Title I-derland

ED Abandons ‘Same Cell’ Battle

November 30, 2011 – 3:01 pm | By Chuck Edwards | No comments yet

No, this is not about biology. This is about another quiet retreat in the Obama administration’s ESEA waiver package — a retreat that shows how much ground civil rights groups have lost in the education debate since the Republican takeover of the House in 2008. In this case, it involves the regulation [34 CFR Sec. 200.32(a)(1)(ii)(B)] prohibiting states from using the “same cell model” to identify schools for improvement. This extremely lenient model would identify schools based only on repeated shortfalls by a single subgroup, such as children with disabilities. This pattern of failures is termed the “same cell” model because only shortfalls in the exact same indicator — such as test participation in reading — by the exact same subgroup two years in a row would trigger school improvement. In NCLB’s first years, many states sought the U.S Department of Education’s (ED’s) approval to use the same cell model. This model has the obvious advantage of reducing the number of schools identified, an attractive idea for states that felt the law already “over-identified” schools.  In addition, states argued that it made sense to focus resources on the special needs of particular groups of students. Strongly supported by civil rights groups, however, the Bush administration adamantly refused to allow states to use the same cell model, in part because it might stigmatize particular groups that are subject to negative perceptions anyway. ED finally tried to put a stop to these requests by writing the prohibition into the No Child Left Behind regulations in 2008. But Obama’s ESEA Flexibility package would waive this prohibition along with the rest of NCLB’s school improvement apparatus and thereby allow states to employ a version of the same cell model in whatever school identification system they adopt. NCLB’s statutory school identification process was built on top of an elaborate standards and assessment apparatus. Beginning in 2002, states were responsible for setting adequate yearly progress goals for schools based on increasing percentages of children meeting state achievement standards in reading/language arts and in math. Schools had to meet these goals, broken out by key subgroups, and also hit a minimum of 95 percent test participation for each subgroup. Combined with a third “other indicator” — graduation rate for high schools and an indicator chosen by states for elementary and middle schools — this yielded a matrix of up to 37 cells for a given school, as illustrated here (the table is taken from our book, The New Title I: The Changing Landscape of Accountability Under a strict reading of the NCLB statute, failure to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) on tests or hit targets for test participation or the “other indicator” for two sequential years in any cell would throw a school into improvement. But ED allowed states to establish more lenient patterns of failure for school identification. In addition to the “any cell” model, they could use the “same subject” model (failure only in one indicator or another — achievement or participation — in the same subject) or the “same indicator” model (failure in the same indicator within the same subject). But the Bush administration wouldn’t go so far as to approve the same-cell model, saying that the intent of school identification “is not to lay blame on a particular group of students … but to identify the instructional and academic areas that need to be improved.” In other words, identification highlights problems with the subjects, not the students. Civil rights groups backed the administration on this issue. All this has gone by the wayside, with the Obama administration tacitly ceding to states the authority to adopt a same cell model if they wish. The elimination of this constraint might be expected to prompt protests by civil rights groups, but I suspect that they have bigger worries right now, given the growing congressional challenge to imposing any federal mandates at all.

