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Kline Urges Deliberation Over Speed

March 31, 2011 – 1:24 pm | By Guest Contributor | No comments yet

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If there was any doubt that House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline (R-Minn.) would take a deliberate approach to the ESEA reauthorization, he dispelled it Tuesday. In a late afternoon briefing with an audience from the Council of the Chief State School Officers in Washington, DC, Kline stated he would not be rushed by the White House or the Senate into producing a quick ESEA reauthorization bill before the start of the school year.  So recounts Kristen Tosh Cowan, a partner with the education law firm, Brustein & Manasevit, who was present at the briefing. When would he introduce a bill for comment and debate? “In May,” he said…but he hastily amended that to “June” after glancing over and seeing the dubious expression on his education staffer’s face. Floor action would follow in the summer and conference with Senate would follow in late summer/ fall. But there is no way the bill is going to be ready before the new school year, as President Obama hopes. The bill also will be produced in pieces, said Kline, with one piece on accountability, one on teacher preparation and evaluation, one on flexibility and so forth. According to Kline, the marching orders from the House Republican leadership discourage any more thousand-page bills that no one has a chance to read before voting on (referring to the 2010 health care reform bill). Such bills do not serve democracy, according to Kline. This is not the first time this year that Kline has sought to ratchet back expectations, in the face of President Obama’s stated desire to get a bill quickly and the Senate’s plans to fast-track the legislation this spring. It’s clear he wants the new House Republican majority to have time to fashion its own approach to the ESEA. The Senate is able to make a fast start because it is under the same management as last year, and much of its work is already done.  Kline noted that half of the Republicans on his committee are new to Congress, so their learning curve is steep. Kline also used his CCSSO forum to draw a personal line in the sand: “If the federal footprint is not smaller when the bill is enacted, I will have failed.

Posted in Congress, Reauthorization | Tagged ,

Arizona Agrees to Make Changes to English Learner Screening

March 31, 2011 – 10:12 am | By Ellen Forte | No comments yet

Arizona Education Policy

(This post was written by guest contributor, Ellen Forte. She is the author The Administrator’s Guide to Federal Programs for English Learners.) March 25 marked another important day in an ongoing series of events unfolding in Arizona regarding service and program standards for English learners (ELs). After ruling in August 2010 that the Arizona Department of Education (ADE)’s identification process and assessment instruments violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) established an agreement with ADE outlining the steps the state must take to rectify one of these violations. Under this agreement, the ADE must reinstate the three-question Home Language Survey (HLS) it had used prior to 2009, when the state reduced its HLS to a single question: What is the primary language of the student? The resolution also includes requirements about how those administering the restored three-question HLS must interpret the responses. Specifically, educators must administer an English proficiency screening exam to every student for whom the answer to any of the three questions is a “language other than English.” To ensure that the HLS administration, interpretation, and screening process is well-implemented, the ADE must provide and document training for all relevant state and local education agency staff. This sends a strong signal about federal expectations. Clearly, states would be best to err on the side of over-identifying ELs, rather than risk missing students who should be receiving support. The mandate for training and monitoring those who administer the HLS serves as a reminder that interpreting an HLS response from a new family is not something that state or district officials can assume will be performed properly without guidance. The common practice of having untrained front-office staffers administer and interpret the HLS clearly must stop. While laudable, this resolution is only the first step toward solving the many problems in Arizona, which has become a national lightning rod for problems with EL service standards. ADE is the defendant in the Horne v. Flores federal court case, which seems destined to take its place in the pantheon of EL civil rights cases, along with Lau v. Nichols, Casteñeda v. Pickard and Plyler v. Doe. Plaintiffs in Horne allege that the state’s language instruction program, which requires that all ELs spend half of the school day in decontextualized ESL instruction divorced from content instruction and isolated from their English-speaking classmates, is ineffective and unnecessarily segregationist. Both research and common sense are on their side. In August, OCR issued a statement expressing doubt that Arizona’s English language proficiency (ELP) assessment is a valid and accurate measure for determining which students need help to develop the language skills necessary to participate fully in classrooms where instruction is in English. Arizona has demonstrated a clear pattern of deficiencies in the full range of its policies for identifying, teaching, and assessing ELs. We at edCount hope that additional agreements will not only correct Arizona’s misinterpretations of civil rights mandates, but deter other states from following its lead. (By the way, have you taken a gander at Texas’ emerging immigration politics lately?)

Posted in Assessments, English Learners, Title III | Tagged , , ,

It’s Harmless!

