1. Do Not Enact Proposals for Straight A’s (also known as State and District Charter Agreements)

Such proposals would allow States and school districts to take federal funds under Title I, the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration program, the Perkins Act, and other federal programs and then exempt themselves from the key program requirements under those Acts. This would cut the legs out from under school reform, and would demolish families’ expectations for the education that will be provided to their children.

A variety of problems with these proposals have been identified, such as:

• an "accountability" structure which is in fact much weaker than the one already contained in Title I (which would become null), for example by allowing States and districts to decide how much or little progress in performance meets their goals, divorced from the adequate yearly progress required under Title I;

• for states and districts that fail to meet even these weaker standards, sanctions which generally will result in no more than eventually having to comply with the reforms that they exempted themselves for several years;

• elimination of requirements to target funds to areas of greatest need;

• failure to identify provisions of federal law that are substantial obstacles to reform and achievement, let alone a case that the core programmatic reform provisions that would become null are the problem;

• disregard the fact many that other flexibility provisions already existing in federal law -- e.g., (a) Ed Flex, (b) consolidation of state and local plans and applications, (c) consolidation of state and local administrative funds, and (d) waivers -- are more than adequate to address such problems even if they were identified.

But even if the accountability and targeting requirements were tightened, the biggest problem would still remain – the basic, minimal expectations in the law for what families can expect for their children in federally funded programs would be gone. For example, the provisions under Title I to provide children with curriculum aligned with standards, effective instructional methods taught by highly qualified teachers, and timely and effective assistance when they are experiencing difficulty meeting particular standards, would be gone. So would the provisions under Perkins designed to ensure that their children in vocational programs do not get a second-class education and are not channeled into narrow job training. And schools could accept money under the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration while ignoring any of the requirements to actually have and implement a comprehensive reform plan. Parents count on these provisions for laying out what they can expect for their children and providing them a role in developing those components. A percentage gain in your school’s aggregate scores in the future, while one important component of reform, is no substitute for the others, if your children are not getting the instruction and assistance they need and deserve. It would be like telling parents that there is no need to be concerned about standards of care for hospitals in treating their children or dispensing drugs, so long as the hospitals are reducing their overall mortality and morbidity rates.

Just as many parents and teachers throughout the nation are striving together to improve teaching and learning for all students, Straight A’s would send a message that the federal government has abdicated its responsibility to ensure that when federal funds are used, quality programs will result. It is bad for children and families, and is counter to those real reform measures in Title I and other programs that, if implemented, help ensure high quality programs for this nation’s students.

2. Improvements in Title I

As has been widely acknowledged, the basic structure of Title I is sound and is mainly in need of better implementation. There are some modest but significant ways to improve the language, including:

a. Schoolwide programs: Clarify the "special rule" for consolidating funds. Section 1114(a)(4) of Title I was designed to allow the Secretary to exempt schools from fiscal requirements of other laws to the extent that they interfere with using the funding to support the schoolwide program, not to exempt them from the substantive programmatic requirements which pose no barrier to consolidated funding and which, in fact, were written by Congress to advance reforms. Unfortunately this understanding has gotten lost, and the reauthorization should make the original purpose much clearer.

(In addition, the threshold for allowing schoolwide programs – currently 50% of the students meet poverty criteria, should not be lowered until there is fuller implementation of the crucial, but too often ignored, programmatic provisions in section 1114.)

b. Targeted Assistance Programs. Targeted assistance programs under Section 115 ought to be making plans for their use of federal funds, and this is not currently required. This is a critical piece of transforming schools – bringing the school community together to decide and implement the vision and mission of the school.

c. Accountability, standards, and adequately yearly progress. Here too, amendments would help perfect the original intent of the reforms, in light of more recent experience. This includes:

• Clarifying that, if the State has standards for what all children should know and be able to do that extend beyond math and language arts, those standards should apply.
• Clarifying adequate yearly progress by setting a time certain – ten years from effective date – by which all students should have reached the proficient level.
• Clarifying that adequate yearly progress should be achieved for students as a whole and for key subgroups within the school, including economically disadvantaged students and students with limited English proficiency.
• Clarifying that adequate yearly progress should be achieved for each subject area and, where more than one grade level is assessed, each grade level. Some jurisdictions have treated scores as compensatory, so that enough progress in reading means that it is alright for students not to be learning mathematics.

d. Report cards and other information for parents, schools, and the public. We applaud Congressional interest in report cards about school performance, information on individual child performance, and information on teacher qualifications. However, we believe the following points need attention:

• We do not support a federal requirement for state-level testing in every grade (3-8), in contrast to the current requirement for at least one grade within each school level. After six years, most states still do not have approved assessment systems for one grade that meet the important assessment requirements of Title I (for alignment with standards, validity, reliability, validity for particular populations, use of multiple measures, etc.). Requiring state-level testing in every grade would push states to jump to off-the-shelf tests which do not meet these requirements.