Title I ‘Formula Fairness Campaign’ Faces Uphill Climb

November 29, 2011 – 5:02 pm | By Chuck Edwards | No comments yet

The Formula Fairness Campaign's dogged pursuit of revisions in the Title I allocation formula faces the same basic obstacle as other pending legislation on Capitol Hill: a viciously partisan atmosphere that inhibits compromise. The Campaign seeks to reduce the impact of “number weighting” in the Title I formula. Number weighting gives a bonus to school districts with very high numbers of low-income children. The Campaign complains that this unfairly favors some districts -- principally large central city and suburban districts with high numbers of low-income children but relatively low poverty percentages -- at the expense of smaller cities and rural districts with higher poverty rates.  The Campaign has certainly made some progress; as we discuss in the most recent issue of the Title I Monitor, proponents have enlisted the support of several members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which is responsible for writing the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. But, while the committee has worked on other parts of the ESEA, it has not yet introduced its bill to reauthorize Title I, and my guess is that it will not do so before the Christmas recess. On the Senate side, no formula revisions were included in the Harkin-Enzi bill approved by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Oct. 20, although there are rumors that Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., is considering pushing for formula changes when the bill reaches the floor. Regardless of the level of support in this Congress, the fate of the Campaign’s desired formula revisions may be held hostage to the overall progress of the ESEA reauthorization bill. Legislation that shifts the balance of funds from one set of grantees to another generally passes only if it is rolled into a larger bill and/or is accompanied by a big enough increase in appropriations to ensure that “losers” do not actually see their grants go down, even if their relative share of the pot decreases. Although some experts see the Senate committee’s action as a hopeful sign that a compromise ESEA bill might pass in 2012, the odds are still long. And there isn’t a lot of extra money sloshing around Washington these days. The Campaign may have to patiently cultivate the ground for the next Congress, which will be elected next fall. Photo Credit: Howard Lake

“New and Ambitious” AMOs May be Toothless

November 28, 2011 – 10:39 am | By Guest Contributor | 1 comment

(This guest blog post was written by educational consultant William Erpenbach, president of WJE Consulting.) On November 14, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) received plans from 11 states to waive No Child Left Behind rules under the department’s new ESEA Flexibility package. Of those states, three (Georgia, Minnesota, and New Jersey) indicated they would develop their Annual Measurable Objectives (AMOs) under the department’s waiver Option A —reducing by one-half the percentage of students in the “all students” group and in each sub-group within six years. One state, Tennessee, indicated it would follow Option B — ensuring that all students achieve proficiency no later than the end of the 2019-20 school year. Seven states (Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Oklahoma) indicated they would follow Option C — another method that is educationally sound and results in ambitious but achievable AMOs for all districts, schools and student groups. Here’s the surprise: The new AMOs set by those seven states go well beyond the requirements under Options A and B. Not only are the attendant requirements more demanding, they also include multiple measures that will produce a broader, more comprehensive, examination of students’ learning and subject mastery. One example is Colorado. The state proposes to focus first on the performance and needs of individual students. Colorado will consider a variety of school- and district-level data based on students’ performance levels on state assessments:

• the Colorado Growth Model, to dig deeper into what each student’s prior and current performance means;
• normative growth data using individual student growth percentiles to determine whether the student is making progress relative to his prior achievement;
• criterion-referenced growth data using adequate student growth percentiles to determine whether the student is making progress relative to state achievement targets; and
• determinations of whether a student is making enough growth to be on track for college- and career-readiness.

A more complex proposal is Kentucky’s continuous improvement model. The state’s  composite score will be derived from three primary components: (1) a composite of achievement scores from five academic areas, a measure the state characterizes as “gap scores,” individual student growth, college/career readiness and graduation rate; (2 program reviews in arts/humanities, practical living/career studies, writing, K-3 and world languages; and (3) measures of teacher and leader effectiveness. Under the ESEA Flexibility provisions, applications from states that choose options A and B will be reviewed by department officials, while applications from those that opt for C must be scrutinized by outside peer reviewers. How the Option C proposals will be received by peer reviewers remains to be seen. And whether the next-generation accountability systems will result in more ambitious and more meaningful measures of student, school, and district progress and, in turn, support school and district improvement is also an open question. The culprit: AMO results need only be reported and will no longer be used to identify schools and districts in need of improvement (with the previously accompanying sanctions.) Why the obvious cynicism? Except for incentives that may be available for state-identified Title I “rewards” schools, those schools that are identified as “priority schools” and “focus schools” will not soon face sanctions for failing to meet their new AMO targets. The primary motivation for meeting (and exceeding) these targets will rest with moving out of one or the other designation. Meanwhile, the concentration on states’ lowest performing 15 percent  of Title I schools may well serve to disadvantage large numbers of low-performing students in other schools that may no longer be able to offer additional academic assistance such as supplemental educational services. The “new and ambitious” AMOs may ultimately have some unintended consequences.

