Verbatim Mac

Title – State waivers school wide programs

School wide programming qualification changes – states can request waivers to spend on school wide programs without 40% requirement

Knight, Center for Education Research and Policy Studies, and DeMatthews , Educational Leadership and Foundations, 2016 

(David and David “Are ∂ school districts allocating resources equitably? ∂ Implications for Title I funding and the Every Student Succeeds Act” CERPS Working Paper 2016∂ -∂ 2∂ . ∂ University of ∂ Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX. http://www.utep.edu/education/cerps/_Files/docs/papers/CERPS_Working_Paper_2016_2.pdf accessed 7-6-17 GDI - TM)

A second change in ESSA relates to the schoolwide provision. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, schools could use Title I funding for schoolwide purposes if at least 40% of students qualified as low-income. Schools receiving Title I funding that did not have more than 40% of students qualify for funding were required to spend the funding specifically on academically struggling students. Schools could target funding by providing those students with, for example, smaller class sizes, after school programs, targeted professional development for their teachers, or some other targeted intervention. ESSA would permit states to apply for waivers that would allow schools to use Title I funding on schoolwide purposes, regardless of whether those schools met the 40% threshold.

In summary, ESSA may lead to two primary changes in the way Title I funding is allocated and regulated. The law could lead to a change in the SNS requirement from equal staff members per pupil between Title I and non-Title I schools to equal spending on teachers between the two school types. States may also receive waivers from the regulation that prohibits Title I schools with fewer than 40% of students in poverty from spending Title I funding on schoolwide programs.

Increased access to waivers may increase title I acceptance from schools, decreasing available resources

Knight, Center for Education Research and Policy Studies, and DeMatthews , Educational Leadership and Foundations, 2016 

(David and David “Are ∂ school districts allocating resources equitably? ∂ Implications for Title I funding and the Every Student Succeeds Act” CERPS Working Paper 2016∂ -∂ 2∂ . ∂ University of ∂ Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX. http://www.utep.edu/education/cerps/_Files/docs/papers/CERPS_Working_Paper_2016_2.pdf accessed 7-6-17 GDI - TM)

Not all schools that districts determine are eligible for Title I provide the program. Of the schools eligible for Targeted Assistance programs, only 62% actually provide the program (and 38% do not provide a Title I program). About 78% of schools eligible for the Schoolwide program actually use the program and 6% choose instead to use the Targeted Assistance program (and the other 16% do not provide a Title I program, see Table 2). Schools eligible for the Schoolwide program are more likely to provide the Targeted Assistance program when they have lower enrollment, lower percent of students of color, and when more schools in the same district also use the Targeted Assistance program instead of the Schoolwide program.7 About 17% of all schools are eligible for the Targeted Assistance program and would therefore be impacted by the waivers that may be available through ESSA. As noted earlier, a potential change in ESSA may allow Targeted Assistance schools to operate Schoolwide programs if their state acquires a special waiver. An open question is whether those schools that are eligible for, but do not use the Targeted Assistance program, would accept Title I funds if given the opportunity to use the Schoolwide program. This change would cause districts’ Title I funding to be spread more thinly across schools.8

Title I Flawed – Supplement no Supplant

U – ESSA gives DOE power to decide SNS standards

DOE rulemaking power on supplement not supplant - current proposals to increase per pupil funding rejected

Malkus, research fellow in education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, 17 (Nat “Ask DeVos about Title I funding” AEI 17-1-17 https://www.aei.org/publication/ask-devos-about-title-i-funding/, 7-3-17, GDI-JIJD)

