Thompson Publishing is hot on the trail of major guidance on the supplement not supplant provisions of Title III:

Findings from federal monitoring visits to states and local school districts have prompted the U.S. Department of Education to issue nonregulatory guidance on the “supplement not supplant” provisions of the Title III English language acquisition program.

In addition, the new guidance answers some questions received by the department about allowable expenditures of both Title III and Title I funds “on the development and administration of English language proficiency (ELP) assessments.”

Title III of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is the largest federal grant program targeted solely to limited English proficient (LEP) children, but Title I also serves many LEP children and establishes the basic testing framework for such children. In recognition of the programs’ overlap, the Education Department (ED) recently moved responsibility for administering Title III to the same office that administers Title I.

The guidance was issued Oct. 2 to state Title I and Title III directors as a joint document by the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Office of English Language Acquisition. …


A new study argues that the nation’s focus on helping students who are furthest behind may have produced a Robin Hood effect, yielding steady academic gains for low-achieving students in recent years at the expense of top students.

The study, to be released on Wednesday, compared trends in scores on federal tests for the bottom 10 percent of students nationwide with those for the top 10 percent and said those at the bottom moved up faster than those at the top.