Keeping the Auditors Happy

November 22, 2011 – 10:19 am | By Chuck Edwards | 2 comments

I was recently reminded of a quote by James Carville, the ragin’ Cajun, uttered in the middle of the deficit debate early in President Clinton’s administration. “I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” Well, I want to come back as an auditor. This may bear a little explanation. I am a regulations geek, and I spend a lot of time looking at audit reports. And it has occurred to me that the grantees I know spend a lot of time trying to keep the auditors happy. I googled the phrase “keep the auditors happy,” and, sure enough, there were 8,040 hits. Many of the websites offer this kind of advice: “Keep all your records for five years — it will keep your auditors happy.” “Make sure your invoices match your purchase orders — it will keep the auditors happy.” “Tag all your equipment — that will keep your auditors happy.” So, it seems that a lot of people out there are doing their best to keep their auditors in a state of perfect bliss. Which is why I would like to come back as an auditor — they must be the happiest people alive. Photo Credit: Traci Bunkers

Supreme Court to Weigh in on Federal Grants

November 21, 2011 – 8:00 am | By Chuck Edwards | 4 comments

Responding to the Supreme Court’s Nov. 14 decision to consider a constitutional challenge to the new health care law, the media have focused on the law’s controversial requirement that everyone buy health insurance (the so-called “individual mandate”). But they have generally overlooked an even more momentous question that is part of the same case: the power of the federal government to require states to perform actions as a condition of federal aid. The plaintiffs’ challenge to this traditional quid-pro-quo has profound implications for the entire grant-in-aid structure, comprising $600 billion in federal aid to state and local governments for such diverse purposes as education, highways, and housing. Of the five-and-a-half hours scheduled for arguments on the constitutionality of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, one hour will be devoted to the law’s expansion of Medicaid to cover additional low-income people. Medicaid, which is operated by states with the help of federal subsidies, constitutes about 40 percent of all federal aid to states.  Although the federal government will bear most of the costs of the mandated expansion during the first six years, states must assume the costs thereafter. In response, a number of states have complained that they can’t afford those additional costs, but they also can’t afford to opt out of Medicaid entirely because it would leave so many of their citizens without health care. They want the Court to decree the expansion unconstitutionally burdensome under the Tenth Amendment (which reserves certain powers to the states). Among the first to note the implications was Brad Joondeph, who wrote in the ACA Litigation Blog: Again, the really big news of the morning — if there is anything surprising — is that the Court has decided to take up the constitutionality of the ACA's Medicaid amendments. Specifically, the question is whether the spending conditions that the ACA imposes on the states are effectively "coercive," such that they amount to an impermissible commandeering [of state powers]. There is no split on the question, and no lower court judge has yet voted to uphold the states' claim. But the Court will take it up. As a purely legal matter, this is a bigger issue than the individual mandate. For much of the modern liberal state is underwritten by Congress's use of the conditional spending power. The last time the underlying question reached the Supreme Court was in the 1987 case of South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203, 211 (1987). In this case, South Dakota objected to the federal government requiring states to set the drinking age at 21 or suffer a 5 percent cut in their annual highway safety grants. The High Court said that if a state does not want to accept the conditions attached to a federal grant, it is perfectly free to turn the money down. The implications of the court’s decision to once again take up this question are obvious: All federal grants are founded on the conditional spending power. If the sheer price tag on the Medicaid expansion elevates the normal grant strings from “conditional” to “coercive,” this may open other grants to challenge. Is the $14 billion Title I program coercive? Is the regulation-ridden, $12 billion IDEA program coercive? Most ominous for grant advocates is the fact that the High Court took up this issue despite the fact that lower courts have uniformly adopted the Dole precedent. The Court normally only considers cases when lower courts disagree. This indicates a particular interest in revisiting the issue, which means that someone on the bench may be hot to overturn Dole — as well as the fundamental principle underlying most federal aid to states.

