Comparability

Looking Forward to NCLB

Jennifer Cohen — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 14:53:00 -0500

We've previously written about both presidential candidates' unwillingness to talk about No Child Left Behind (NCLB). That's changed a bit - especially since the Teacher's College debate between Obama spokesperson Linda Darling-Hammond and McCain advisor Lisa Graham Keegan brought it back into the public eye. Regardless, it's impossible to deny that whoever wins the election will have to tackle NCLB head-on. It's not going to be an easy battle.

Reauthorizing NCLB will likely be a long process that demands the next President's leadership and guidance. The list of topics that is likely to make or break the reauthorization process is extensive and overwhelming. But in honor of this Election Day, we have selected a few that are near and dear to our hearts for the future President-elect to look forward to.

First and foremost is the looming 2014 deadline for 100 percent proficiency on academic tests. As we've read in the headlines time and again, schools, districts, and states are struggling to reach intermediate goals, let alone approach 100 percent proficiency in all subjects for all student subgroups.

Accomplishing such levels of proficiency could take a miracle. Many states set low initial annual achievement goals in their trajectory towards 100 percent proficiency. As a result, their schools are expected to make double digit leaps in proficiency between now and 2014. This type of growth is near to impossible.

Given the limitations of reasonable growth, maintaining the 100 percent requirement in a new iteration of the law will result in more Schools In Need of Improvement (SINIs). States and districts barely have the capacity to turn around the number of low-performing schools they already have. Imagine the strain on their capacity should the list of SINIs grow.

Some stakeholders have suggested that the reauthorized version of NCLB focus on student academic growth, rather than static levels of achievement, and allow more flexibility for schools, districts, and states to reach those growth goals. Moving away from 100 proficiency may present a political obstacle, but directing federal accountability towards realistic expectations could mean real, positive change for low-performing schools.

Speaking of Schools In Need of Improvement, the current version of NCLB is short on guidance and funds for improving or restructuring schools that haven't made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for at least two years. Drastically improving schools takes ample time, money, and planning, and many districts and states lack the dollars, infrastructure, or expertise to do so.

Currently, little research exists to guide school improvement and restructuring - an area where federal investment could make a big difference. Hopefully, a new NCLB will include provisions for research and development on school improvement strategies, direction for schools and districts undergoing the process, and financial support for, well, "supporting" schools.

Another hot-button issue for NCLB reauthorization is the comparability provision for Title I funding. Comparability is intended to prevent school districts from systematically spending less on students in their highest-poverty schools and ensure that Title I funds supplement, not supplant, services to those students. Districts can demonstrate comparable funding by issuing written assurances of comparability or comparing student-instructor ratios, per pupil teacher salary spending, or per pupil expenditures across Title I and non-Title I schools.

But comparability is subject to a series of loopholes that gut the provision. For example, when calculating per pupil teacher salary spending, districts can exclude salary differences due to years of experience. As a result, two schools in the same school district can be deemed "comparable" even if teachers in one school are far more experienced, and therefore higher paid, than those in another. Typically, high-poverty schools lose out in this game, employing primarily inexperienced teachers.

Comparability regulations currently allow districts to remain "comparable" while unevenly distributing experienced teachers and putting low-income students at a disadvantage in the classroom. If the next President wants to ensure that all children are given the tools they need to succeed, comparability regulations must be strengthened to resolve inequities in teacher distribution.

There's also a growing list of special programs the next President will have to negotiate and pare down. Various stakeholders have been fighting for universal pre-K, school construction funds, national standards, and all manner of pet projects. Some programs have more merit than others, but there will not be enough money to pay for them all. It will be impossible to please everyone with the reauthorization bill, and we wish the new President luck as he works his way through it.

Finally, there is the need for a new, snappy title for the law. Surely "No Child Left Behind" has worn thin on the public's patience and a new name could be just what the doctor ordered. But given the problems detailed above, that's probably the least of the President-elect's education concerns.

Chancellor Rhee Tackles Teacher Seniority

Lindsey Luebchow — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:30:00 -0400

The Washington Post reports that D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is taking steps to end teacher seniority preferences in the District's teachers union contract, as part of ongoing contract negotiations with the Washington Teachers' Union. This is an important, and contentious, teacher pay reform that holds promise for reversing inequitable teacher distribution patterns between low- and high-poverty schools in the district.

