Not Everyone Loves White House Title I/Standards Proposal

I must admit, I was surprised (and less than thrilled) that the Obama administration seems to be tying their goals to everything that moves in education.

This from Alyson Klein at Politics K-12:

Yesterday, we heard from governors who either praised the proposal to tie Title I money to rigorous college and career-readiness standards in a renewed Elementary and Secondary Education Act ... or said they were still "studying" it.

But last night, the National School Boards Association put out its own statement. And that group is not happy with what it sees as federal "coercion" (Catherine Gewertz over at Curriculum Matters has more.) Meanwhile, David Shreve over at the National Conference of State Legislatures also told me he's worried about the feds stepping on what has been a state and local issue. It seems the farther you go down the chain of government, the more concern there is over this proposal, although a number of groups have yet to weigh in.

And we still haven't heard from another key constituency: Congress. Tomorrow, I'm planning to attend the House Education and Labor Committee's very first hearing on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The topic is charter schools, probably the issue most likely to have Republicans and Democrats joining in a kumbaya chorus of bipartisan agreement....

Obama's education budget bad for rural schools, National Schools Boards Association says

This from the Rural Blog:

President Obama has proposed big changes to federal education funding and the No Child Left Behind Act with the unveiling of his fiscal 2011 budget. It includes a 6.2 percent increase in funding for the Department of Education, but most of that money will go to competitively awarded programs, Alyson Klein of Education Week reports.

Programs that use set formulas to allocate funding such as Title I, based on the number of poor children in a school or district, received little or no increase in budget."The focus on competitive grants and the decision to provide no increase to Title I means rural districts and children in the poorest parts of the country will be left behind," said Anne Bryant, the executive director of the National School Boards Association. "Those districts do not have the capacity to compete for grants—unless you want to shift money from teachers to grant writers." ...

"While there is much to applaud in the budget, we are concerned that virtually all of the proposed increase is for competitive grants, while Title I — the lifeblood for our most disadvantaged children — is flat-funded," Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement. "Students with the most needs should not have to rely on how well adults compete for dollars."

Advocates Say NCLB’s ‘Comparability’ Provision is in Need of Fine-Tuning

This from Education Week:

When Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, it rewrote much of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, increasing the amount of testing required and demanding that states hold schools accountable for results on those tests.

Although the changes were intended to hold school officials accountable for the educational experiences of disadvantaged children, Congress left intact a short clause in the main K-12 education law that, in practice, has failed to ensure that money from the federal Title I program only supplements state and local money, researchers and advocates said at a conference here last week.

“Title I is not having its intended effect,” Marguerite Roza, a research associate professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, said at the one-day conference sponsored by the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank. “It’s filling in the holes left by state and local funds.” ...

President Bush approves $59.2 billion Education Budget

Budget Raises Title I, Cuts Reading First

Yesterday President Bush has signed into a law a $59.2 billion bill that will increase federal education spending by 2.9 percent in fiscal year 2008.

The appropriation for U.S. Department of Education programs during the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 is part of a larger budget drama in which Democrats largely gave in to a hard-line White House stance that earlier measures contained too much in domestic spending increases.

In signing the bill, a $550 billion omnibus measure that includes fiscal 2008 spending for most other Cabinet agencies as well as the Education Department President Bush complained that the bill contains nearly 9,800 earmarks, totaling more than $10 billion.

“These projects are not funded through a merit-based process and provide a vehicle for wasteful government spending,” the president wrote.

Education Week reports:

The measure will provide $13.9 billion to the Title I program for disadvantaged students, an 8.6 percent increase over the $12.8 billion appropriated for the program in fiscal 2007. But the amount is about 2 percent less than what was proposed for the program in a bill vetoed by President Bush in November.

By contrast, the Reading First program was cut significantly under the legislation, dropping from $1 billion last year to $393 million in fiscal 2008. That is slightly more severe than the $400 million proposed for the program in the vetoed spending bill.

Reading First, one of President Bush’s highest priorities under the No Child Left Behind Act, came under fire in a series of highly critical reports over the past 15 months by the Education Department’s inspector general that found favoritism for certain textbook publishers and other management problems in the program’s early years...

Democrats Move to Slash ‘Reading First’

House subcommittee's fiscal 2008

plan would cut program 61 percent.

House Democrats want to put their own stamp on federal education spending by increasing Title I and other programs they favor and slashing Reading First and other priorities set by President Bush.

In the $56 billion fiscal 2008 spending bill for the Department of Education unveiled by the Democrats, No Child Left Behind Act programs would receive a $2 billion increase, with the Title I program for disadvantaged students receiving $1.5 billion of that.

But the $1.03 billion Reading First program—which the Bush administration points to as one of its biggest accomplishments under the NCLB law—would take a cut of $630 million, or 61 percent. What’s more, the administration’s latest proposals for private school vouchers and new mathematics programs would not be funded at all.

"This [Reading First] cut will not be restored until we have a full appreciation of the shenanigans that have been going on,” said Rep. David R. Obey, D-Wis., the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Reports by the Department of Education’s inspector general and congressional investigators have outlined management and ethical questions involving the program.

Republicans voiced no objections to the Reading First cuts or other spending levels during the June 7 session of the appropriations panel’s Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Subcommittee. The subcommittee approved the Democratic plan in a unanimous voice vote.

“If I were chairman,” said Rep. James T. Walsh, R-N.Y., the subcommittee’s senior Republican, “I don’t know that I would have made the bill a whole lot different.”

...Some reading experts agreed that, despite the problems with Reading First outlined in six inspector general reports since last fall, the program is worth saving.

The findings essentially supported complaints that federal officials appeared to favor the use of some commercial programs, and discouraged others, during the implementation of Reading First. The inspector general’s findings largely substantiated the allegations of conflict of interest and mismanagement in the program. A Senate education committee report last month also described alleged ethical breaches by reading experts who gained financially while assisting in the rollout of the 5-year-old program. ("Senate Report Cites ‘Reading First’ Conflicts," May 16, 2007.)

“The move to eviscerate the program by drastically cutting it is the ultimate example of throwing the baby out with the bath water,” said Alan E. Farstrup, the executive director of the Newark, Del.-based International Reading Association.

This from Education Week (subscription).