Public Education

On Wednesday, the House Education & Workforce Committee convened to debate Chairman John Kline's (R-MN) proposed Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization. Ranking Member George Miller (D-CA) also proposed his own version of the bill. ICYMI, here's the play-by-play.

Click here for the Storify of last week's Senate HELP Committee markup.

Click here for the Storify of last week's Senate HELP Committee markup.

The parade of bills that could replace No Child Left Behind continues this week with Wednesday’s markup of Rep. John Kline’s (R-MN) version. All signals suggest that this won’t be the year Congress finally updates the nation’s most comprehensive education law—and the substantial differences between Kline’s and Sen. Tom Harkin’s bills have a lot to do with these dim prospects. We’ve already seen what Harkin’s Strengthening America’s Schools Act would mean for English Language Learners (ELLs). Today we’ll take a similar look at Kline’s bill, the Student Success Act (SSA).

Tuesday and Wednesday, the Senate HELP Committee convened to mark up Chairman Tom Harkin's (D-IA) bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. @NewAmericaEd's Anne Hyslop and Conor Williams live-Tweeted, and we've collected some of the main takeaways here, ICYMI.

“Big Data” has been launched into every area of our lives: businesses, consumer products, political campaigns, healthcare, and more. But data still hasn’t managed to penetrate the classroom in many schools.

Last week, New America’s Education Policy Program released a new paper, Promoting Data in the Classroom: Innovative State Models and Missed Opportunities, that explores K-12 teachers’ use of data to improve instruction. It focuses on two such efforts in Oregon and Delaware, both federally funded projects, and highlights key takeaways from both for state officials and policymakers.

Recently, we published an op-ed in Roll Call exploring the federal policy implications of the report:

Congress can do more. Already, lawmakers fund two federal programs that include an explicit focus on the collection and use of data – the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems and Race to the Top competitive grant programs. Those funds enabled Oregon and Delaware to deliver 21^st century data skills to teachers across their states. Another program – the Improving Teacher Quality State Grants program, or Title II, Part A of the No Child Left Behind Act – carries even more potential. It’s a formula program, provided to every state, every year for the explicit purpose of improving teacher quality. And it could be the key to equipping teachers with the skills they need to learn from the reams of student data already available to the classroom.

The Senate began marking up the long-overdue reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (currently known as No Child Left Behind), and the House is expected to embark on that process soon. We hope neither chamber will forget 21^st century skills in data-driven instruction as they do:

Already, policymakers face a long to-do list when they start the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. But when they do, members of Congress should be sure not to lose sight of the ultimate end goal of federal education policy: bringing better teachers to schools, so they can better serve students. And that means bringing schools and teachers into the golden age of data.

To read the full op-ed, click here. For the full report, Promoting Data in the Classroom: Innovative State Models and Missed Opportunities, click here. 

This podcast originally appeared on New America’s In the Tankblog.

What place do data have in the classroom? Last week, the New America Foundation’s Education Policy Program produced a new report that describes how teachers can use their students’ data to improve classroom outcomes, and how states can help give teachers those skills. The report dives into two states – Oregon and Delaware – that are doing it right.

In this week’s Education Policy Program podcast, New America Managing Editor Fuzz Hogan talks with the report’s co-authors (Jennifer Cohen Kabaker, former Senior Policy Analyst at New America and now Corporate and Foundation Relations Manager at KIPP Los Angeles Schools, and Clare McCann, Program Associate with the Education Policy Program). We discuss the potential of data-driven instruction in K-12 classrooms, the challenges that Oregon and Delaware faced–and that other states could face in similar efforts–and the merits of helping teachers master these skills.

Click above to listen to the podcast. To view the report, click here.

This week, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee Tom Harkin (D-IA) released a new draft bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The bill, called the Strengthening America’s Schools Act, makes a lot of changes – you can read more about those here and here. Among those changes are some tweaks to Title I, the $14.5 billion program that provides funding to low-income children and high-poverty schools.

States’ Distribution to School Districts

The Harkin bill would require states to modify how they provide funds to school districts by adding a new provision. The new requirement would mean that the lowest-performing school districts, the neediest districts, and those that prove the “strongest commitment” to evidence-based reforms that improve student performance get first priority. Any additional funds would be diverted to districts that don’t meet these criteria.But districts would receive at least as much funding as they did last year; the change would only apply to a percentage of funds over the existing appropriation.