• However, we strongly agree that every parent should have frequent, regular information about how his/her children are doing in relation to the standards, and the current law does not adequately provide for this. (Interpretive, individual score information is now linked to the state assessments, which only occur in certain grades and which do not necessarily provide sufficient information about even those children at an individual level.) But rather than requiring state assessments, the Act should provide that schools must provide this information regularly to parents (as well as for use by teachers and by the school for internal improvement), which can be done through a variety of forms of classroom-based assessment. In addition, improving such school-level and classroom-based assessment of student performance in relation to assessments should be a required part of the Act’s professional development for teachers and school leaders.

• Parents’ should receive information about the qualifications of their children’s teacher as a matter of course, without having to request it. Lay people commonly find it very uncomfortable to ask professionals individually to document their credentials.
• Additional data to supplement assessment results should include not only such things as disaggregated information on graduation rates and students not taking the assessments but also students retained in grade (including those retained in the grades prior to the grade assessed). The latter will not show up as students who did not take the assessment, yet they are a very important component of students who are not performing well. In fact, it would be useful to have a measure of the students who have demonstrated levels of proficiency in relation to the total number who, for their age, should have (whether they scored low, were absent or excluded from the assessment, or have yet to reach the grade they should have).

• Much of the content, format, and methods of dissemination for reports and other information will undoubtedly be left to States, districts, and/or schools. There should be heavy parent involvement in shaping that information at each level so that it effectively reaches and meets the information needs of parents.

e. Negotiated rule-making. Negotiated rule-making has not worked well at the Department of Education. It doesn’t have to be that way, and in fact it usually isn’t in such other venues as the EPA, from which it was adopted. In those other venues, though, the process is structured around a recognition of the need to give equal representation to the voice of consumers, providing basic parity with that of industry. Instead, on Title I in 1988 and 1994, and Perkins II in 1990, 1 or 2 representatives of parents and students were at the table along with about 20 representatives of program providers (administrators and teachers). The interests of families, wherever they diverged from program providers, were quickly seen as aberrant, by sheer weight of numbers alone, putting the parent representatives in a difficult position. (In addition, in other venues, it is readily recognized that advocacy organizations, with professional staff whose daily work is representing consumers in policy-making and who can thus deal more readily with the intricacies and implications of regulatory drafting, are a critical part of the process, particularly since the providers’ presence is through full-time professionals.) Thus, if negotiated-rule-making is to be maintained in the Act, (a) representatives of students and parents served by the program and representatives of those who administer or provide the program should be equally balanced, and (b) the former should include representatives of advocacy organizations.

3, Teacher Quality. We know that a great deal of attention will go into new provisions in ESEA -- whether under Title I and/or Title II -- to improve teacher quality. This may include provisions, which we would support, to ensure students have credentialed teachers teaching within their field. However, while having a credential (or major) for the area in which a teacher is teaching is significant, we also know that such credentials do not begin to define what it means to be adequately qualified, let alone "highly qualified" or "fully qualified" to teach all students effectively the knowledge and skills we expect them to master. Instead of defining "highly qualified teachers," we ask you to call them "in-field" or "credentialed" teachers, conform the rest of Title II accordingly, and leave lots of room for improvement and growth. The fact that its teachers are credentialed should not lead a school community, in its Title I planning, to stop inquiring into how well qualified the teachers are to enable the kind of performance expected and demanded by Title I. Thus, Title I school-level planning provisions should continue to include a focus on "highly qualified" teachers, while any new provisions and definitions regarding teacher certification or majors should use a different term which will not be confused with this particular Title I provision on highly qualified staff.

4. Independent Parent Centers and Local Family Information Centers. Parents are the ultimate local quality control agents for public schools. They are the consumers at the local level. Moreover, the evidence is clear that children whose parents are engaged in their learning performs at high levels of achievement. In order to provide support for those parents, independent parent centers, run by parents, are essential to provide training, information, and a helping hand. For instance, parent centers can help parents understand how to work with schools and how to understand standards and accountability systems so that parents can make informed decisions about their children’s education and how to use the provisions of Title I for school-based planning and parent involvement to help to ensure that their children are learning to high standards.

First, to assure they truly meet parents’ needs, the statewide Parental Information Resource Centers must be run by parents, and therefore should have a majority parent board or project governing body.

Second, in order to ensure that the parents whose children need it the most receive sufficient information and support, we ask you also provide for Local Family Information Centers which would focus in on localized areas where parents may need particular support -- such as areas where there are high concentrations of disadvantaged students. Without parents acting as informed consumers at the local level, many of the goals for reauthorization will languish in areas of entrenched low expectations and low quality programs.