Within-District Teacher Disparities

Seniority preferences allow teachers with the most experience to transfer to any open teaching position in a district, which means the most experienced teachers tend to gravitate to the lowest-poverty schools and those with with the most ideal teaching conditions. This leaves the highest poverty schools, with the neediest students, with teaching staffs composed largely of rookie teachers .

Within-district teacher quality disparities perpetuate the achievement gap, particularly in large districts like Washington, D.C., which as a heterogeneous mix of schools and students. Higher-income, high-performing schools in the affluent Northwest neighborhoods and Capitol Hill attract the most experienced teachers away from lower-income, low-performing schools in the Northeast.

In addition, these teacher distribution patterns lead to significant spending disparities between schools in the same district. Most teacher contracts determine district-wide salary levels based on teacher experience and education credentials. Thus if one school has ten teachers who have been teaching for 20 years, while another school has ten first-year teachers, the first school is going to receive more money from the district for teacher salaries. That school—likely with higher-income, less challenging students—will have a higher per-pupil expenditure.

"Comparability" provisions in the NCLB law governing federal education funding are supposed to force districts to spend the same amount at their low- and high-poverty schools. However, the provision contains a major loophole that allows districts to disregard inequitable spending on teacher salaries resulting from teacher experience. Last year, Congress discussed closing this loophole and strengthening the comparability provision in the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. If this were to happen, many districts would have no choice but to follow Rhee's example and figure out how to alter current teacher distribution and spending patterns.

Rhee's Teacher Contract Proposal

Rhee has decided to address teacher quality disparities head on, without waiting for a federal mandate. She first offered the possibility of differentiated pay reforms for teachers in D.C., but the response to modifying the traditional teacher salary schedule has not been positive, and one union member told the Washington Post that the compensation issue is "not on the table" now.

So Rhee is testing another tack with the union—ending teacher seniority transfers. The objective of such a reform should be to get the best teachers into classrooms with the students who need them the most. Under the plan, Rhee could assign teachers to schools based on factors such as teacher skills and student needs, instead of automatically having to honor the transfer request of an experienced teacher. This isn't going to be an easy sell for the Washington Teacher's Union. Seniority preferences protect the interests of union members and have been enshrined in teacher's contracts for a long, long time. Simply putting the issue on the table is an audacious move.

Rhee has been concentrating on bringing in young talent to D.C. schools, which is a fine objective as long as she implements an effective process for identifying and nurturing that talent. More importantly, she should focus on getting the most developed talent—which often means more experienced teachers—to low-performing schools. Achieving this goal will likely require a portfolio of reforms, including financial inventives to attract skilled teachers to high-poverty schools, and improved working conditions in those schools. But ending seniority transfer preferences is one important step toward achieving that goal.

Layers of Inequity

Jennifer Cohen — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:04:00 -0400

Poor states, communities, and children persistently get the short end of the stick in school funding. Education spending policies at all levels-federal, state, and local-layer on inequities that disproportionately benefit high-wealth school districts and lead to large funding disparities between high- and low-poverty communities. A new report from Education Sector and the Center on Reinventing Public Education seeks to quantify the cumulative impacts of these inequities on local schools. The results are striking. Addressing these inequities should be a key priority for federal and state policymakers.

The Education Sector/Center on Reinventing Public Education report examines two elementary schools in neighboring states that serve similar populations but receive very different levels of federal, state, and local funding. Cameron Elementary in Fairfax County, Va., receives more than twice the per pupil funding Ponderosa Elementary in Cumberland County, N.C., receives even though both schools serve predominantly low-income populations in poorer sections of their respective counties. These funding disparities are the result of funding distribution structures that disproportionately benefit wealthier states, districts, and schools over poorer states, districts, and schools.

The federal government distributes Title I funds to states based on the number of poor children in each state to improve the quality of the services they receive. However, the specific amount allotted per student depends on how much money a state and its localities spend on education. Because state and local spending is more a function of the wealth of the state and locality than a function of the cost of providing that education, wealthy states like Virginia receive more Title I funds per poor child than poorer states like North Carolina.

While federal funding disparities are significant, 90 percent of the funding schools receive comes from state and local sources. State policies determine both the amount and distribution of these funds, and are a major source of inequities. In Virginia, state funds provide a minimum foundation for education funding-40 percent-that each locality must match out of local funds. Localities can also choose to supplement school funding with additional local tax revenues. North Carolina, in contrast, uses a district funding formula based on student enrollment and cost of hiring teachers and staff that benefits wealthier districts and has no local matching requirement. As a result, local funding constitutes 31 percent of education funding in North Carolina and more than 53 percent in Virginia. Less flush districts like Cumberland County, N.C., are unable to supplement education spending as much as wealthier districts like Fairfax County, Va., and have no incentive to do so.

