Title I

Texas has joined Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and 46 other states (including Washington, D.C.) in seeking waivers from No Child Left Behind (NCLB). With Nebraska and Montana sitting out, Vermont and North Dakota withdrawing, and California flat-out rejected, the pool of non-waiver states continues to shrink. But despite jumping on the waiver bandwagon, Texas breaks the mold in many respects.

Although the Lone Star State’s refusal to adopt the Common Core is one important distinction from other waiver winners, this wasn’t the detail I was most keen to uncover in their formal request. Texas’ plan to implement their own college- and career-ready standards and assessments actually stood out as one of the stronger points of their waiver, and other non-Common Core states, like Virginia and Minnesota, have successfully applied. Rather, Texas had originally considered asking the Department of Education for leeway to redesign the federal Title I funding formula – a provision that would have gone well beyond the flexibility granted to other states and a demand that would have undoubtedly made Texas’ waiver dead on arrival. To their credit, Texas officials removed this request, bringing their final proposal much closer to what the Department is offering.

But does this mean Texas’ waiver will be a hit with the U.S. Department of Education? Not so fast. While the proposal has strong points – like working with higher education to gain buy-in for college- and career-ready standards and articulating a plan to pilot teacher evaluations and scale them statewide – Texas’ proposed system of school accountability and improvement is not among them. In fact, Texas’ waiver could significantly undermine efforts to hold schools accountable for the performance of individual student subgroups.

Texas’ request is complicated by the fact that its state accountability system, which has operated in parallel to NCLB, is undergoing a significant overhaul, with many provisions yet to be finalized. Because Texas would like to fit its existing system into the waiver requirements, the state simply excluded these half-baked provisions from its request. Therefore, Texas’ waiver omits critical details, including how student progress will be measured, what annual performance targets will be, how each component within accountability will be weighted, and how focus and priority schools will be selected. Further, the application doesn’t even include Texas’ proposed framework, burying the information in attachments and hyperlinks.

For those that do seek out the information, Texas’ new performance index leaves a lot to be desired. Similar to other states, Texas plans to use a combination of four indices for accountability: student achievement, student progress, achievement gap closure, and postsecondary readiness. But the state does not specify how the index would translate into specific interventions, i.e. focus and priority schools.

Even more worrisome is how student subgroups and academic subjects will be treated across the four indices. While some states created “super-subgroups,” Texas took a different approach: ignore subgroups altogether.  Within the student achievement index, only the all students group is considered, with proficiency rates combined further across all subject areas. Yet for measuring student progress, subjects are considered separately and all traditional subgroups count– with the exception of low-income students, who are only considered within the performance gap closure index. But the gap closure measures do not consider English Language Learners or special education students. Finally, within the postsecondary readiness index, only racial subgroups are considered on one measure (advanced proficiency rates), while all subgroups (except low-income students) are considered for graduation rates. Texas does not provide a rationale for picking and choosing which indices apply to which subgroups.

Texas could also be plagued by an issue that cropped up in other waivers: annual performance targets. Texas’ targets would be based on the goal of cracking the top ten states nationally on college and career readiness by 2020 – a novel approach worth considering. But it’s unclear how the state could judge itself against others to define the annual targets. Texas is not a Common Core state, and existing national measures, like the SAT or ACT, would only apply to high schools. If the proposed readiness index were used instead, the ranking would be based on Texas assessments, students graduating with advanced Texas diplomas, and graduation rates. Using these measures, Texas would be number one by default – no other state has similar data.

Given these issues, I am doubtful that the Department could approve Texas’ request in its current form. There are simply too many unanswered questions and missing details. That said, Texas’ request is strong enough in other areas to allow for productive negotiations with the Department. With additional assurances and information from the Lone Star State, along with some give and take, NCLB flexibility could reach deep in the heart of Texas by the 2013-2014 school year.

The early education world is about to suffer some serious whiplash. Last week was a time of excitement and hope, as President Obama announced his proposal for expanding preschool. This week the mood is the opposite, as federal spending cuts look increasingly likely, spelling potential hardship for a wide swath of programs, including Head Start, special education services and Title I school funding.

An under-examined aspect of President Obama’s new early childhood education plan is his proposal to encourage states to create more full-day kindergarten seats – though only after states are able to guarantee access to pre-K for all 4-year olds from low and moderate-income families.

For nearly a year, the PreK-3^rd Grade National Work Group has hosted free webinars on how to reduce the achievement gap by focusing on children’s early years: pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, first, second and third grades. The last of these webinars, Scale and Sustainability: Implications for State and District Policy, will be held this Wednesday, Jan. 30, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. EST.

In a post for the Huffington Post's Education blog, I wrote about the Early Education Initiative's event on January 14 that highlighted three promising strategies for turning around low-performing schools: FirstSchool, AppleTree's Every Child Ready and Cincinnati's

Jacqueline Jones, our country’s first Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and Early Learning, left her post at the U.S. Department of Education earlier this month. Early Ed Watch had the opportunity to conduct an email interview with Jones. Below is the complete interview, edited for typographical errors only.

Yesterday the Early Education Initiative issued a new report by Maggie Severns, “Reforming Head Start.” In addition to this issue brief on Head Start “recompetition,” readers can also access our new Head Start background and analysis page, which was released in September as part of our pre-K expansion of the Federal Education Budget Project.

In 2009, President Obama and a Democratic Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), an economic stimulus package that included large, one-time cash infusions for some of the federal government’s largest education programs.  But since then, Congress and the president reset funding for key PreK-12 programs back to their prior funding levels and haven’t increased it since. Meanwhile, they’ve ensured that the Pell Grant program for undergraduate students from low-income families maintained the one-time funding gains and then some. Will a second-term Obama administration continue this Pell-at-the-expense-of-everything-else policy?  First, let’s review how policymakers got here.