March 30, 2011 – 12:57 pm | By Chuck Edwards | No comments yet

Sandy Brown

[caption id="attachment_171" align="alignleft" width="100" caption="Sandy Brown"][/caption] Well, maybe not. I’m talking about Title I’s “hold harmless” provision, which guarantees eligible school districts a certain percentage — 85, 90 or 95 percent, depending on their poverty — of the previous year’s funds, even if a relative decline in their child poverty would justify a larger reduction. Harmless or not, it certainly bears watching, according to ED official Sandy Brown. “Given the uncertainty of the funding level [for school year 2011-12], and even the potential for a funding reduction, I anticipate that [the hold harmless guarantee] will play an important role in the allocation process, and I expect that a larger number of local educational agencies will be funded at their hold-harmless levels than in the past,” Brown said Monday at the National Association of Federal Education Program Administrators' annual conference in D.C. Brown is the U.S. Department of Education’s Title I allocation maven. Each May (if Congress actually finishes a budget!), he issues one of education’s largest, and most widely anticipated, Excel spreadsheets: the national list of every school district’s Title I allocation for the coming school year. When there are steadily rising appropriations (i.e., for the past two decades), the spreadsheets hold mainly good news. But the stakes are very high this year because flat-funding would turn Title I allocations into a zero-sum game. If one district’s poverty goes up more than the national average, it will receive a larger allocation. But that increase will come from districts with poverty growth below the national average. This is a natural outcome of the congressional allocation formula, which is intended to send the dollars to where the poverty is. The hold-harmless provision is intended to cushion the impact on the losing districts. But this also means that districts with rising poverty may receive a much smaller increase than they anticipate. To them, the hold-harmless protection might not seem so harmless after all. (Photo credit: U.S. Department of Education)

Posted in Federal Budget/Appropriations, Title I | Tagged , ,

U.S. Public Against Education Cuts?

March 29, 2011 – 12:45 pm | By Travis Hicks | No comments yet

As Republicans and Democrats continue to duke it out over the budget for fiscal 2012, neither party has directly asked the American people what they think. But that’s not to say that others haven’t. In fact, the Committee for Education Funding has compiled the results of nine recent polls and discovered that the U.S. public strongly opposes cutting K-12 or higher education spending. For example, a March Bloomberg National News poll found by an almost four to one margin that the American public opposes cutting No Child Left Behind spending, while a February 2011 Garin Hart Yang Research Group report found 78 percent of individuals against cutting K-12 funding as a means of deficit reduction. Check out CEF’s whole analysis here.

Posted in Federal Budget/Appropriations | Tagged

Solving the Supplanting Conundrum

March 28, 2011 – 3:09 am | By Andrew Brownstein | No comments yet

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If ever a situation cried out for a relaxation of federal mandates, it was the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The disaster killed at least 1,800 people, caused $81 billion in property damage and displaced thousands of students throughout Louisiana and Mississippi. “You would think in a natural disaster of this kind, the department would have waiver authority,” said Celia Sims, senior policy advisor to Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and a former U.S. Department of Education (ED) staffer under the George W. Bush administration.  To lift longstanding fiscal safeguards like the supplement-not-supplant (SNS) provision, the department had to get approval from Congress, which it ultimately won. But, as Sims noted, “You hit resistance on the Hill even with that.” She delivered her comments during a daylong discussion sponsored by the Center for American Progress (CAP) and the American Enterprise Institute entitled “Tightening-Up Title I.” The biggest splash of the day came from a paper on changing SNS written by attorneys Melissa Junge and Sheara Krvaric of the Federal Education Law Group. Title I-Derland previously blogged about the issue here and here. As Sims’ comments demonstrate, however, change won’t be easy. When it comes to SNS, Sims quipped, many in Congress have a knee-jerk view that “if we don’t have it, the world is going to collapse.” Junge and Krvaric believe in SNS’ intent, which is to ensure that Title I funds provide extra support for the neediest students and do not replace state and local funds.  They want to eliminate the thorniest aspect of the provision—its focus on individual goods and services—and replace it with what they call a “Title I-neutral” allocation test. In a nutshell, under this proposal, it would not be necessary to test every cost charged to Title I for potential supplanting. Instead, the authors want to use a model that is currently limited to Title I “schoolwide” schools: If a district can verify that it allocates to each Title I school the amount of state or local money that the school was entitled to had it not been a Title I school, then the district is demonstrating that it provides its Title I schools with a “floor” of state and local funds and that Title I is, in fact, supplementing those funds. There are early indications that the department is giving the proposal some thought. Appearing with Sims, Carmel Martin, ED’s assistant secretary for planning evaluation and policy, said she likes the idea that “in compliance with supplement not supplant, you don’t have to trace every cost with every dollar. That’s really the move we need to make — moving away from, ‘What did you spend that dollar on?’” At the very least, she said, it’s clear that SNS currently is “not working.” What do you think? Would the author’s proposal solve your supplanting headaches? Look for more detailed reporting and analysis on this issue in the May edition of the Title I Monitor. (Photo credit: D. Sharon Pruitt.)

