MI
Facts About Special Education in Michigan April 2005 from the Office of Special
Education and Early Intervention Services -
click here (PDF).
Special Report:
Data-Driven Decision-Making
- Data-driven decision-making, which involves the
collection and analysis of test results, demographic information, and other
student data to make more informed decisions about instruction--and, given
the stringent requirements of NCLB, it's a practice that is no longer an
option for today's school leaders, but a necessity.
Featured Website:
National Center
for Education Statistics - NCES is the
primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data that are related to
education in the United States. You can easily search for public and private
schools in your area and learn all about them, find college information
online, and locate public libraries. A goldmine of data.
Working Hard, Falling Short:
9.2 Million Families Barely
Getting By - On October 12, 2004 a 36 page
report titled: Working Hard, Falling Short-
America's Working Families and the Pursuit of Economic Security wasreleased by the Annie E. Casey, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations. It
shows that 9.2 million workingfamilies in the
United States - one out of every four - earn wages that are so low they are
barely able tosurvive financially. 20 million
children are in these low-income working families.
TX
State Undercounts Dropouts, Expert Says -
Boston professor says Texas should look at completion numbers. Annual school
ratings surged over the past decade in Texas with the help of a faulty
formula used to count dropouts, a Boston College professor said Tuesday
during a court challenge to the state's school finance system. [Free
login/registration required to view this article.]
AZ
Student Tracking System Has Fans, Foes - After
seven years and $12 million, the state has created one giant computer system
containing the names and whereabouts of Arizona's 900,000 students.
MI
Detroit Population
Still in Top 10, but Falling - Six of Michigan's
largest population centers rank in the top 200 in the nation,
with Detroit No. 10; but according to a U.S. Census report
released Thursday, people continue to leave the city and
others.
Child Abuse & Neglect Media Handbook (PDF) - Child
Trends has just published this free, handy booklet to help
journalists improve their coverage of child abuse and neglect
stories. The handbook includes basic facts on child abuse and
neglect and foster care, as well as quick references to
sources of information that can help journalists develop a
deeper understanding of the complex issues related to child
welfare. Even though the handbook was originally targeted at
journalists, it should be of interest to anyone who wants to
learn where to find more information about one of society's
most troubling problems.
U.S.
Website Promises
Easy Access to School Data - Federal, state and
private education leaders launched a Web site Thursday that promises
unprecedented access to information about public school performance.
Quality Counts 2004:
Count Me In: Special Education in an Era of Standards -
Education Week's eighth annual state-by-state report card on
public education, examines what the states are doing to test
special education students, hold schools accountable for their
performance, prepare teachers to educate such students, and
pay for special education services.
MI Michigan
Child Welfare:
Serving Special Kids - For
the first time, report includes disabled children; parents say
it's difficult to get them the help they need. One in eight
Michigan youths has a disability that interferes with their
ability to learn, go outside the home alone, see, hear or move
about, according to the Kids Count in Michigan Data Book
released today.
MI
2003 Michigan School Health Services Report
Now Available Online - A survey was administered to
schools in the Spring of 2002 to K-12 schools to assess school
health services in schools.The
document is at the Educational Materials Website at
www.emc.cmich.edu.
MIHow to Use the 2003
Michigan Kids Count DataBook (Book coming
1/2004) - (PDF; size=23k) Learn
about Kids Count Data from the 2000 census. This year's data book also
includes county information on children with disabilities and
information on lead poisoning, birth defects, hospitalizations for
asthma, and children receiving special education and supplemental
security income. For more information, contact Jane Zehnder-Merrell:
800-837-5436.
The Michigan Department of
Education keeps basic home school counts, but home schools are not
required to report to MDE.
Home School Exemption rules: The home school family is not
required to report to MDE. There are however, forms that non-public
and home school families complete and register with MDE. That is how
MDE gets its numbers for the count of homeschool students. However,
the actual numbers of students/schools could be higher than reported.
