Title I-derland

The Thrilla on Capital Hill-a

January 31, 2012 – 2:36 pm | By Chuck Edwards | No comments yet

Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, is a long-time veteran of the Washington, D.C. lobby wars. And it was with a sigh that he girded himself for another battle at the recent meeting of the Equity and Excellence Commission (see our coverage here, here, here and here), which is mandated by Congress to examine resource disparities that inhibit achievement for children. At issue was proposed language in a draft version of the Commission’s upcoming report, due in March. The recommendation in the “finance” section of the report said that “Title I formulas should be adjusted to reflect concentrations of poverty, costs of services, and local tax effort.” When it comes to the Title I formula, any attempt to make “adjustments” is likely to spark full-scale war, as competing education interests battle over their share of the pie. The big cities represented by Casserly and the Council have a lot to lose, in light of a mounting "Formula Fairness" campaign that would shift more Title I funds to rural areas and small cities with high percentages of poverty. So at the Jan. 23 meeting, Casserly quickly sought to take this possibility off the table. He pointed out that the word “adjusted” implies that the Title I formula needs to be changed to achieve equity. “Please don’t have the Commission open up the Title I formula. I can’t tell you how much I dread another formula fight. I have been through four of these major fights in 35 years.” In the zero-sum environment now prevailing on Capitol Hill, he asserted, the current campaign to change the formula would cost the nation’s major urban school districts over $1 billion. “If that is equity,” he said, “then the commission’s report won’t be worth the paper it is printed on.” Fellow commission-member, Cynthia Brown, vice-president for education policy at the Center for American Policy and a strong advocate of formula changes, stomped on Casserly’s hope of avoiding a formula fight, asserting, “There is going to be one.” Nonetheless, she offered a way to bridge their differences, at least temporarily, by removing the words “be adjusted to”’ and just leave the word “reflect” — deferring the question of whether the Commission should support changes for another day. So, war has been averted, at least for now. But two months of drafting lie ahead, and it is anybody’s guess whether the Commission ultimately will take a stance on Title I’s next formula fight.

Thy Offense Was Rank

January 30, 2012 – 8:00 am | By Andrew Brownstein | No comments yet

It seems some officials at the U.S. Department of Education took issue with a recent Title I-Derland post describing guidance on Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) waivers as a “striking departure” from departmental precedent and a violation of ED Secretary Arne Duncan’s waiver authority. The post, written by our colleagues Julia Martin and Leigh Manasevit of the Brustein & Manasevit law firm, was a response to the department’s release of a series of “Frequently Asked Questions” related to the waivers, one of which indicated ED will consider waiving “rank and serve” criteria for determining which schools receive Title I funds. The blog post charged that the move “does not appear to be authorized by the waiver provisions in the ESEA statute.” This didn’t sit well with the department. As the National Title I Association held its annual meeting amid historic snowfalls in downtown Seattle, Kay Rigling, a veteran attorney at the department, referred to “a blog post out there … I think the title was ‘USED Pushes the Envelope,’ and it talked about this being an incredible deviation from this longstanding policy of serving Title I schools in rank order.” We know of such a post. At issue is a requirement by the Obama administration that states receiving waivers identify schools in the bottom 5 percent (priority schools) or the next 10 percent (focus schools) of Title I schools according to variables including student achievement, subgroup performance, high school graduation rates under 60 percent over multiple years and/or status as a Tier I or II school under the School Improvement Grant program. The new guidance would allow states to request a waiver to allow a Title I-eligible high school with the requisite low graduation rates to be identified as a priority school, even if that school’s “poverty percentage is not sufficiently high for the school to be served under ESEA section 1113” — the statute concerning rank and serve requirements. If it receives a waiver, a state may serve the school with Title I funds, making it a Title I-participating school. The blog post held that in creating such a waiver, the department was violating Section 9401(c) of the ESEA, which explicitly identifies the rank and serve requirement as one the secretary may not waive, except in cases where a school does not rank more than 10 percentage points below the lowest ranking school in the district that received Title I funds — an exception, the post said, “which is notably absent from ED’s waiver guidance.” In Seattle, the department brushed off the objections as much ado about nothing. Rigling insisted the waiver was based on a “narrow exception.” She also denied that the exception fell outside Duncan’s authority. The department, she said, interprets ESEA section 1113 to govern “requirements that make schools eligible for Title I.” She added: “What we’re talking about here are Title I-eligible high schools with a grad rate below 60 percent, so we don’t believe we have violated the limitation on the secretary’s waiver authority.” And that ended the discussion, as far as the Seattle audience was concerned. But Manasevit remains unconvinced. He noted a discrepancy in the exception the law allows, which is based on poverty, and the Seattle defense, which appears to be based on graduation rates. Said Manasevit: “The New Q and A waives the rank and serve rules based on a high school’s low graduation rate, not on poverty … Therefore, it is difficult to see how the criteria for this waiver meet the criteria set forth in the law.” He encouraged confused readers to brush up on the relevant citations in ESEA (sections 1113 and 9401) at http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/index.html. We would love to hear back from the department on this. Is the defense of the waiver given in Seattle consistent with what the statute allows?

