School reform: FIC critiques White House approaches
Faced with two wars, a full-blown economic crisis and other challenges, President Obama still managed to embark on a comprehensive school reform effort soon after taking office in January 2009. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that he signed into law less than a month later included $100 billion for education—and gave the administration wide latitude in the use of those funds.
ARRA helped state and local educational agencies cope with devastating budget cuts foisted on them by the economic crisis, but the money came with strings attached that foreshadowed the Obama administration’s priorities for K-12 school reform measures that many educators now find unduly prescriptive and of questionable merit.
CSBA’s Federal Issues Council communicated those concerns to the White House and Congress in face-to-face meetings with representatives of those two branches of the federal government, starting on the day Education Secretary Arne Duncan released “A Blueprint for Reform” of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
The blueprint outlines the administration’s goals for ESEA’s reauthorization. Its strategies were largely prefigured in ARRA, especially in ARRA’s Race to the Top competitive grant program, and in the administration’s revamped School Improvement Grants program.
ARRA added $3 billion to the $546 million initially appropriated for the School Improvement Fund for the current fiscal year. The funds are given to the states according to Title I formulas. However, the Obama administration’s new distribution provisions require states to give priority to local educational agencies with persistently underachieving schools—whose identification has become controversial in Sacramento—and to require those schools to undergo one of four intensive intervention models (see "School turnaround strategies").
San Francisco Unified School District board member Jill Wynns was part of an FIC delegation that met with Thelma Meléndez de Santa Ana, Duncan’s assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education.
Wynns defended SFUSD’s Paul Revere Elementary School, a prekindergarten-grade 8 school that’s on the list of underperformers. In order to receive SIG funding, the school would need to be closed, converted to a charter or have its principal replaced—even though it has already undertaken significant interventions and posted substantial gains in student achievement, and its principal has been in place only since 2007, when he volunteered to take charge in a bid to help turn the school around.
But Meléndez, the superintendent of Pomona Unified School District before joining the administration, was adamant that schools on the lists of persistent underperformers must implement one of the four prescribed interventions to receive SIG funding.
Priscilla Cox, an Elk Grove Unified School District board member, joined in the exchange, pointing out the unique challenges that small and rural districts face under the SIG requirements. Those districts may not have alternatives available that would allow them to close schools or convert them to charters, and they often have trouble attracting new principals or teachers.
Race to the Top
Meléndez remained inflexible as the discussion turned to the Race to the Top competition. Wynns pointed out that RTTT’s $4.35 billion pot is funded by all the nation’s taxpayers and that Title I money is supposed to benefit all economically disadvantaged students.
California applied for phase 1 funding but finished 27th among the 41 competitors; only Delaware and Tennessee will receive funding. June 1 is the deadline for phase 2 applications, but observers are questioning whether California should even apply after its poor showing in the first round.
ESEA ‘too prescriptive’
The FIC members’ themes remained consistent when talk turned to ESEA, commonly referred to under the name of its 2001 reauthorization bill, the No Child Left Behind Act. The House Education and Labor Committee has already conducted two hearings on the issue this year, James Bergeron, deputy director for education and human services policy for ranking member John Kline, R-Minnesota, told the FIC contingent he met with, and three more are already planned.
Emma Turner, a La Mesa-Spring Valley School District trustee, urged members of Congress to assert their authority as the reauthorization hearings proceed. After the Obama administration’s improvised, ad hoc approach to RTTT and the SIG grants’ stimulus funding, Turner suggested that the 45-year-old ESEA ought to be subject to stricter congressional review as the reauthorization bill is drafted, and to stricter congressional oversight once it’s enacted.
CSBA Executive Director Scott P. Plotkin agreed, calling the ESEA blueprint “too prescriptive” and suggesting the administration’s reform models rely more on Secretary Duncan’s mixed record as head of Chicago Public Schools than on empirically based, proven strategies for effective reform.
“Reform should be research based,” agreed CSBA President Frank Pugh.
An ESEA issue brief that FIC members distributed at meetings on the subject sums up CSBA’s position: Federal policy should be 1) consistent with the Obama administration’s stated intention to permit state and local flexibility and 2) guided by what research and experience show actually works.
Easy links:
- SIG intervention webinars: U.S. Department of Education Assistant Secretary Thelma Meléndez de Santa Ana recommends this series of six webinars on School Improvement Grant intervention models developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the Center on Innovation and Improvement