In today’s confirmation hearing for President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. secretary of education, Betsy DeVos will undoubtedly be grilled about her position on school choice. Given DeVos’ long history of advocating for school choice and Trump’s proposed $20 billion investment in it, her pointed position deserves a full discussion. However, the bulk of the secretary’s responsibilities will center around traditional public schools, and the knotty issues directly impacting those schools should not be lost in the shuffle. DeVos is poised to take the helm at the U.S. Department of Education at a particularly busy time, as the department must figure out how to implement many aspects of the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act before next school year. A key issue DeVos will likely have to decide soon is the act’s supplement-not-supplant rule. That rule is meant to ensure that federal Title I funds intended to help low-income students are added on top of (supplement) local funds and not used to backfill (supplant) inequitable local funding. Last summer, there was an uproar over then-Secretary John King’s apparent intention, in defiance of congressional will, to issue a rule that would have significant disruptive effects on districts across the nation. Leading up to the election, many anticipated that King would issue his controversial regulation. But the Education Department has still not made a ruling, and unless it releases one in the next three days, it will become Betsy DeVos’ problem. Supplement-not-supplant runs up against a thorny equity problem for Title I schools – high-poverty schools that receive supplemental federal funding – which often receive less local funding than other district schools. These funding disparities occur within districts because of three interconnected facts. First, most district spending goes to teachers’ salaries and benefits. Second, districts pay teachers, and send teachers, not dollars, to local schools. Third, Title I schools tend to have less experienced, and therefore lower salaried, teachers. Under this common arrangement, fewer local dollars per students end up in Title I schools, even if all district schools receive the same numbers of teachers per student. The equity issue is largely moot if schools are compared by how many teachers a school receives per student. Comparing schools in dollars spent, which would include these salary differences, results in significant and persistent funding differences between Title I and non-Title I schools. Federal education law has long allowed districts to satisfy its supplement-not-supplant provision by showing similar staffing allocations, purposefully avoiding comparisons in dollar terms and tacitly allowing spending inequities. When Congress debated and passed the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, this issue was a sticking point that went unresolved. Congress left it up to the Education Department to negotiate a new supplement-not-supplant rule so long as it did not prescribe a specific methodology or require equalized spending. Despite congressional guardrails, King proposed a rule that would require districts to spend at least as many dollars per pupil in Title I schools as are spent in non-Title I schools. While the proposed rule sounded reasonable and was well-intended, many groups, including congressional Republicans, governors, teachers’ unions and district leaders, opposed it. Because most school spending is spent on teachers, in practice the rule could prove very disruptive, require forced transfer of teachers to Title I schools, upend teacher compensation systems and collective bargaining agreements or necessitate billions of dollars in new funding. Opponents are breathing ever easier as King nears the end of his term without having issued his proposed rule. 1 However, DeVos will face a choice similar to King’s, between two lousy options. A rule that required equalized spending would be disruptive for hundreds of large districts serving hundreds of thousands of students. One that didn’t would be unlikely to make significant changes to longstanding funding inequities shortchanging hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged kids. The supplement-not-supplant dilemma is reflective of many of the tough calls the secretary of education will have to make. The rule deals with a substantial and complex problem rooted in the structure of public schools – in the way districts are funded, in how teachers are hired and paid, in thousands of collective bargaining agreements, affecting thousands of teachers’ work-life decisions and the prospects of untold numbers of students. On top of that complexity, the secretary has limited influence over how state and local authorities run public schools, leaving her with unenviable choices like doing something that won’t work well or doing nothing at all. DeVos can certainly promote school choice as secretary, but the bulk of her responsibility will remain with traditional public schools. At her confirmation hearing, senators may learn more about how DeVos will approach her work as secretary, both for choice and for public schools, by asking about how she will deal with issues like supplement-not-supplant, where there are few good choices and no easy answers.

DeVos won’t implement SNS rule propsed under Obama

Hart, Administrators at Truth in American Education, 17 (Shane Vander, “Supplement Not Supplant Is Dead”, Truth in American Education, 1-19-17, https://truthinamericaneducation.com/elementary-and-secondary-education-act/supplement-not-supplant-dead/, 7-4-17, GDI-JIJD)

The U.S. Department of Education yesterday killed their draft rule for Title I funding in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) known as “Supplement, Not Supplant.” It’s not an issue that we’ve written a whole lot on here, but it highlighted one way that the Secretary of Education could gut any flexibility members of Congress thought they had when they passed ESSA. If you were not familiar with the rule it basically said that in Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), as recently revised by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), that federal funds must supplement, and may not supplant, state and local funds. Civil rights activists and department bureaucrats were concerned that federal funding would replace state and local funding to the detriment of lower-income schools. “For too long, the students who need the most have gotten the least,” said U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr said in a released statement announcing the proposed rule last Summer. “The inequities in state and local funding that we see between schools within districts are inconsistent not only with the words ‘supplement-not-supplant’ but with the civil rights history of that provision and with the changes Congress made to the law last year. No single measure will erase generations of resource inequities, and there is much more work to do across states and districts to address additional resource inequities, but this is a concrete step forward to help level the playing field and ensure compliance with the law.” Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, during her confirmation hearing on Tuesday also expressed concern with this proposed rule and promised to enforce ESSA in way that “Congress has intended.”