The Lonely Fight of “Dr. Outcomes”

January 27, 2012 – 1:50 pm | By Chuck Edwards | No comments yet

When an education commission has the word “equity” in its name, you can be sure that the focus will be on “inputs” — that is, resources for kids and training for teachers. And so it has proved, based on our ongoing reporting (here, here and here) on the meetings of the congressionally mandated Equity and Excellence Commission. The overwhelming emphasis of the 27 members has been on distributing a greater share of funding to low-income schools, with the purpose of enabling them to compete in the local labor market for top teachers. A few have gone farther and advocated an aggressive increase in the total amount of school funding, including more aid from the federal government. But standing in front of the charge has been “Dr. Outcomes,” aka, Eric Hanushek. A noted education researcher at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Hanushek is famous, and famously controversial, for his insistence that a strong causal relationship between inputs (dollars) and outcomes (achievement) in education has not been established. On a commission whose very charter — “to examine the disparities in meaningful educational opportunities that give rise to the achievement gap” — assumes the opposite, his role was probably fated to be lonely. In any case, at the most recent commission meeting, held in Washington on Jan. 23, he quickly and firmly challenged the Input Gang. In response to draft report language proposing that the U.S. is not serious about education, he said: We’ve had somewhere between 2½ and 3 percent growth in real expenditures for 100 years. If you take ‘inputs’ as the measure of seriousness, on the aggregate level, the country has, in fact, taken this seriously. The bigger point that you should start out with, in the framing of this [report], is that we have messed up, and we ought to be competitive [with other nations] in terms of ‘outcomes.’ This is not to say that other commissioners failed to acknowledge the importance of outcomes. No one questions the dedication of all the members to the educational “excellence” featured in the commission’s title. It’s just that the correlation between inputs and outputs was taken for granted in most of the discussion. And Hanushek was having none of it: Are we trying to ensure equitable outcomes, which has to do with accountability and what people know and the skills they have … or are we talking about the inputs? Accountability is not something that should be slipped in under [another heading]. It is a fundamental issue of how the entire report is framed. And I see the current framing of the report to be entirely unacceptable, because it says nothing about outcomes. Despite assurances from Chairman Chris Edley and others that the language under discussion is still in draft form, the development of a final report is coming down to the wire — a committee will now go to work crafting language to be considered and adopted at the commission’s last scheduled meeting in March. When the final report appears, it will be interesting to see the “outcomes” of Hanushek’s vigorous advocacy.

