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…
Category Archives: Individuals with Disabilites Education Act (IDEA)
A Stake Through the Heart
November 16, 2011 – 7:00 am
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…
Stop Jerking Us Around!
October 24, 2011 – 8:00 am
The latest congressional funding fiasco might legitimately prompt local school administrators to yell “Stop jerking us around!” With almost no notice, the current temporary funding bill (or “continuing resolution”) designed to buy time for Congress to finish up its long-awaited…
MOE Better Implementation
September 27, 2011 – 8:00 am
Do maintenance of effort (MOE) requirements encourage inefficiency? That is the question du jour on the Interwebs after the Department of Education (ED) sent a letter to the National Association of State Directors of Special Education, stating that districts will…
Restructuring, Reform and Reality
September 20, 2011 – 2:08 pm
In a recent eduwonk post regarding NCLB’s complex and controversial school restructuring options, Andrew Rotherham wrote, “When it comes to tackling these problems, we have a serious failure of creativity, imagination, and, of course, political will. That’s not this law’s…
Hey, MOE!
July 21, 2011 – 1:52 pm
As state and local budgets atrophy and federal stimulus dollars dry up, states and districts are having a harder time keeping up with “maintenance of effort” (MOE) rules in special education. ED has already threatened to cut $4 million from…
Transferability’s Near-Death Experience
June 20, 2011 – 2:16 pm
When the 2011 appropriations bill defunded the longstanding Ed-Tech grant program, it pretty much marked the end of a nearly forgotten NCLB experiment: ‘transferability’. Hailed at the time of the law’s passage, this provision allowed school districts to transfer up…