Title I

Though fiscal year 2011 – the year most education funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 were set to expire – has come and gone, some states are still clinging to their ARRA Title I funds. These funds are intended to provide additional services for low-income students and are distributed by formula among states and school districts. In an effort to give states the opportunity to use all of their Title I funds from the stimulus bill, last September the Department of Education gave states permission to apply for waivers that would allow them to obligate any remaining ARRA Title I funds through the end of fiscal year 2012. Previously, those states have to obligate the funds September 30^th, 2011 and spend them by January 3^rd, 2012.

This was a significant development for several states that initially faced obstacles in distributing their ARRA Title I funds to districts. In some cases, states had tens of millions of dollars remaining on October 1st, 2011. But it appears that the vast majority of states had at least some money lingering in their ARRA accounts at the end of the 2011 fiscal year. Where do those states stand today? 

According to Department of Education spreadsheets on outlaid and remaining ARRA Title I funds, only six states had used every single one of their ARRA Title I dollars as of January 13, 2012. Those states are Hawaii, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, South Carolina, and Vermont, an interesting collection of states with widely varied budget deficits during the economic downturn.

Most states have somewhere between 0.1 percent and 2.0 percent of their funds remaining, meaning they have about 8 months to spend anywhere from a few thousand dollars (Connecticut and Alaska, for example) and several million (Ohio, Texas, and California, among others). In total, over $175 million is still unspent, 1.8 percent of the total $10 billion made available.

But a few states have really lagged in getting their funds out the door. Puerto Rico is the biggest offender – it has $70.0 million in funds remaining, 17.3 percent of its original allocation under ARRA Title I. Nebraska comes in second with 14.2 percent, or $6.8 million in remaining funds. North Dakota, the District of Columbia, and New Jersey round out the top five, each with over 5.0 percent of their funds remaining.

It is likely that the states with relatively small proportions of their funds remaining will have little trouble obligating and spending their ARRA Title I funds between now and September 30^th, 2012. But the states with significant remaining balances will have to engage in some thorough and thoughtful planning to make sure they don’t lose any of these funds at the end of the year.

To download a table containing these data for all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia, click here.

Answering the Senate education committee’s fall proposal for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, last Friday, Rep. John Kline (R-MN), chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, introduced two final ESEA bills, completing a package of five bills that would rewrite the current law, No Child Left Behind.

Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, currently known as No Child Left Behind) has been an on again, off again proposition in Congress. The 2002 law expired in 2007 and Congress has extended it a number of times while lawmakers debate some sort of longer term policy.  Meanwhile, the Obama Administration has given states the opportunity to waive some of the provisions of the law. In the latest development, House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline (R-MN) announced that House Republicans would be moving forward with several pieces of legislation to address different aspects of ESEA. Earlier this week, that committee released two of these bills, the Student Success Act, which would replace the current Title I of ESEA, and the Encouraging Innovation and Effective Teachers Act, which would replace Title II of the existing law.

By many accounts, both bills contain few surprises. They generally lessen the federal role in state and local K-12 education, particularly as it pertains to accountability and standards, putting more authority in states’ hands. But as we read the bills, particularly the Title I language, we noticed a few things missing that we thought for sure would be in any proposal. The top three surprising omissions are explained below:

1. Maintenance of Effort Provision of Title I: Current law states that a local school district can only receive Title I Part A funds in an upcoming year if state and local governments provided the district with at least 90 percent of the funding (per pupil or overall) that they provided in the preceding year. In other words, if a district received $8,000 per pupil in 2010 in state and local funds, it has to have received at least $7,200 per pupil (90 percent of $8,000) in 2011 to receive Title I funds in 2012. This rule ensures that states and localities don’t dramatically reduce funding for their school districts year to year.
   
   The recently introduced House bill strikes this provision entirely. It effectively gives states and localities license to dramatically cut contributions to K-12 education without jeopardizing their federal funds. While the provision was struck no doubt to give states and districts more flexibility in crafting their own budgets, the change is problematic. If the federal government doesn’t require states and localities hold up their end of education funding, it’s far less likely that they will use Title I funds to provide additional services for low income students – the core purpose of the federal funds.
2. Updates to Teacher Comparability: Current law includes a provision that requires districts to demonstrate that they are comparably funding their low- and high-income schools. But the provision contains several flaws that undermine its goal, including a “loophole” that allows districts to exclude from the comparability calculation variations in teacher salaries that are due to years of experience. Ultimately this means that the current comparability provision has few teeth: much of the variation in spending between schools in a district is due to teacher compensation, and variation due to years of experience, at that. The current law labels spending between schools “comparable” even when schools with children from wealthier families receive much higher funding, so long as it comes in the form of salaries for more experienced teachers.
   