An Inspector Calls

January 25, 2012 – 2:18 pm | By Steve Peha | 2 comments

Were he alive today, George Bernard Shaw might get more than a little enjoyment from contrasting the American approach to school improvement and that of our cousins across the pond. In “On Her Majesty’s School Inspection Service,” a new report from Education Sector, author Craig D. Jerald explores this divide as he describes the English school inspection system, highlighting in particular how it not only provides accountability but directly furthers the cause of school improvement. I’ve been an advocate of school inspection systems for years, but whenever I bring up the idea, I get shot down. Typical arguments against inspection systems are that they are expensive and subjective and that we lack the capacity to implement them well. Jerald’s report addresses each of these arguments and disposes of them simply and elegantly with detailed examples of how the British system works and, in particular, how it is applied at the local level to help struggling schools improve. NCLB has taught us that consequential accountability can produce results in certain cases, especially within the student sub-groups for which it was expressly designed. But the law’s school improvement remedies are, in some ways, disconnected from its goals. Schools tend to choose the "other" option and submit a weak plan. They get good money, but don't use it — again — to solve the fundamental problems. So, in contrast to the English model, we ask the very people who've been unable to solve the problem for 7+ years to all of a sudden solve it — just because we give them money. Unlike the Brits, we’ve chosen a model of school improvement where the measurement of failure is decoupled from the means of success. English school inspectors not only note their school’s weaknesses, they stick around to assist in addressing them. This is not to say that England forgoes testing, or that data plays no part in school improvement decision-making. However, in comparison to our approach, the English system seems to have struck a better balance between the quantitative bite of cold statistics and the nuanced insights of warm bodies. As Jerald notes, “…trained professionals weigh the evidence for judging a school rather than simply plugging it into a weighted formula. [England] relies on inspectors’ judgment about whether school leaders have the capacity to make necessary improvements….” Relative to our country’s test-driven, data-dominated approach, Jerald asserts that, “…inspections offer a way to make much more nuanced judgments about school performance, provide richer information to parents and the public, offer better formative feedback to schools, inform much more targeted improvement and interventions for low-performing schools, and accelerate timelines for school improvement.” Furthermore, Jerald points out that inspection systems are not nearly as expensive as we think they are. In a chart entitled “Estimated Cost and Number of Inspectors Necessary to Conduct English-Style Inspections in the United States,” Jerald has estimated the cost and capacity needs for every state in the country. His totals for the nation as a whole are reassuringly reasonable:

• Lower-bound annual cost estimate for English-style inspections: $635,122,239
• Upper-bound annual cost estimate for English-style inspections: $1,130,717,093
• Estimated number of inspectors needed: 8,042

An ed reform mechanism that provides BOTH consequential accountability AND a reliable school improvement process: priceless! So if we shouldn't judge a book by its cover, why should we judge a school by its stats? As complex as education is, don't educators and the kids they educate deserve a deeper read—and a more constructive response when things aren’t going as well as we think they could? Steve Peha, a veteran practitioner and writer on all aspects of federal education policy, is currently working for Wireless Generation on the Shared Learning Infrastructure project.

HQT: What the Doctor Ordered?

January 24, 2012 – 8:00 am | By Nancy Connor | No comments yet

During tough times over the years I have heard more than one non-educator say, “If I lose my job, I’ll think about teaching. I’ll just get my substitute license and use that as my fallback position.” It makes one wonder: Is teaching a respected position, or is it the equivalent of a Wal-Mart greeter — anyone can do it? In a Jan. 16 piece on her Policy Notebook blog, Sara Mead writes, “Obviously, it makes intuitive sense that if we value teaching, we should respect teachers. But what do people actually mean when they say "teaching should be a respected profession on par with doctors…"? Mead was discussing relative compensation, but I think her statement is worth examining from a different angle. One change that seems likely whenever Congress gets around to reauthorizing NCLB is the demise of the law’s requirement to have a “highly qualified teacher”(HQT) in every classroom in favor of a new push for better evaluation tools linking teacher ratings in part to student growth. The HQT rule is very simple in its concept. It requires that teachers have a degree, a license, and most importantly, subject matter knowledge — in other words, the very things that are required of doctors. No one would go to a doctor who did not have a degree, license or knowledge of the subject. These are basic requirements. The new evaluation tools are clearly step two in the process, but the elimination of HQT should be reconsidered. Having a degree seems like a “duh” to me. I have a degree in chemistry, and I can tell you that I would be very worried about being taught chemistry by someone with an English degree. I shudder at the thought of having to teach reading to a classroom full of first-graders without knowledge of guided reading and the scaffolding necessary to move second-language learners forward. To be well-taught at some level of sophistication, every subject requires teachers to be more than a page ahead of their kids. I realize that teacher licenses are not respected. The general perception is that they are easy to obtain. Perhaps that should encourage all of us in education to elevate the rigor of the licensing process, but a license at least indicates a floor for expertise. It demonstrates that the teacher has some preparation for the classroom and what it means to teach. I am very much in favor of the new evaluation systems. They will look at which teacher behaviors are effective and which student behaviors reflect good teaching. They will help move the practice of teaching forward and clearly differentiate between good and poor teachers. But even teachers gifted in the art of teaching will be deficient in advancing the academic growth of their students if they are not deeply acquainted with the subject being taught.  It’s sort of like a doctor with good bedside manner and a great track record of diagnosing ear infections being asked to perform heart surgery. If the teaching profession is ever to have the same respect as medicine, then teachers should be held to the same standards. Change what it takes to get that initial license, if necessary, but having that license, a degree, and competency in the subject being taught — in other words, meeting the federal definition of HQT — sets the foundation for effectiveness without which great teaching is impossible. Photo Credit: Carson Tahoe Nancy Connor is the director of federal programs for the Denver Public Schools.

