a lot of them are well aware of the high-stakes and potential payoff of going to an elite university."

Such GPA gaps, as Gershensen describes them, can have a devastating impact in driving larger education and socioeconomic gaps.

"When students in more affluent schools systematically receive more optimistic evaluations of their current and future performance than their more disadvantaged peers, they will act on this misleading information," he writes in the report. "That means, among other things, that they will apply to and attend more selective postsecondary institutions. In this way, inflated grades trigger a self-fulfilling prophecy that perpetuates – even exacerbates – existing socioeconomic gaps in educational access and success."

The study looked at the issue of grade inflation more broadly, also finding that many students who receive good grades do not demonstrate mastery on end-of-year exams, and that some students with good grades fail to demonstrate simple proficiency.

In fact, among students with top grades, just 3 percent of students earning a B and 21 percent of students earning an A reach the highest level of achievement. And for those who earned a B, more than one-third, or 36 percent, of them did not even score proficient.

The report underscores that grade inflation can be a double-blow to poor students, both because it can widen the socioeconomic gap when the grades of wealthy students are inflated, and also because when poor students' grades are inflated it may cause them to miss out on tutoring services that could help them catch up, or worse, lead them to graduate high school mistakenly thinking they have the necessary knowledge or skills for college or a career.

One potential fix, Gershensen posited, is designing a system akin to a GDP deflator, which economists use to predict dollar amounts over time. If we knew which schools were more prone to grade inflation, he says, a GPA deflator of some sort would allow a better apples to apples comparison.

"There's no debate that grade inflation exists," he says. "It's unequally distributed across schools. It is especially perilous for disadvantaged students."

SKUNK SMELL

BOB HIRSHON (host):

Skunk vs skunk. I’m Bob Hirshon and this is Science Update.

[Pepé LePew clip] The cartoon skunk Pepé LePew was oblivious to his own stink, and listener Arthur Magida wonders whether skunks in general are immune. We asked University of New Mexico skunk researcher Jerry Dragoo. He says that skunks and other members of the order Carnivora, including dogs, don’t seem to mind the smell. But they are still repelled because the spray is an irritant.

JERRY DRAGOO (University of New Mexico):

If one skunk gets sprayed by another one, and it hits him in the face, gets him in the eyes, they do go through a lot of the typical behaviors you could see a dog do, you know, rub their face in the dirt, put their paws up to their face and rub it a little bit, so they are definitely affected by it when another animal sprays them.

HIRSHON:

If you have a science question, give us a call at 1-800-WHY-ISIT. Or email us from our website, science update dot com. I’m Bob Hirshon for AAAS, the science society.

Story by Bob Hirshon

CBSE Class 10 Board Exam 2019 New Rules for Pass Marks

CBSE Class 10 Board Exam 2019 New Rules for Pass marks – According to Indiatv News the Central board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has tightens the rules for pass marks in Class 10 board exam 2019. According to the new change in passing mark by board, the students will now have to secure passing marks i.e. 33 per cent separately for theory and internal assessments
Students will now require to secure a minimum of 27 marks in 80 marks board examination and a minimum of 7 marks in 20 marks internal assessment.
 
The class 10 students who appeared in board exams in 2018 were granted one-time relaxation in passing marks  by CBSE as students found it difficult to clear the exams. The board had said that the students getting overall 33 per cent marks would be considered pass as it was the first batch after the mandatory board exam made a comeback after a gap of seven years.
 
The CBSE had introduced the Comprehensive and Continuous Evaluation (CCE) scheme along with optional Board exam in the year 2010-11. However, the board decided to withdraw it in 2017 and reintroduced the mandatory board examination from 2018
 
Over 10 lakh students are likely to appear for the CBSE class 10 examination in 2019.