Posted in Accountability, Auditing and Monitoring, Compliance/Reporting, Congress, Cost Principles, Legislation, Reauthorization, Title I | Tagged ,

The SNS Debate, Part Deux: Compliance vs. Kids

March 25, 2011 – 11:09 am | By Andrew Brownstein | No comments yet

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We know that Title I’s longstanding supplement-not-supplant (SNS) provision is good for auditors, monitors, lawyers, accountants and a bevy of mid-level bureaucrats. But is it good for kids? That was the question posed during a recent panel discussion devoted to a provocative new paper by attorneys Melissa Junge and Sheara Krvaric of the Federal Education Law Group. “The supplement-not-supplant challenge is that we actually spend so much time trying to defend how we do the work that it takes away from being thoughtful and progressive,” said Tony Smith, superintendent of the Oakland Unified School District. “The intention of the statute is being interrupted by the compliance mechanism.” Title I-Derland first reported on the paper yesterday. SNS was designed to maximize Title I’s impact by ensuring that federal dollars add to, rather than replace, state and local funds for underprivileged students. Since it focuses on individual goods and services, however, SNS compliance begins with a somewhat metaphysical question: “What would you have done in the absence of federal funds?’” ED defined three typical scenarios under which it would “presume” supplanting to have occurred: 1.      Using Title I funds to pay for something that is required under other federal, state or local laws. 2.      Using Title I funds to pay for something supported last year with state or local funds. 3.      Using Title I funds to pay for services when a state, district, or school uses state or local funds to provide the same services to other students. Sounds simple, right? Except it isn’t. As the paper notes, the requirement makes it difficult to use Title I funds for comprehensive programs. For example, ED has advised that it would constitute as supplanting the use of Title I funds to pay for services written into the individualized education plan of a student with disabilities, complicating the delivery of services to the large number of students eligible for both special education and Title I services. SNS can also stifle innovation. If a district hires reading intervention specialists for a pilot project in its Title I schools, and that pilot proves successful, the district may be blocked from “scaling up” the pilot to all its schools. The district may have to pick up the entire tab, including the cost of the already-hired specialists, because using Title I funds to provide services for Title I students is considered supplanting when the district provides the same services to non-Title I students. The burden of dodging such presumptions leads to what Junge calls “a culture of ‘No.’” “This is what I find to be the tragedy,” she said. “It is often easier to pay for a field trip, a computer and God knows, you don’t want to know about T-shirts. That stuff is much easier to get through than formative assessment tools, language instruction experts, data analysts…those things we really need in our schools to upgrade our program.” Check in Monday for a look at ways to make SNS work better for students.

Posted in Accountability, Assessments, Auditing and Monitoring, Compliance/Reporting, Cost Principles, Individuals with Disabilites Education Act (IDEA), Title I | Tagged , ,

SNS: Ready for Prime Time

March 24, 2011 – 1:45 pm | By Andrew Brownstein | No comments yet

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When it comes to “supplanting,” the problem is that states and districts are required to apply a test akin to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous comment about pornography: “I know it when I see it.” So says attorney Melissa Junge, co-founder of the Federal Education Law Group. “People are scared, so they wind up making easy administrative decisions that might not be good educational decisions,” she said. “There’s this lockdown compliance mentality that has evolved…because it’s a ‘you know it when you see it’ kind of test.” Still with us? The somewhat snoozeworthy topic of supplement not supplant (SNS) is getting a fresh appraisal thanks to an eye-opening paper written by Junge and law partner Sheara Krvaric, and presented recently for the Center for American Progress (CAP) and the American Enterprise Institute. It has already generated loud buzz at the U.S. Department of Education and on Capitol Hill. Cynthia Brown, CAP’s vice president for education policy, called the paper “historic” and said it “really breaks new ground.” Title I-Derland will be exploring its themes in several posts, with a detailed analysis to come in the May issue of the Title I Monitor. I predict its publication will later be seen as a “shot across the bow” similar to the 2004 paper Marguerite Roza and Paul Hill penned on the deficiencies of comparability, which sparked major momentum to change that provision. SNS had good intentions. It was added years after the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed in 1965. Districts were using Title I money to simply subsidize their general operating budgets, leading to a variety of scandals. In adding the SNS requirement to the statute, Congress made clear that Title I funds are meant to be extra: They provide an additional layer of support for the neediest students and are not meant to substitute for state and local funds. However, unlike other Title I fiscal requirements, such as comparability or maintenance of effort, SNS focuses on individual goods and services. Are you providing reading coaches in non-Title I schools with state and local funds while funding the same positions  in Title I schools with Title I funds? Bingo! That’s supplanting. That’s a fairly clear case. But many supplanting scenarios are anything but clear. And that’s when the head-scratching begins. “Instead of being a real fiscal rule, dealing with numbers — and numbers are transparent — it’s a discretionary, psychological, theoretical test: ‘What would you have done in the absence of federal funds?’” Junge said. “Who knows what you would have done? That’s a really hard thing for schools to deal with.” We’re interested in your thoughts. How much time do you spend on supplanting issues? Is it worth it? Does SNS primarily help to ensure the integrity of Title I funds or does it stifle much-needed innovation? Check this site for upcoming follow-up posts on how SNS works in practice and ways the provision could be improved.

Posted in Accountability, Auditing and Monitoring, Compliance/Reporting, Cost Principles, Legislation, Reauthorization, Title I | Tagged ,

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