High Court Considers Challenge to Grants-in-Aid

January 22, 2012 – 1:15 pm | By Chuck Edwards | No comments yet

Columnist George Will Sunday highlighted an oft-overlooked challenge to the "quid pro quo" theory behind state grants-in-aid. This challenge is an incidental part of the suit against the Obama administration's health care law that will be argued before the Supreme Court in late March. That suit is focused mainly on the much criticized "individual mandate" requiring people to purchase health insurance or pay a fine, but it also challenges the health care law's expansion of the Medicaid program. The expansion is partially funded by the federal government but will ultimately cost states many billions as well. States will have to accept the added expenses or opt out of the program entirely. Hitherto, the Supreme Court has upheld the federal government's authority to impose conditions on federal grants on the theory that compliance is merely an optional quid pro quo for the money -- if you want the money, you have to comply with the conditions. But some states object, saying that the scale of the new Medicaid requirement makes it more like extortion than a contract. In particular, they claim they are compelled to participate because the federal government taxes the states' citizens to fund the program and the money is effectively lost to a state unless it participates. As we explained in an earlier blog, this challenge may have profound implications for the whole grant-in-aid structure that funds activities as diverse as education, highways and social services. As a nationally syndicated columnist, George Will may awake state and local grants managers to the potential impact an adverse Supreme Court decision may have.  

‘Intelligent Design’ in the ESEA?

January 18, 2012 – 8:00 am | By Chuck Edwards | No comments yet

Will the next ESEA reauthorization contain a mandate to teach “intelligent design,” the creationist alternative to the theory of evolution? In a discussion of whether “ID” should be included in the public school curriculum, Jay Mathews, a Washington Post education columnist, hearkened back to a long-forgotten controversy sparked by then-Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) when he attempted to include a thinly veiled ID provision in No Child Left Behind (the 2001 version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act). He succeeded in getting his amendment into S. 1, the Senate version of the bill: SEC. 1022. SENSE OF THE SENATE REGARDING SCIENCE EDUCATION. It is the sense of the Senate that-- (1) good science education should prepare students to distinguish the data or testable theories of science from philosophical or religious claims that are made in the name of science; and (2) where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much continuing controversy, and should prepare the students to be informed participants in public discussions regarding the subject. This amendment uses the “teach the controversy” strategy promoted by the Discovery Institute, the leading proponent of ID, which asserts that many biological structures in living creatures are too complex to have arisen through natural selection and, hence, must have been designed by some outside intelligent agency. ID does not mention God, but leaves the nature of the outside agency to further inquiry. It is commonly understood that ID is an alternative strategy to smuggle creationism into the classroom after the Supreme Court identified it as a religious doctrine and banned it from the public school classroom. Ultimately, the House-Senate conference committee struck the provision from the final version of  No Child Left Behind, leaving a bit of non-binding report language that has never influenced any NCLB regulations or guidance, although it is often trumpeted by the Discovery Institute: The Conferees recognize that a quality science education should prepare students to distinguish the data and testable theories of science from religious or philosophical claims that are made in the name of science. Where topics are taught that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution), the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist, why such topics may generate controversy, and how scientific discoveries can profoundly affect society. But this whole incident may assume new relevance as Santorum seeks the presidency. The other Republican candidates appear to be divided on the issue, with Paul and Perry firmly on the creationism side and Romney and Gingrich more or less on the side of evolution.  (Huffingtonpost.com has a good compilation of their views.) But if the GOP seizes control of both the executive and legislative branch in 2012, we might see a revival of the Santorum amendment, with little opposition from a Republican President.