Under the stimulus bill, Title I funding for disadvantaged PreK-12 students grew by $10 billion.  Special education state grants under Part B of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) nearly doubled, with an extra $11.3 billion, in addition to the program’s regular 2009 appropriation of $11.5 billion. And the Pell Grant program for low-income college students got a $15.6 billion add-on to its 2009 appropriation of $17.3 billion.

Since then, lawmakers have boosted the U.S. Department of Education’s budget overall by a healthy sum (especially when compared with other agencies), up from $59.2 billion in fiscal year 2008 to $68.1 billion in 2012. Amidst that healthy increase, however, lawmakers kept Title I funding and IDEA funding essentially flat.

What explains the overall funding increase? A big part of it went to Pell Grants. But there is more to the explanation. After the stimulus money had run out for other education programs, lawmakers approved four additional years of emergency supplemental funding for Pell Grants, which coincided with a separate increase to an entitlement funding stream for the program that started in 2008. The result may be the largest funding increase for any federal education program in history—while other programs remained flat.

Here’s the kicker: That emergency supplemental funding lawmakers approved for Pell Grants will run out this year. So the program needs another infusion of funding of about $5.8 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office, just to keep it going in its current form. The following year that figure jumps to $8.7 billion. Over the next 10 years, the total gap is $76.5 billion.

Over the coming weeks and months, it’s time for lawmakers to starting thinking about smart ways to reform the Pell Grant program and put it on a sustainable funding path—but also to ensure that the program serves low-income college students well. PreK-12 programs have a lot riding on that outcome.

In September the Early Education Initiative added pre-K data from the state and school-district levels to the Federal Education Budget Project database -- already the only comprehensive, centralized database for funding, demographic and outcome information for every state, school district and higher-education institution in the country.

Last Friday, the Office of Management and Budget at the White House released a sequestration report, confirming the impact of the automatic, across-the-board funding cuts scheduled for January 2013. Sequestration resulted from the “supercommittee’s” failure to find $1.2 trillion in 10-year cuts to federal spending (or tax increases) last year. According to the report, the majority of Department of Education spending programs will face an 8.2 percent cut as a result of the sequester. Unless Congress and the President agree to turn off the sequester, school districts across the country will face some difficult budget decisions starting in January and continuing into the 2013-14 school year.

To get a better idea of what these cuts will mean for schools, Ed Money Watch used Census data on school districts’ total annual revenue and federal revenue for the 2009-10 school year to calculate the percent of each district’s revenue made up of federal funds, as well as how much each district stands to lose under a 8.2 percent cut. (We did a similar analysis recently looking at the impact of Congressman Ryan’ proposed 20 percent cut.)

It is important to note that not all cuts will happen at the same time. Specifically, cuts to Title I and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act spending will not take effect until next school year because the programs are mostly forward funded (due to something called “advance appropriations”). Other programs, such as Impact Aid, will face immediate cuts in January 2013. School nutrition programs, however, are exempt from the sequester. Unfortunately, the Census data do not disaggregate by funding source, so it is not possible to include this exemption in our calculations.  

Unsurprisingly, the districts that rely the most on federal funds for their annual revenue will take the greatest hit due to a 8.2 percent cut as a proportion of their total revenue. For example, Shannon County School District in South Dakota relied on the federal government for 67.9 percent of its annual revenue in 2010. If that funding were to be cut by 8.2 percent, Shannon County would lose $1.5 million, or 5.6 percent of its $18.1 million in annual revenue. Shannon County serves over 1,100 students, 98 percent of whom participate in Free and Reduced Price Lunch and 99 percent of whom identify as American Indian.  The district receives nearly $5 million in Title I funding for disadvantaged students and over $8 million in Impact Aid funding to replace revenue lost from the lack of property taxes derived from Bureau of Indian Affairs land.

Similar stories can be told for numerous districts with high proportions of low-income, American Indian, English Language Learner, or other high-needs students.

But even districts that do not rely on federal funding for large portions of their annual revenue stand to lose significant funding. Forty-eight districts stand to lose more than $10 million should the 8.2 percent cut become a reality. These large districts include New York City Public Schools, which would lose about $168 million, Los Angeles Unified School District, which would lose $111 million, and Chicago Public Schools, which would lose $100 million.

But it also includes many lesser-known districts like Gwinnett County School District outside of Atlanta, GA, which would lose over $16 million, or Cypress-Fairbanks School Districts outside of Houston, TX, which would lose over $10.5 million. Though these figures represent less than 2 percent of each of these district’s budgets, finding savings to accommodate these cuts will surely be a challenge.

The 8.2 percent cut from the sequester will also have a dramatic impact on districts that serve particularly fragile communities like students with the most challenging special education needs or districts that have recently experienced natural disasters. For example, the Los Angeles County Office of Education, which serves nearly 9,000 students with severe special needs, would lose nearly $37 million, 3.6 percent of its annual revenue. The Recovery School District in New Orleans would lose nearly $12 million, 4.0 percent of its revenue.

Sequestration is a blunt instrument that prevents Congress from targeting spending cuts to the programs that are best equipped to face such cuts. Limiting federal spending may be a worthy goal in this austere time, but the current method stands to hurt the school districts and students that need the extra funding support the most. This is not an argument for increasing federal spending, but rather an argument for ensuring that any decisions to cut such spending are done thoughtfully and with an eye towards equity.

To download these data for every school district in the country, click here.