New Title I regulations

This is a big week for the education policy community, and practitioners – although practitioners will not have to deal with this until next year. The US Department of Education released long awaited Title I regulations, first issued as proposed regulations in April of this year. The regulations make significant changes to 14 sections of No Child Left Behind and there are two critical changes that will affect high schools and districts. Critically, the regulations create a uniform definition of graduation rate for high schools. According to ED, an accurate method of calculating graduation rates that is uniform across states is necessary to improve high school accountability.

The final regulations define the “four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate” as the number of students who graduate in four years with a regular high school diploma divided by the number of students who entered high school four years earlier.

• Students who graduate in four years include students who earn a regular high school diploma at the end of their fourth year; before the end of their fourth year; and, if a state chooses, during a summer session immediately following their fourth year.
• To remove a student from a cohort, a school or district must confirm in writing that the student has transferred out, emigrated to another country, or is deceased.
• For students who transfer out of a school, the written confirmation must be official and document that the student has enrolled in another school or in an educational program that culminates in a regular high school diploma.

The four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate must be reported at the high school, district, and state levels in the aggregate, as well as disaggregated by subgroups, beginning with report cards providing results of assessments administered in the 2010-11 school year. For AYP decisions, states must use the four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate at the state, district, and school levels, including disaggregated graduation rates for all required subgroups, based on assessments administered in the 2011-12 school year.

These changes are, as you can imagine, very significant. I’ll provide more coverage in the coming days. To learn more about them see: http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/reg/title1/index.html

 

Major Guidance for Title III Fiscal Oversight

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. …

 

Aspen rallies the policy insiders

Today, the Aspen Institute held its national education summit titled: An Urgent Call (See http://aspenedsummit.blogspot.com/). The all-day affair brought together key policymakers from across the political spectrum to publicly agree on the moral imperative of education reform and the economic urgency for immediate action. The broad goal was not to hash out any policy details, but to elevate education as a national issue and to secure some kind of consensus on the most important elements of action.

The summit comprised of six sessions throughout the day. Each session provided a different perspective on the current education policy landscape and how to improve it. There was consensus on many of the broad moral and economic themes. The prominent moral themes included:

• Education as a critical civil rights issue;
• Education as a means to looming ethnic and socioeconomic chasms (not just gaps) in our populace; and
• Education as the currency of social opportunity.

The economic themes closely connected to the moral ones. The topic most prominently discussed included:

• A clear understanding that the United States has been in rapid decline over the last 30 years, on measures of international academic accomplishment;
• Emphasis that education is a vital tool for economic competitiveness; and
• Even if the nation’s economy could sustain itself on those fortunate enough to have access to quality education, the matter is essential for long-term domestic stability – closing the looming have and have-not chasm.

The details, of course, are what matter and the heart of the activity would be in the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. Even though there was consensus on some of the moral and economic imperatives for action, the deep divisions on the technical details of the law appeared to remain. Those divisions could be seen on many occasions, but on this day discretion was the better part of valor and the panelist chose to focus on areas of agreement and not division. So where does that put us? Frankly, not much further than we were before the event, but it did provide the Aspen Institute and important opportunity to bring everyone together to discuss, in a collaborative manner, the fact that all groups, regardless of their orientation, have a lot to agree upon and that this should be frequently presented to the public.

There absolutely is a need for an urgent call, and this call needs to be consistently put before the public. Unfortunately for the Aspen Institute, this also fell on the day when the year 1929 was on the lips of many economists across the nation. If that keeps up, it’s going to be hard to push education to the forefront.

So if you were advising the next administration on some of the key components of national education reform, what would you tell them?

 

TN: Few in Metro use free tutoring

SES is and will remain one of the more convtroversial asepcts of NCLB. It’s controversial for two reasons. First, there is a free market versus traditional school tension inherent in the provision which manisfests itself in arguments over the application of highly qualified techer provisions to the SES providers and how SEAs hold SES providers academically accountabile. Second, the US Department of Educaiton has aggressively tried to monitor and encourage more eligible students to take advantage of the federal tutoring opportunities. So far, many of the eligible students (most in fact) have not availed themselves of the benefits and the reasons for this slow participation rate is a hotly contested topic. These arguments were discussed this weekend in the Tennessean:

Only a fraction of Metro students eligible for free, private tutoring are getting it, six years after the federally mandated program first came to Tennessee.For students who do get it, results are negligible, a University of Memphis study and a state comptroller’s report reveal.But for many families who sent their children to about 40 contracted providers in the state — some offering hourlong sessions for $70 — the program was the only way past educational challenges.”If it wasn’t for A to Z (In-Home Tutoring), he would have never been able to show what he could do; he wouldn’t have graduated with a regular diploma,” Shirley Percle said of her son, Tommy. “He’s more outgoing now. All his shyness is gone; he doesn’t feel ashamed.”

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The shape of the debate – possibly

The pause in the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) provides a critical point for Congress to reconsider the state-federal relationship. It is not clear what will come of this reconsideration period, but there is a lot of talk of a “loose-tight” set-up, which is to say that the federal government will be tight about the results (rigorous standards, assessments and the like) but loose about the means of accomplishing that task. The federal government would tell us what to do, generally, but not how to do it.

Data is, of course, critical to such a set up. It is the linchpin of good systemic reform. Without it, is hard to tell who is doing what, officials have to trust the sources and hope for the best. With reliable data (reliability being key), school leaders can monitor programs, analyze results and act on the information to improve programs.

The twin themes of freedom and data should sound familiar to those in education and policy. It sounds a lot like a charter contracts, just at a national level and with federal dollars (Title I specifically). So if the federal role were to move to such a model would it work? We’ll it is far beyond this post to get into that, but, like most answers, it would be “yes” and “no.” Some states would succeed and some would not and adjustments would be made and the debate would go on.