Two questions about fairness and quality ran through the InformED Report for January 20, 2017. The first was whether Washington State’s way of funding schools quietly favored wealthier districts. The second was how colleges, as online courses grew, could tell whether those courses and the people teaching them were any good. The edition closed with a doctoral student in Tulsa whose path ran from a Head Start classroom to a national research grant in early education.
In this edition
- The Seattle Times reported on “stealth inequities” in Washington’s school funding that can send more money to affluent districts for students with the same needs.
- U.S. News looked ahead to online education trends for 2017, from alternative credentials to artificial intelligence.
- With an estimated 5.8 million students in online courses, colleges were under pressure to evaluate online teaching well.
- Emisha Pickens-Young, a former Head Start child, became one of six graduate students nationally to win a federal Head Start Graduate Student Research Grant.
Washington’s “stealth inequities” in school funding
In The Seattle Times, Claudia Rowe examined how parts of Washington’s education system worked against schools in poorer communities. Some of the state’s funding formulas pushed more money to programs in affluent districts than to districts with higher poverty rates, even for students with the same needs. Because the effect sat inside technical formulas rather than in any single, visible decision, the paper called them “stealth inequities,” and low-income communities were pressing for major changes to the system.
Rowe’s account began with a trip. In November 2016, a group of 15 Washington activists, legislators, philanthropists, school officials and policy specialists, brought together by equity advocate Sharonne Navas, flew to Sacramento for a two-day look at California’s effort to overhaul school funding by directing more money to poorer students.
The timing mattered. Washington’s legislature was under a state Supreme Court order, from the McCleary case, to fully fund basic education, so the shape of the state’s funding system was already on the table in Olympia. For district leaders, Rowe’s reporting was a reminder that the fairness of a funding system lies in its formulas as much as its totals, and that a district’s own budget can carry those inequities without anyone choosing them.
Online education in 2017: growth, and the question of quality
Looking ahead to 2017, U.S. News’s Jordan Friedman noted that in recent years more students had enrolled in online courses, more organizations had offered alternative credentials such as digital badges and nanodegrees, and more employers had accepted online degrees. The experts he spoke with expected more online degrees and courses, and suggested artificial intelligence could begin to appear in classrooms. Some cautioned that bringing these tools into teaching would not be easy.
Growth brought its own problem. In EdTech Magazine, Meghan Bogardus Cortez cited the Online Learning Consortium’s estimate that 5.8 million students were enrolled in online courses, and pointed to a report titled “Effectively Evaluating Online Faculty.” Its authors argued that an evaluation method that both assesses and mentors online instructors is vital to a program’s success. The consortium had maintained a set of quality scorecards since 2010, and in December 2016 it added three more, covering course design, instructional practice and digital courseware, one of them developed with the State University of New York’s Open SUNY program.
The same questions applied to K-12. Districts adding virtual courses and blended programs needed a way to judge course design and teaching online, not only to count enrollments. Scorecards of this kind are frameworks built from expert practice rather than proof that a course will raise achievement, but they give leaders a shared checklist for what good online teaching should include.
InformED Report spotlight: from Head Start child to Head Start researcher
Ginnie Graham reported in the Tulsa World that Emisha Pickens-Young, 36, a doctoral student at the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa, had been selected as one of six graduate students in the country, and the first ever from Oklahoma, to receive the federal Head Start Graduate Student Research Grant, an award of about $25,000. She had been a child in a Head Start program herself, and the power of a good early education had stayed with her.
Looking back on those early years, Pickens-Young said, “I thought school was a fun place to be.” The grant would support her research in early childhood education, adding to the evidence on programs like the one she attended. Her story was a direct, personal example of what early education programs aim to do: give children a strong start, and open doors that last well beyond the classroom.
Further reading from that week
- WPRI: Raimondo’s $9.3B budget targets online sales to spend on schools
- Chalkbeat: Why online learning works for these Indiana kids
- Stanford University News: Brief interventions help online learners persist with coursework, Stanford research finds
Sources
- Claudia Rowe, “‘Stealth inequities’: How Washington’s education system hurts poor schools,” The Seattle Times, January 2017.
- Jordan Friedman, “5 Online Education Trends to Watch in 2017,” U.S. News & World Report, January 2017.
- Meghan Bogardus Cortez, “Is Your University’s Online Course Up to Code?,” EdTech Magazine, January 9, 2017.
- Ginnie Graham, “OU-Tulsa grad student receives prestigious early education grant,” Tulsa World, January 2017.
About the InformED Report
The InformED Report is edCircuit’s short news program on education. This edition first ran on January 20, 2017. In 2026, edCircuit re-presented it with a new anchor and this full written account. Both report the stories as they stood on that date and link the original reporting, so readers can see exactly where each claim came from.
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