The lowest-performing districts are defined elsewhere in the bill as “priority” and “focus” schools. Focus schools are the 10 percent of schools with the biggest achievement gap, and the 10 percent of high schools with the biggest graduation rate gap, among student subgroups as compared to the statewide average. Priority schools are the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools, high schools with graduation rates below 60 percent, and any school that has been a focus school for 6 consecutive years. The idea of priority and focus schools is co-opted from the No Child Left Behind waivers the Department of Education has already issued to 35+ states.

A separate ESEA reauthorization bill authored by Sen. Alexander (R-TN) goes much further – and in the opposite direction. Under that bill, states could elect to allocate funding by the number of Title I-eligible children per district. Effectively, then, the funds would follow a child to any public school within a district. (A Romney campaign proposal would have allowed funds to follow children into private schools or other school districts. This is less extreme – and less of a logistical nightmare – than that proposal would have been.)

School Districts’ Distribution to Schools

The Harkin bill also revises how funds awarded to school districts are distributed to schools. Currently, school districts that receive Title I funds are required to rank all “school attendance areas” in the district. The district must serve all areas with more than 75 percent of its children living in poverty, in rank order, and then may serve schools below 75 percent poverty with any remaining funds.

The rankings are calculated by one of a few measures: Census poverty data, the number of students in the free and reduced priced lunch program, the number of children in families that receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits, or the number of children eligible for Medicaid assistance are all allowable metrics. Under the new plan, high schools could instead use a “feeder” pattern to calculate poverty rankings. That would calculate the number of low-income students by measuring the average percentage of low-income families in the elementary schools that will later attend the high school.

And under the Harkin bill, that split would be different for high schools than for elementary and middle schools. Districts would still have to serve elementary and middle schools with more than 75 percent of children living in poverty, but now any high school with over 50 percent poverty would also be served. Elementary and middle schools that received funding last year, but are now out-ranked by high schools at more than 50 percent poverty, could be protected by the district, though.

One last note on school attendance areas: Districts would be allowed to provide funds for early childhood education in eligible areas, even before they provide funds to high schools in eligible areas.

Title I Teacher Comparability

The Harkin bill does try to correct one loophole in Title I: comparability. Under current law, school districts are required to distribute funds to their Title I and non-Title I schools equally. The amount of funding provided to Title I schools cannot be more than 10 percent below that of non-Title I schools.

But that metric can mask a major inequity: teachers in non-Title I schools tend to be more experienced and better paid, so high-income schools typically receive more state and local funding for teacher pay than low-income schools do. School districts that compare student-teacher ratios between Title I and non-Title I schools to prove compliance with teacher comparability are obscuring the variation in teacher pay.

Harkin included a provision in the 2011 reauthorization draft he produced closing the loophole, and it’s back in the current draft. As of the 2015-2016 school year, districts will have to demonstrate comparability using per-pupil expenditures from both state and local funding, including actual expenditures on teacher salaries and benefits. They’ll be measuring actual funding in individual schools, not less valid measures like teacher-student ratios or district salary schedules. And Title I schools would receive equal funding to non-Title I schools, rather than a measure that’s within 10 percent.

Title I Funding Formulas

Title I is one of the largest federal education programs. It serves about 23 million low-income PreK-12 students nationwide across most school districts, because any district with at least a couple of low-income students is eligible. Funds are distributed through four complicated funding formulas, which have several flaws that do little to rebalance inequities. The Harkin bill doesn’t touch the formulas themselves, in spite of arguments that the formulas don’t target high-poverty schools very well.  But it does make some adjustments around the edges that could help prevent some inequities.

We’ll have a lot more on the Harkin bill, and other ESEA reauthorization progress, in the coming weeks. Check back with Ed Money Watch for more details.

Earlier this week, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) introduced the Strengthening America’s Schools Act (SASA). We profiled its major changes here, and a few significant mentions for early childhood education here. Our sister blog, Ed Money Watch, wrote about the Title II teacher and principal provisions today (for more, click here). We’ve collected a few notes on the early education and early grade connections to the Title II reforms:

We’ve written a lot about the particular needs of teachers in the early grades, including more comprehensive teacher evaluation systems, a curriculum that spans multiple domains of learning and better support from school leaders and classroom observers.