   The House bill makes no changes to the existing provision, effectively allowing districts to turn the intent of the comparability rule on its head and short-change low-income schools. In contrast, the Senate’s Harkin/Enzi bill includes a strengthened comparability provision that eliminates the loophole and limits comparability calculations to actual expenditures rather than student-teacher ratios.
3. High School Graduation Rates in Accountability: Current law includes an extensive accountability provision that holds states, districts, and schools accountable for student performance in math and reading and high school graduation rates. Though the House-proposed bill requires states to implement an accountability program that pertains to math and reading test outcomes, it strikes the high school graduation rate provision.  Though the bill allows states to include other student outcome measures besides math and reading test performance, high school graduation rates seem like a glaring omission, especially given the recent focus on high school completion among policymakers and other stakeholders. By comparison, the Harkin/Enzi reauthorization bill in the Senate includes high school graduation rates as a required part of a state accountability plan.

Although the House has released its bill on the core functions of ESEA – accountability and the distribution of Title I funds – it is unlikely that the reauthorization process will proceed full-speed ahead. Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) has said that he will not move a bill forward until the House presents a bi-partisan bill and many stakeholders believe that reauthorization will not occur until 2014 when the final NCLB proficiency deadline approaches (the point at which 100 percent of students are supposed to be proficient or above on math and reading tests). But at least now we know what the House has in mind for a future federal role in K-12 education: far fewer fiscal and accountability requirements for state and local school districts masquerading as flexibility and local control.

Last week on the National Journal Education Experts blog, we were asked how to ensure that federal funding under Title I -- the provision for disadvantaged students  -- goes to the schools most in need. In education-speak, this is known as "Title I comparability."  The National Journal asked:

A little-known provision of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is starting to bear fruit.

Deep in the legislative text of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Congress buried a school-level data collection requirement. Every state had to submit school-level data on state and local per-pupil expenditures for school personnel in 2008-09. Once collected, these data would show the degree to which school districts comparably fund their Title I and non-Title I schools, as required in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

The Department of Education completed the data collection a few months shy of its original goal and has just released a report on their findings. Though ED avoids drawing conclusions about the degree to which current comparability requirements are or are not working, the evidence put forth in the report is pretty clear. Current comparability requirements fall far short of ensuring that low income students receive equitable resources as their higher income peers.

As a refresher, teacher comparability refers to a current provision of Title I that attempts to ensure that school districts provide equitable state and local resources to both their low-income (Title I schools) and their higher-income (non-Title I schools). School districts can demonstrate comparability by showing that per pupil expenditures or student-teacher ratios at their low-income Title I schools are within 10 percent of the average in their higher-income non-Title I schools.

The kicker, though, is that the law allows districts to ignore any variation in spending per pupil related to a teacher’s years of experience. Conversely, a district can demonstrate comparability by showing that they have a uniform teacher salary schedule that all schools use. Regardless of how a district chooses to demonstrate comparability, the current methods allow districts to obscure the actual resources – dollars per pupil – in their Title I and non-Title I schools. Because teacher salaries are the largest school expense, this “loophole” undermines the intent of comparability and practically ensures that districts are able to inequitably fund low-income schools.

Because the ARRA data collection effort provides data on actual state and local personnel expenditures at the school level for all schools in America, it can be used to determine the degree to which schools are comparably funded. Using these data, ED calculated the number and percentage of Title I or higher-poverty schools that received below average per pupil personnel expenditures for their district by school grade level. Though the report presents the information rather matter-of-factly, the conclusions are cause for concern.

Though the report provides many ways to cut the data, the most telling analysis is also the simplest. The report shows that 15,749 Title I schools (43 percent of Title I schools in the study) received lower per pupil personnel expenditures than their district average in 2008-09. Of those, 11,228, or 31 percent, received per pupil expenditures that were more than 10 percent below the average – above the threshold for variation in resources currently set in the comparability requirement (though districts are not currently required to include actual spending per pupil). Though this number seems somewhat inoffensive – it is less than 50 percent after all – it is still far from zero, where it should be according to the intent of the law.

