Accountability

If the events of the last two years have taught us anything, it's that the U.S. Department of Education's oversight of the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program has been unconscionably lax. The recent revelations that the Department had inadvertently allowed convicted felons to become eligible FFEL lenders is just the latest example of the agency's negligence.

Why then, despite all evidence to the contrary, does the Government Accountability Office (GAO) no longer consider the FFEL program to be at a "High Risk" for waste, fraud, and abuse?

Every two years the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, puts together the "High Risk" list, an official compilation of federal programs it considers to be the most vulnerable to exploitation. Started in 1990, the goal of the list is to help set the oversight agenda for each new Congress. For 15 years, the federal student aid programs stood at the top of the list, along with other notorious trouble areas such as the Defense Department's contracting practices, and the IRS's efforts to police tax law violations.

Among the government's financial-aid programs, the GAO expressed the most serious reservations about the FFEL program. For instance, a January 1999 update to the report noted that the guaranteed loan program was "particularly vulnerable because of its size, the large number of participants, and the federal guarantee under which the federal government bears most of the risk when students default on their loans."

Modest Increases Proposed for Pell Grants

Dept. of Ed Details Student Loan Rescue Program

Lawmakers Discuss Need for Increased Regulation of Credit Card Marketing on Campuses

Minnesota Unveils Accountability ‘Dashboard'

Four years ago in Oregon, two foundations invested $25 million in a "small schools" initiative, the largest private investment ever in Oregon's K-12 schools. The initiative sought to improve student performance and retention by transforming large, under-performing high schools into small learning academies. The first results of the Oregon experiment are in, and unfortunately they aren't very positive. Graduation rates remain low, and attendance and test scores haven't improved much since the large high schools split apart.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—the primary funder, along with the Oregon-based Meyer Memorial Trust—has pumped significant money into the creation of small high schools around the country. But improvements in student achievement and graduation rates have been elusive. Evaluations of the Gates initiative generally show that the redesigned small high schools produce similar results to their predecessor schools, and the Oregon findings are more bad news. The Gates Foundation deserves credit for reacting to these failures in the most productive way possible: continuing its investment in high school reforms, while also modifying that investment in response to research findings.

The New Mexico legislature has been working to increase and better target K-12 education funding to school districts with high-need students. Governor Bill Richardson and the legislature appointed a Funding Formula Task Force in 2005. The Task Force commissioned a comprehensive study of New Mexico’s public school funding formula, including an estimate of how much it would cost the state to provide a "sufficient" education to all students.

The American Institutes of Research released the New Mexico funding study in January, and concluded that "sufficient" state funding for education would require an increase of $335 million ($1,034 per-pupil), or 14.5 percent above the current $2.5 billion in spending. When the legislative session ended in March, the legislature was in the middle of considering legislation to boost spending and overhaul the state funding formula. This week, the Legislative Education Study Committee is meeting to discuss the impact of the proposed formula.

New Mexico included a critical step in this process that other states have too often left out: accountability.

On Tuesday, the Department of Education unveiled a new set of proposed regulations on No Child Left Behind. The major announcement was details about the new, uniform graduation rate formula that all states will have to use for NCLB accountability purposes going forward. In addition, the Department outlined new requirements for district implementation of the Supplemental Educational Services (SES) provision.

In general, the proposed regulations focus on greater transparency for what's already happening in each state. At a briefing in Washington D.C., U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education Ray Simon said that the Department wants to make sure states and districts can justify what they are doing on assessment and accountability. He also raised concerns that districts are not adequately implementing NCLB's restructuring and SES requirements, and said that the Department wants to detail and reinforce what is already required by the law.

Here's a quick summary of the new proposed regulations, which were published today in the Federal Register and will be open for comment for 90 days:

Last week Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced that the Department of Education will begin requiring all states to use the same method to calculate high school graduation rates. NCLB already requires states and high schools to report graduation rates, but it allows states to craft their own formulas to do so. The result: states inevitably found ways to inflate graduation statistics. And the state-by-state patchwork of methods used makes it impossible to compare graduation rates across states.

Spellings' announcement is an important, smart move following years of pressure from education and civil rights organizations to improve graduation rate data. Without comparable, meaningful data to expose low graduation rates, states can continue to ignore the drop-out crisis that is plaguing low-income communities—especially in urban areas—around the country.

But Spellings' announcement also raises some important questions: Do states have in place the data systems they need to calculate new, standardized graduation rates? And, if not, how will they pay for new state data systems? So far, neither Spellings nor news articles covering the new regulations have addressed these issues in any detail.

As Congress works to finalize legislation to reauthorize the Higher Education Act for the next five years, higher education lobbyists are making one last ditch effort to dissuade lawmakers from requiring colleges to provide even the most basic information about how they spend their own institutional financial aid dollars.

At issue are provisions in both the House and Senate reauthorization bills that aim to provide prospective students, their families, and policymakers with more detailed data about their aid policies, as well as other types of consumer information, such as graduation and retention rates. Both bills ask colleges to report the average amount of grant aid that the institutions award their students and the proportion of students who receive these grants. The House legislation goes a much-needed step further, and requires colleges to provide a breakdown by income of students who receive institutional aid.

The two bills also differ on how this consumer information is to be reported. Under the House measure, colleges would be required to provide the data to the Education Secretary who would then publish it on the U.S. Education Department's College Navigator website, which the agency hopes prospective students will use when picking colleges. In contrast, the consumer reporting provisions in the Senate bill would be completely voluntary. Colleges that chose to participate would publish the information on their websites, using a model form developed by the Education Department.

Last week, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a database of higher education earmarks for fiscal year 2008. A number of the earmarks are related to K-12 initiatives at colleges and universities, and many of the programs sound valuable and work toward positive goals. Members of Congress are certainly skilled at justifying them. But don't let these justifications sway you—earmarks mean no accountability to taxpayers and no concrete proof of program effectiveness.

The Office of Postsecondary Education routinely receives the most earmarks in the Department of Education, including some for K-12 initiatives such as teacher training programs. The Chronicle database also includes higher education earmarks distributed through the Office of Innovation and Improvement's Fund for the Improvement of Education (FIE), such as grants to support partnerships between colleges and local school systems.

Last week United Federation of Teachers (New York City’'s teachers union) President Randi Weingarten gave a major speech proposing a new accountability framework to replace the controversial school report cards that NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein instituted last November.

In contrast to Klein’'s report cards, which assigned schools a single letter grade based primarily on student test scores, UFT'’s proposed alternative would offer parents and the public a matrix of indicators concentrated in three areas: academic achievement; safety, order and discipline; and teamwork for student achievement. Each school’s report would also rate the NYC Department of Education on the quality of support it provides the school.

Colleges have won their battle with the Bush administration over accreditation reform. After two years of being chastised and pressured to better report on student learning, and then being threatened with new federal accreditation regulations, colleges turned to their longtime allies in Congress and found support. The Higher Education Act reauthorization bills, as passed by the Senate and the House, would prevent the Department of Education from issuing regulations on the accreditation process.

[slideshow] But while this is a victory for colleges, they would be wrong to think that the college quality issue has been put to rest. The heart of the matter—meaningful accountability for higher education institutions who receive billions of dollars in federal money—still has yet to be addressed. While the Bush administration failed to pursue a politically viable process for reform, the need for stronger accountability still remains highly visible to many members of Congress, and likely future members of the next Department of Education.

Where Spellings and Bush Went Wrong