It’s Alive!

November 17, 2011 – 7:00 am | By Chuck Edwards | 3 comments

"It's alive! It's alive!" No, I’m not talking about Frankenstein’s monster, but “adequate yearly progress,” or AYP. For all the hullabaloo about Obama’s ESEA flexibility package, what is overlooked is how much of No Child Left Behind’s original accountability framework has been preserved. This includes AYP, which has such scary connotations that “eliminating AYP” has become shorthand for eliminating everything bad about NCLB. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPmVhyHBRAM[/youtube]NCLB’s process has traditionally worked like this: AMOs with 2014 deadline--->Fail AYP--->Federally dictated sanctions The new process looks like this: AMOs dictated by state--->Fail AYP--->Federally dictated sanctions for bottom 15%/State-dictated sanctions for the rest The core of the process —determining whether a school district has failed to meet its annual measurable objectives and thereby fallen short of AYP – remains. States have always had a fair amount of discretion to determine which combinations of failure lead to intervention — e.g., failure to hit AMOs in any subject two years on a row, or only in the same subject? — and they get even more under the ESEA flexibility. But AYP, per se, still exists. So, if you view AYP as the monster it is so commonly portrayed as, don’t put your pitchforks away quite yet.

A Stake Through the Heart

November 16, 2011 – 7:00 am | By Chuck Edwards | No comments yet

A little-noticed provision of Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s ESEA waiver flexibility would put a stake through the heart of a prime nemesis: the so-called “2 percent rule.” States that are approved for the ESEA waiver flexibility would no longer be able to use a specially modified test for certain children with disabilities and count their scores as “proficient” for the purposes of ESEA accountability. Under present regulations, states with approved tests are able to count as proficient a number of scores equivalent to 2 percent of their student population. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but it equates to about 20 percent of the average state population of special education students. This test — termed an “alternate assessment measured against modified achievement standards,” or AA-MAS — should not be confused with an “alternate assessment for children measured against alternate academic standards,” or AA-AAS. (Love the acronyms, don’t you?) The AA-AAS is designed for children with the most significant cognitive disabilities, who, by general agreement, will never be able to meet grade-level performance standards. States may count as proficient a number of AA-AAS passing grades equal to up to 1 percent of their student populations. In contrast to the AA-AAS, which states are required to administer, the AA-MAS is optional. It was introduced  in 2007 under the previous administration to respond to district complaints that there were many students — particularly those diagnosed as having a specific learning disability — who do not meet the standards for an AA-AAS but still could not pass the regular tests for reasons related to their disability. These tests measure students against grade-level standards, but use a less-challenging format, such as fewer choices on multiple choice tests, bigger type and simplified language. From the start, many disability advocates challenged the AA-MAS because they said it merely excused failure to adequately teach such children. They were also worried that the availability of this option would encourage over-identification of struggling students who are simply not receiving the interventions they need. Duncan has never concealed his distaste for the AA-MAS option, saying in a speech earlier this year that he considered the 2 percent rule to be “unacceptable.” But the AA-MAS is part of the regulations, and repealing regulations is a tough and controversial undertaking. Making it a condition for receiving the ESEA flexibility is more direct and achieves the same end. The problem is, a lot of states have invested significant effort in the AA-MAS. According to a recent paper from the National Center on Educational Outcomes, 17 states have developed or implemented such tests, while four — Kansas, Louisiana, North Carolina and Texas — have been approved to use them for accountability under the ESEA. If ED no longer accepts scores under an AA-MAS, states desiring the ESEA flexibility will have no choice but to abandon these tests.  Notwithstanding this fact, Kansas and North Carolina have both notified ED that they intend to apply for the ESEA flexibility. Although the development work probably contributed some useful information to the field, I wouldn’t be surprised if some state testing experts are feeling a tad frustrated at ED’s change in course.