Finally, district-level funding distribution practices benefit wealthier, easier to staff schools over schools with poorer, more challenging populations. Seniority staffing rules and experience-based salary schedules mean that higher poverty schools are generally staffed by cheaper, less experienced teachers.

We've written previously about how the No Child Left Behind Act's funding comparability requirements contribute to this problem, by allowing districts to overlook these experience-based salary differences when determining whether teacher salary funds are allocated equitably between Title I (read: more poor) and non-Title I (read: more affluent) schools. As a result, poorer schools spend less money on teacher salaries and therefore have fewer resources overall.

The impact of these differences is striking: Despite its high poverty population, Cameron is succeeding at retaining qualified and experienced teachers, while Ponderosa has a constantly cycling staff of inexperienced teachers. As a result, the average teacher at Cameron makes $62,533, compared to $35,610 for the average Ponderosa teacher. Whatever Cameron is doing right to maintain its teachers is worth thousands in increased spending on teacher salaries at the school.

The ES/CRPE report provides a series of policy recommendations to mend the funding disparities at the federal, state and district level. Among these is eliminating the section of the federal comparability requirement which allows districts to ignore experienced-based salary differences when determining whether funding is equal across schools. This change would force districts to recognize the mal-distribution of experienced teachers in their schools and act accordingly to fix it.

The report also suggests that districts give schools a standard amount of funding per student for paying teacher salaries rather than basing funding on the salaries of the actual teachers each school hires. This way schools will be able to prioritize between hiring many inexperienced teachers or a few experienced teachers and consider offering incentives to highly desirable teachers. Both of these changes would be important steps toward improving the equity of school funding and would give poorer schools a real chance to attract and retain qualified and experienced teachers. Other policy recommendations include:

Basing Title I funding on national average per student funding (adjusted for both state wealth and actual cost of education in that state), rather than state and local funding;
Encouraging states to provide minimum floors and maximum ceilings for state and local education funding contributions; and
Distributing state education funding in inverse proportion to district wealth, in order to mitigate disparities in spending due to differences in the amount of property tax revenue districts can raise.

Each of these proposals is likely to face political opposition-especially those that seek to lessen the role of property taxes, and therefore local control, in education funding. However, they would be significant strides towards equalizing both inter- and intra-state education funding disparities across the country and giving low-income students the education they need and deserve.

Conversations in California on District Budget Transparency

Lindsey Luebchow — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:00:00 -0400

In California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's Committee on Education Excellence released its long-overdue final report last week with recommendations for reforming the state's K-12 education system in four areas: governance, finance, teacher recruitment and retention, and administrator preparation and retention. The finance section, titled "Ensure Fair Funding that Rewards Results," offers a number of good, detailed ideas for making state funding more flexible and student-centered, and better tied to incentives to improve learning.

One specific proposal in the report caught Ed Money Watch's eye: Recommendation 2.1.8—make school budgets more understandable. We believe that changing school district budgeting practices is a key first step in school finance reform. Education advocacy groups in California have been talking about this for a long time, and it's encouraging to see a state committee acknowledge the need for change. We hope that other states will take note.

Specifically, school districts need to report how funding is allocated—using the actual cost of resources—across all of their schools. Currently, districts do not report school-level funding figures, instead using district averages to calculate budgets. As the California report recommends, districts should "clearly delineat[e] the total resources (i.e., the financial value of the personnel, supplies, and services) that reach each school."

Why is this important? Many school districts—specifically, large, diverse districts, which are common in California—systematically spend less on their poorest schools than they do on more affluent schools. Policymakers, parents, and the public are largely unaware of these disparities, because school districts are not required to report them, and district budgeting practices mask their existence.

If the state is going to invest its money in a funding formula that gives additional money to districts based on student needs (as the Governor's Committee recommended), it must ensure that the additional resources actually reach the students who need them. Without more transparent budgeting practices at the district level, the state, parents, and other stakeholders will never know.

Loophole Makes School Finance Inequity Within Districts Possible

Ed Policy — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

When the federal government started distributing compensatory education (i.e. Title I) funding in 1965, it wanted to ensure that federal money was supplementing, not supplanting, support to schools educating disadvantaged children. Thus, the government added fiscal requirements to Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that require communities to establish an even state and local school finance playing field within district — before supplemental Title I money is given to the highest-poverty schools.