Data is also available by county.
Washington City Group on Disability Statistics - The Washington
City Group on Disability Measurement was formed as a result of the
United Nations International Seminar on Measurement of Disability that
took place in New York in June 2001. An outcome of that meeting was
the recognition that statistical and methodological work was needed at
an international level in order to facilitate the comparison of data
on disability cross-nationally. Consequently, the United Nations
Statistical Division authorized the formation of a City Group to
address some of the issues identified in the International Seminar and
invited the National Center for Health Statistics, the official health
statistics agency of the United States, to host the first meeting of
the group. The City Group format is one that has been used by the U.N.
in numerous other occasions to address various problems in survey
measurement and methodology, such as the Rio Group, which focuses on
poverty statistics.
Policy
Brief
Serving America's Youngest: A Snapshot of Early Head Start (PDF) -
A policy brief by the Center on Law and Social policy, entitled
Serving America's Youngest: A Snapshot of Early Head Start Children,
Families, Teachers, and Programs in 2002, offers the first detailed
examination of Early Head Start PIR data from the most recently
available program year, 2001-2002.
MI Disparities at Birth
Persist in Urban Areas - Despite improvement since 1990 in
Michigan’s largest cities on some measures of a healthy and promising
start to life, urban babies in 2001 continued to start life at a
greater disadvantage than those born elsewhere in the state, according
to the latest analysis released by Kids Count in Michigan.
Read 2003 Kid's Count
Data for Michigan's Largest Cities (PDF, 10 pages, size=267k)
MI
Schools Struggling to Address Drop out Rate -
Michigan schools don't know how many students are dropping
out of high school or where they're going when they quit, leaving
thousands of teenagers lost in the state system designed to track
them.
U.S.
Government Accounting
Office Report:
Dispute Resolution Under
IDEA - Special Education: Numbers of
Formal Disputes Are Generally Low and States Are Using Mediation and
Other Strategies to Resolve Conflicts. "The
four states we visited reported that disputes between school districts
and families have often centered on
fundamental issues of identifying students’ need for special
education, the development and
implementation of their individualized education programs (IEP), and
the educational setting in which they were placed."
MI
C.E.P.I. Beginning
to Work on Final Data Change - The
Center for Educational Performance and Information began work Tuesday
on the last of its planned changes in school data collection in the
state.
Michigan
Data Resource - CLICKS Updated data for many Michigan cities
and all counties is available through the Annie Casey Foundation's
County, City, Community-Level Information on Kids (CLICKS) system.
In addition to the maternal and infant
health data, the system includes infant mortality, child deaths, teen
deaths and births to young teens. This
on-line searchable database includes a mapping function, and will soon
include more graphic options. Check it
out here.
Welcome to a Special,
Updated Report by KIDS COUNT and Child Trends
This web site updates
previous Right Start reports by providing a text and data update
focused on cities and the nation as a whole. Updated data are
available as profiles,
line graphs,
national maps,
rankings,
and raw data
for the nation's 50 largest cities (plus 5 additional cities in which
the Annie E. Casey Foundation has made a long-term investment) and the
50 states through 2000.
Child Trends: dedicated to improving the lives of children by
conducting research and providing science-based information to improve
the decisions, programs, and policies that affect children
Child Trends' Mission
Child Trends is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization
dedicated to improving the lives of children by conducting research
and providing science-based information to improve the decisions,
programs, and policies that affect children. In advancing this
mission, Child Trends collects and analyzes data; conducts,
synthesizes, and disseminates research; designs and evaluates
programs; and develops and tests promising approaches to research in
the field.
2001-2002 Public
School Data: The National Center
for Education Statistics is acomprehensive,
annual,national statistical database of
information concerning all publicelementary
and secondary schools (approximately 95,000) and schooldistricts (approximately17,000). The
Public School and District locatorsallow
users to retrieve information on public
schools and districts. Datainclude address
information and basic information on students,staff,finance and 2000 Census data.