The average school in 2009 had 547 students. This means that more than 6 million students in this country (that’s roughly the combined student populations in Arizona, Missouri, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Washington, and Indiana), likely those that need additional resources the most, are attending schools that benefit from dramatically less state and local funding than federal law suggests they should.

Title I funds are intended to provide additional resources for low-income students. Given the wide gap in state and local support for these Title I schools, it is difficult to imagine that those funds are doing much more than bringing per pupil funding in these schools up to funding parity. Clearly, comparability as it currently stands is not doing what it should – ensuring that state and local funding provide a level playing field for the education of low-income students.

Luckily, Congress is considering legislation that would change all this in the Harkin/Enzi Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization bill. Though that bill may be flawed in several ways, Congress should be sure to maintain the bill’s comparability language and do more to ensure that low-income students receive the support they need.

With Congress still a long way from reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the Department of Education plans in the meantime to waive some of the law’s provisions in exchange for getting states to undertake reforms. The Department might issue such a waiver for one No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act program that is unpopular among states and school districts: supplemental educational services (SES).

Failing schools under NCLB must provide students with supplemental educational services, primarily implemented as tutoring outside of school time. Those schools are required to set aside up to twenty percent of their federal funds under Title I, Part A and use them to fund transportation for school choice students, tutoring, or a combination of both. Whatever portion of the set-aside is not used to cover eligible students can be reverted for use in other Title I activities. A tutoring industry official placed the estimate of federal dollars spent on tutoring in 2010 at about $650 million for 600,000 students, well below the total available amount ($2.55 billion in 2005, up from $1.75 billion in 2001 thanks to a jump in schools characterized by NCLB as “in need of improvement”).

Low participation rates, questions regarding the effectiveness of the program, and costs have all made the tutoring services controversial. Students have been slow to sign up for tutoring. A GAO report published in 2006 suggested that 20 percent of school districts that were required to provide in the 2005 school year had zero students participating. And despite multiple attempts by the school district to notify parents of the service, about half of districts still failed to notify them prior to the start of the school year.

Participation has been a persistent problem throughout the program’s existence, too.  A 2008 report from the Department of Education showed that in 2007, 2.4 million children were eligible to participate in SES, and only 446,000 did so. Today, over half a million students participate annually, but most still only receive 20 to 40 hours of tutoring in an entire school year, hardly enough time to make a significant impact on students’ achievement.

Studies have shown the limited effectiveness of the program. Relative to other Title I activities, one study found that the positive impact tutoring has on students’ achievement is very small. The same report also found that school districts’ programs tended to be more successful than outside providers were; yet as of 2007, only 40 percent of programs were administered by schools or school districts.

States’ abilities to monitor program effectiveness are also highly limited. States are required by the Department of Education to monitor SES programs, measure their impact, and remove from the list of authorized providers any who fail to demonstrate student achievement. But no federal funding is provided for any studies of the programs. Assessment of SES varies from state to state. In early 2006, the Government Accountability Office found that only two states – New Mexico and Tennessee – had managed to provide SES evaluation reports to the public, and only a few others were on their way to doing so.

Students have underutilized the tutoring program, but supplemental educational services have not demonstrated much impact on low-income students in low-performing schools. Tutoring services have set aside significant sums of money from the Title I allocations for each school, necessitating cuts to other activities than have been proven to be effective. The NCLB waivers offered by the Department of Education could end that cycle, allowing schools to pursue more effective routes to improving student achievement.

While states and school districts can typically count on federal support to remain stable after Congress passes and the President signs an annual appropriations bill, that is not the case this year. Earlier this month, the Department of Education released revised fiscal year 2011 Title I Part A allocations to states and school districts to be spent during school year 2011-12. Title I Part A provides grants to school districts to provide additional services to low income students. The revised allocations reflect a $163 million decrease in support resulting from the Fiscal Year 2012 Continuing Appropriations Act. The law mandated a 1.5 percent decrease in spending across-the-board, even though those funds were technically appropriated in fiscal year 2011. Fiscal year 2011 ended September 30, 2011. This decrease comes in addition to the 0.2 percent decrease written into the fiscal year 2011 appropriations law, which was passed in April of 2011, several months after the fiscal year began on October 1, 2010. Additionally, some states submitted revised state per-pupil expenditure data that result in lower allocations than previously published.