ESSA – SNS changes

ESSA gives states flex to determine SNS compliance – no cost by cost possible

Knight, Center for Education Research and Policy Studies, and DeMatthews , Educational Leadership and Foundations, 2016 

(David and David “Are ∂ school districts allocating resources equitably? ∂ Implications for Title I funding and the Every Student Succeeds Act” CERPS Working Paper 2016∂ -∂ 2∂ . ∂ University of ∂ Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX. http://www.utep.edu/education/cerps/_Files/docs/papers/CERPS_Working_Paper_2016_2.pdf accessed 7-6-17 GDI - TM)

Instead, the DOE has pushed for equalized spending on teachers between Title I and non- Title I schools through the supplement, not supplant (SNS) requirement (Gordon, 2016). Under SNS, federal dollars may not be used for purposes that state law already requires schools to spend money on – federal dollars must supplement, not supplant, state and local dollars.

Determining how districts would fund schools in the absence of Title I is not straightforward. In previous iterations of the federal education law (ESEA, later reauthorized as the No Child Left Behind Act), schools demonstrated compliance with SNS by reporting, on a cost-by-cost basis, what was purchased with Title I funds. Past research has shown that because funds allocated to the core instructional program are difficult to justify as “extra” or supplemental, most schools choose instead to use Title I funding for external programs (Gordon, 2016). The result is that schools create fragmented budgets that allocate Title I funding to ineffective add-on programs or special pull-out programs that remove high-needs students from the mainstream curriculum (Gordon & Reber, 2015).

The SNS regulation is substantially changed under ESSA. Congress now prohibits the requirement that districts provide a cost-by-cost basis of Title I spending to show compliance with SNS. Instead, ESSA allows states and districts to design their own methodology to determine whether the SNS requirement is met. The goal of this change is to remove the burdensome reporting requirements under SNS, while maintaining some degree of accountability. While federal lawmakers left final determination of the general compliance requirements up to the DOE, congress included language prohibiting the DOE from prescribing “the specific methodology a local educational agency uses to allocate state and local funds to each school receiving assistance,” (ESSA, 2015). The DOE has used this limited authority to argue that districts should be required to prove compliance with SNS by showing equal average state and local per-pupil expenditures on teacher salaries between Title I and non-Title I schools. Members of Congress have pushed back on the DOE interpretation of ESSA, arguing that requiring equal expenditures is too stringent (Gordon & Reber, 2015).

SNS – misallocation of Title I funds

Supplement-not-supplant policy undermines proper allocation of Title 1 resources

Gordon, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Economic Studies, Center on Children and Families, Brookings Institution, 2016

(Nora, “What you need to know about ED’s proposed rule on Title I supplement-not-supplant”, Brookings, October 21, 2016, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2016/10/21/what-you-need-to-know-about-eds-proposed-rule-on-title-i-supplement-not-supplant-sns/, accessed 7/8/17, GDI-JG)

That’s because the rule on its own does not solve the problem motivating it—that poor kids don’t have equal access to good schools, not just high-spending ones. Requiring that districts move closer to equal spending across schools, as the proposed rule does, may simply shift high-cost, but less effective resources to students in need.∂ High-poverty schools—many of which are not served by Title I—spend less than richer schools. As Sec. John King told Michel Martin of NPR, differences in teacher experience levels (and therefore, differences in salary) are “a very large driver” of such school spending gaps. The lower average teacher experience levels in high poverty schools stem from their higher rates of teacher turnover, itself a symptom of a bigger problem: research shows that teacher turnover is related to problems with school leadership.∂ Sending more money to schools with high turnover would change funding gaps, but won’t necessarily change school leadership gaps or teacher effectiveness gaps. It’s very likely that these new funds would come in the form of experienced teachers from elsewhere in the district—who, as I’ve explained here, the district is contractually obligated to employ somewhere, but may well be expensive without being good.∂ Even more perversely, the proposed rule would actively work against districts that want transparent and consistent resource allocation systems. Instead, districts would have to do significant parts of their budgeting in an ad hoc manner to make the numbers come out right each and every year.∂ The rule also could prompt districts to change which of their eligible schools participate in Title I: a district’s total allocation of Title I funds is set according to student, not school characteristics, and districts themselves have considerable discretion over how much to concentrate those funds in their poorest schools or to spread them more thinly over more schools. Different districts choose different strategies: according to NCES Public School Universe data, thousands of Title I schools nationally have fewer than a third of their students eligible for free lunch, while at the same time thousands of non-Title I schools have over half their students eligible. The proposed rule wouldn’t change the amount of discretion districts have over Title I participation at the school level, but could mean that compliance concerns, rather than educational ones, dictate the choice.