Additionally, the "Build a Table" tool
enables users tocreate customized tables of
public school data forstates, counties,
districts and schools usingdata from
multiple years.
Report
Released: Youth
with Disabilities: A Changing Population -
This report details changes in disability classification,
demographics, household profiles, services, and outcomes from the first National
Longitudinal Transition Study (NLTS) in 1987 to the second begun in 2001. Many
positive changes are recorded, but challenges remain such as a significant
increase in negative behaviors among youth with emotional disturbances and other
health impairments including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
GAO
Report on Special Education:Clearer Guidance Would Enhance Implementation of Federal Disciplinary
Provisions.In the 2000-01 school year, more than 91,000 special education students were
removed from their educational settings for disciplinary reasons. The GAO
(General Accounting Office) was asked to determine
where disciplined special education students are placed, the extent to which
local school districts continue educational services for those students, and how
the U.S. Department of Education provides support and oversight for special
education disciplinary placements. Highlights of
the GAO report are available at
http://www.gao.gov/highlights/d03550high.pdf.The full report is available at
http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-03-550. (both
documents are in PDF format)
The Michigan Census
Office has reformatted census data into tables and maps and added an
in-depth analysis of population trends for counties making it a better
alternative to the Census site for Michigan-specific data:
http://www.michigan.gov/census/0,1607,7-162--66114--,00.html
NY Students Ousted
for Stats? - Thousands of struggling students were discharged by high
school administrators more concerned about their own job
evaluations than the students' futures, say some public
officials and children's advocates.
-
Visitors to the Center for Educational Performance and
Information Web site will now be able to find the pupil
headcounts for every school, school district and intermediate
district in the state, director Andrew Henry announced Monday.The information, which was collected by the Department
of Education before CEPI's creation, is posted in the Download
Data section of its site:
www.michigan.gov/cepi.
National Center on Educational Outcomes (NCEO)
-
http://www.coled.umn.edu/nceo/ -
Offers information on assessments, accountability policy and
practices, national and state data collection programs, and
standards-setting for all students, including those with
disabilities.
Click here
for additional information on Drop Outs.
Dropout
Rate Is Climbing and Likely to Go Higher
-
With so much attention paid to test scores, an equally
important gauge of school performance has mostly been overlooked. High
school dropout rates seem to have jumped.
Letters
to the Editor: Education
Week - Virtually all states exclude the achievement of
special ed students in state ratings of school performance.
The
Center for
Educational Performance and Information (CEPI) collects and reports
data about Michigan's K-12 public schools. Our mission is to become the
single source for the most comprehensive, accessible information about the
performance of Michigan's public schools and students.
Schools:
Many who failed MCAS quit - Boston school officials announced findings yesterday that a
significant number of the students in the Class of 2003 who failed the
high-stakes MCAS exam in the spring of 2001 and who did not take the
retest in December of 2001 have dropped out of high school.
MIRS 7/07/02 -
Special ed gender gap stirs worry
- Some say boys singled out for wrong reasons.
Public schools in Massachusetts and nationwide place twice as
many boys as girls in special education, a gender gap that extends
from the biggest cities to the tiniest suburbs to the tiniest towns,
according to a Globe analysis of state and federal data.
Playing the Numbers Game With Dropout Rates
- L.A. Weekly examines how fraudulent dropout rates are being
reported at some schools in California. According to the authors, the
chicanery around dropout rates begins with the state of California
itself, which does not conform to widely accepted standards for
counting dropouts honestly and accurately. The state gives schools up
to a year and a half to locate missing students and then offers any
number of loopholes to avoid counting them as dropouts. A federal
study used a mathematical model to estimate that California
undercounted dropouts in one recent year by more than 70 percent.
Ironically, regular student absences are unintentionally solving the
problem of chronic classroom overcrowding.