With the new lower Title I allocations, states and school districts may have to scramble to readjust their spending plans for this school year. However, not all states and districts will feel the effect equally – while some states, like West Virginia, will see an overall decrease over the mandated 1.5 percent, others like New Hampshire, will see much smaller decreases.

Thanks to the Title I Monitor, a Thompson Publication, the Federal Education Budget Project, Ed Money Watch’s parent initiative, is able to incorporate those new allocations into our state and school district data website. Through the website, users can view how Title I Part A allocations have fluctuated over time in the context of per pupil expenditures and student demographics. All data on the site is easily available for download, as well.

Additionally, the database now includes recently released state and school district student demographic data for 2010 including percent of students in free and reduced priced lunch, special education, and English language learner programs.

Check out the new data and the wealth of other information available at www.edbudgetproject.org.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), the current incarnation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, often is characterized as enforcing a punitive and inflexible accountability system. Few education stakeholders ever discuss the provisions in the bill meant to provide rewards to schools that succeed in improving student achievement, particularly among low-income students. And there is good reason for this – the sections of the law that provide for such rewards are mostly buried in the bill and ignored by states because they are not mandatory.

But Senators Harkin and Enzi recently proposed an ESEA reauthorization bill that would take an existing program – Blue Ribbon Schools – and use it to further codify and formalize a rewards system for successful schools.

The existing Blue Ribbon Schools program is authorized under the Fund for the Improvement of Education (FIE), a program in NCLB that typically supports pet projects and some specific national programs. The program recognizes either high-performing public and private elementary, middle, and high schools or schools where student achievement has improved dramatically, especially among disadvantaged students. In 2011, 314 schools were named Blue Ribbon Schools and Congress appropriated the program $1 million. While these schools can take pride in knowing that they are considered some of the best schools in the country, they receive no specific benefits from the program.

The Harkin/Enzi proposal would move the Blue Ribbon Schools program out of FIE and make it part of Title I, the section of the law that outlines accountability provisions in the bill. States are not required to participate in the program – they can opt into the rewards system. However, those that choose to do so would participate in a much more rigorous system of rewards than the Blue Ribbon Schools program provides today.

To become a Blue Ribbon School, a school must be in the top 5 percent of schools in a state in terms of the percent of students on track to college- and career-readiness in language arts and math, graduation rate (where appropriate), performance of students by sub-group, student growth in achievement (if a state is using a growth model), and school gains. The current Blue Ribbon Schools program allows schools to either be “high-performing” or “improving” as defined by each state’s chief state school officer. The new program would place a higher bar, as it more clearly defines high-performance as in the top 5 percent.

But more importantly, the proposed Blue Ribbon School program specifies actual benefits for the recipient schools. Participating states could have to give their Blue Ribbon Schools autonomy over budget, staffing, and time; give the schools flexibility in how they use their Title I funds; and distribute competitive reward grants to school districts for their Blue Ribbon Schools.

The prescribed uses of these reward grants are perhaps the most interesting aspect of the proposal: Blue Ribbon Schools that receive rewards would be required to use them to (1) improve student achievement; and (2) provide technical assistance to low-achieving schools with similar characteristics.

If a Blue Ribbon School is already in the top 5 percent of schools in terms of student achievement in a state, it is somewhat counterintuitive to require that school to use the funds to further improve achievement. This is not to say that Blue Ribbon schools should not be expected to improve further. In fact, it is commendable that the Harkin/Enzi bill seems to prioritize pushing these successful schools harder. But it is somewhat confusing to see that language in a program meant to reward schools.

More intriguing is the second usage: to provide technical assistance to low-performing schools. This is one of the few places where we see Congress attempting to create what are known as “communities of practice” – opportunities for schools to come together to share best practices and work together to improve student achievement. But this is often more easily said than done. Highly successful school leaders may have neither the time nor inclination to help similar schools while they are still working to support and strengthen their own campuses.

In many ways, Harkin and Enzi should be applauded for writing a more concrete rewards system into their ESEA reauthorization bill. If it’s enacted, however, it’s difficult to know how many states will choose to participate and which of those states will actually use the program to provide their successful schools with well-earned benefits. Further, the reward grant provision seems poorly thought out at the moment, and it needs further explanation. Check back with Ed Money Watch as we continue to follow developments in this program and others in the Harkin/Enzi reauthorization bill.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the current incarnation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, is almost universally unpopular with lawmakers, state officials, and principals and teachers for a variety of reasons. But it does retain some favor with civil rights groups, particularly because it requires states, school districts, and schools to ensure that minority students and students enrolled in special programs like free and reduced price lunch, special education, and English language learners are reaching performance targets. Further, it requires states and districts to publish information on this disaggregated student achievement through annual report cards that are publicly available to parents and other stakeholders.