For a school district to be eligible for federal funds under Title I, Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, it has to fulfill three fiscal requirements:

Maintenance of effort
School districts must maintain expenditures from state and local funding sources from year to year.
Comparability of services
School districts must provide services in Title I (high-poverty) schools that are at least comparable to the services provided in non-Title I (low-poverty) schools.
Supplement, not supplant
School districts must use Title I funds to supplement the activities supported by state and local funds that would have taken place in the absence of federal funds.

In theory, the "comparability" requirement has the greatest potential to help low-income students and schools. It's supposed to require school districts to change their long-standing practice of spending more money per pupil on schools with the lowest poverty rates. The maintenance of effort and supplement, not supplant and don’t address underlying finance structures.

But the legislative statute and regulations that define comparability contain a major loophole that renders the guarantee meaningless. The loophole allows school districts, when comparing education services provided at Title I and non-Title I schools, to ignore differences in spending on teachers, which consitutes over half of all state and local education spending.

In the first draft of a No Child Left Behind reauthorization bill released last fall, the House Education and Labor Committee proposed closing the comparability loophole. Done correctly, it could be the most important change to NCLB for low-income children.

[slideshow] Within-District Spending Disparities, and Why They Exist

Within-district, between-school spending disparities aren’t frequently discussed, but they are widespread, particularly within diverse districts that house a socio-economic range of neighborhoods and students. Disparities result mainly from an unequal distribution of teachers and teacher salaries among schools—more experienced, better paid teachers gravitate towards the lowest-poverty schools, while the highest-poverty schools are left with the least experienced, lowest paid teachers (and thus the highest-poverty schools receive less money per-pupil).

This type of teacher movement is allowed, because of the structure of union contracts with school districts. Staffing provisions in collective bargaining agreements grant preference for seniority, meaning that the most experienced teachers get first choice where they want to transfer and teach. And the better teaching conditions at lowest-poverty schools attract the higher-credentialed, more experienced teachers.

The Teacher Salary Loophole, and How it Undermines Comparability

It sounds like the comparability requirement might force districts to remedy these teacher spending disparities. Unfortunately, the legislation contains one major loophole that throws any possibility of meaningful comparability out the window:

For the purpose of this subsection, in the determination of expenditures per pupil from State and local funds, or instructional salaries per pupil from State and local funds, staff salary differentials for years of employment shall not be included in such determinations.

This means the principle cause of within-district, school finance inequity—teacher salary differences—need not be remedied.

Currently, all school districts have to do to demonstrate comparability among schools is submit a written assurance to the state that they: (1) use a district-wide salary schedule, and (2) have policies "to ensure equivalence among schools in teachers, administrators, and other staff…and in the provision of curriculum materials and instructional supplies." (Oh, and they must "keep records to document that the salary schedule and policies were, in fact, implemented." But states do such a poor job monitoring comparability that it’s unlikely those records would ever be needed.)

Thus as long as the teachers are all paid on the same scale and distributed evenly in terms of numbers, not quality, it doesn’t matter that the lowest-poverty school has 20 highly-credentialed, experienced teachers and the highest-poverty school has 20 rookie teachers. In this regulatory world, Wilson High School in Northwest Washington, DC is comparable to Anacostia High School in Southeast Washington, DC. And thus, the comparability provision has become a cruel joke.

Giving Comparability Teeth

The most robust demonstration of comparability would involve a straight-up, no-gimmick state and local teacher salary expenditure comparisons between schools—with salary differentials for years of employment included. This is what the House has proposed, and where Congress should continue to head, in its NCLB reauthorization bill.

(Side note: One obstacle to using teacher salary spending per-pupil for comparisons is that many school districts do not track real teacher spending at each school, instead only monitoring teacher allocation numbers. These local budgeting practices, which mask teacher spending disparities, would have to change.)

There will be (and already has been) intense opposition to any comparability changes from teacher’s unions and school administrators, as such changes might require renegotiating teacher collective bargaining agreements, changing seniority and transfer provisions that enable the most experienced teachers to cluster in lowest-poverty schools, or adding pay incentives to attract high-quality teachers to highest-poverty schools.

But if the federal government wants to ensure that its investment is truly enhancing the education of disadvantaged children—not making up for disparities in teacher quality—strengthening comparability is a critical first step.