Though the report card requirements in the current 2001 law have made great strides in improving parent access to data, Senators Harkin (D-IA) and Enzi (R-WY) recently introduced a bill to reauthorize ESEA (which expired back in 2007) that would take the annual report card even further to provide parents with even more valuable data on school performance. That said, it would also allow states and districts to obscure information on teacher qualifications.

In addition to data on student achievement both overall and for sub-groups of students and graduation rates, the Harkin-Enzi bill would require states and districts to publish three more key pieces of data. These include data on the percentage of graduated students that matriculated to college the following fall, the percentage of graduated students needing remedial education in college, and student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for 4^th and 8^th graders.

All three of these changes would significantly improve the usability of the report cards. Including College matriculation data in the state and district report cards would show which high schools have the greatest success sending students to higher education institutions and college remediation data would reveal which schools are not properly preparing their students for college-level learning. Both of these measures would put direct pressure on high schools to improve their focus on college-going and increase the rigor of their courses where necessary. However, it is unclear how many states and districts are able to make these data available. While some states are already able to track student matriculation and coursetaking in college, many are not. States would have until the 2012-13 school year to produce matriculation data and the 2013-14 school year for remediation data.

Including NAEP performance in the report cards, on the other hand, would provide a point of comparison for each state’s standards and student performance on those standards. For example, if 75 percent of a school’s students score proficient in 8^th grade math on the state assessment, but only 30 percent of students in that state score proficient on NAEP, parents could conclude that the state’s standards are not nearly as rigorous as the NAEP standards. This direct comparison could push states to improve their standards.

The Harkin-Enzi bill also includes some optional information states and schools can include on their report card. These include passing rates on AP/IB tests, class size, incidence of school violence, school climate indicators, attendance rates, and school readiness for kindergarten students. While some of these indicators are relatively difficult to track systematically across districts, others, like class size and attendance, are low-hanging fruit. Hopefully most states and districts will take advantage of the data already available and include these two indicators on their report cards.

Strangely missing from the Harkin-Enzi bill is any mention of teacher quality or qualifications in the proposed new report card. NCLB currently requires states and districts to publish in their report cards information on professional qualifications of all public elementary and secondary school teachers, the percentage of all public elementary and secondary school teachers teaching with emergency or provisional credentials, and the percentage of classes not taught by highly qualified teachers, in the aggregate and disaggregated by high-poverty compared to low-poverty schools. The reauthorization bill includes no such requirements; in fact, the report card section doesn’t mention teachers at all.

However, under the “parents’ right-to-know” section, the proposal requires school districts to release information on teacher qualification to parents if they request it. This information would include whether a student’s teacher has met state qualification and licensing requirements, whether the teacher is emergency certified, what the teacher majored in in college, and the qualification of any paraprofessionals in the classroom. At the same time, the bill requires states to submit data to the Secretary of Education on the percentage and distribution of teachers that are not highly qualified, teachers that are inexperienced, teachers that have not completed a teacher preparation program, and teachers that are teaching out of their subject area.

If states and districts are already required to provide this information to the Secretary or to parents that request it, why do they not also have to include it on state and school districts report cards? Teachers are one of the most important components of a student’s learning experience and any information regarding the qualifications or experience of those teachers should be readily available to parents and other stakeholders. Requiring parents to request this information creates an unnecessary roadblock that many parents are unlikely to want to navigate.

The state and school report card is one of the primary sources of school quality information for parents. The Harkin-Enzi bill would make some strides in improving the report cards by strengthening data on high school outcomes and providing a good point of comparison for state standards. But at the same time, it would allow states and districts to conceal valuable information about teacher qualifications.

Last week, Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) released a proposal for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) formerly known as No Child Left Behind. Yesterday, Harkin and his counterpart on the Senate’s education panel, Mike Enzi (R-WY), released a revised version of the proposal, reportedly to include more of what Senate Republicans want. Much like the first one, this newer version includes some key elements related to early childhood education, birth through third grade. In this post and more to come, we will give some thumbs up and talk through specifics of the legislation.