Verbatim Mac

Federalism

DOE refusal of state plans smacks of fed overreach

Petrilli, Thomas B. Fordham Institute president, 17 (Michael J., "Betsy DeVos's team stumbles on ESSA", Thomas B. Fordman Institute, 6-15-17, https://edexcellence.net/articles/betsy-devoss-team-stumbles-on-essa, 7-7-17, GDI-EC)

Do the feds even have the authority to second-guess states on their goals? All ESSA says is that states shall establish ambitious State-designed long-term goals. That sort of vague statement is precisely the kind of language that usually gets embellished by regulations, which in this case might add clarity as to what it would take for states to meet the ambitious goals standard. (For example, states might be asked to explain how they came up with their goals. Were they informed by an analysis of the data?) But with the encouragement and signature of the President, Congress famously repealed the Obama Administration’s ESSA regs, and the Department hasn’t had the time or inclination to replace them. Federal agencies aren’t allowed to use policy letters like this one to shortcut the lengthy but necessary notice-and-comment process required for formal rulemaking.

Perhaps Secretary DeVos’s lawyers would argue otherwise—that she and her team have the authority to decide whether a state’s goals are ambitious enough. But this sure smacks of the executive overreach, and trampling of state decision-making, that many of us complained about when Arne Duncan was practicing it.

CP Answers

States CP Answers

Solvency Deficit—Federal Action Key—Accountability

Federal action key to solve funding disparities—need for accountability proves

Sargrad, Managing Director, K-12 Education Policy, Center for American Progress, 2016

(Scott, “The Feds Can Fix School Funding”, U.S. News, May 6, 2016, https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-05-06/the-federal-government-should-do-more-to-close-school-funding-gaps, accesesd 7/6/17, GDI-JG)

On the second question, of the federal government's role in addressing school funding disparities, there are strong opinions on both sides. While some argue that the Department of Education should leave it to states and districts to address, others have urged the department to take on this issue and make sure that states and districts provide equitable funding to their low-income schools.∂ The federal government has always played the role of a backstop to protect the most disadvantaged students in the face of longstanding inequities. Why should this issue be any different? The department is simply interpreting a provision of the law that is designed to ensure that federal dollars are truly supplemental, not just filling state and local funding gaps. If the department doesn't insist that states and local school districts spend at least as much on their most needy students, it's far too easy for districts to use the federal funding to simply make up their shortfalls, rather than providing the additional resources that these schools and students need.∂ Of course, simply mandating something isn't always the best way to spur action or get results. Ultimately, more states and districts should move towards broader reforms of their school finance systems so that schools get their funding based on the actual students they serve, with more money going to schools with disadvantaged students. Fortunately, the new education law includes a new pilot program that will provide districts with new incentives to adopt these weighted student funding systems and break down some of the barriers to putting them in place. The department should do all it can to promote this program and provide maximum flexibility to districts that implement these more equitable systems.∂ With a new federal law, our country has the chance to rethink its approach to supporting the most struggling schools and students. The Department of Education should seize this opportunity to make sure that these schools and students get the resources they need to succeed.

State based democratic experimentalism allows for laissez-faire spending and harms local education leaders without motivation or capacity

Gross, Research Director, the Center on Reinventing Public Education, University of Washington Bothell, and Hill, Research Professor of Public Affairs, University of Washington Bothell and Founder, the Center on Reinventing Public Education, 2016

(Betheny and Paul T., “The State Role in K--12 Education: From Issuing Mandates to Experimentation”, Harvard Law & Policy Review, Summer, 2016, accessed via LexisNexis, accessed 7/14/17, GDI-JG)

Deregulation, a key feature of a democratic experimentalism regime, comes with risks. The new federal education law, ESSA, eliminates requirements that states take specific actions on behalf of children in low-performing schools. This opens up the possibility that some or all states will adopt a laissez-faire approach toward local schools and dis-tricts. Given that low-performing schools are most likely to serve low-income and disadvantaged students, deregulation puts those students at risk. Compared to a rule-based system, which requires states do something to avoid charges of non-compliance and loss of federal subsidies, deregulation relies heavily on state-and local-level motivation and capaci-ty. Though the new federal policy is risky in these ways, democratic experimentalism neither causes nor exacerbates these hazards. Experimentalism ensures that states share their experiences and measure results.∂ Critics of democratic experimentalism contend that the certainty of mandates protects policies that might be vul-nerable to competing political interests. David Super, for example, argues that under a decentralized anti-poverty policy the nation failed to reach consensus on goals, left under-resourced government agencies in control of enforcement, and created lengthy negotiations and debates on policy that consumed the resources of anti-poverty advocates. n123 While we agree with Super's argument, it is not clear that a mandate-based regime would have been more effective without a very different political environment and a great deal more money. Nor is it likely that a mandate-based regime would have allowed the diversity of practice that could lead to innovation and long-term improvement. Topdown rights enforce-ment can reallocate money and access, but it cannot mandate the discovery of a solution to a heretofore unsolved prob-lem.∂ Local education leaders who lack capacity or motivation will also not make progress. States will differ in whether they have the leadership, intellectual capacity, and political support necessary to move intransigent localities. Such real-ities of a decentralized system are not caused by democratic experimentalism, which creates some transparency and pres-sure for improvement. Low-performing localities that refuse to experiment will be identifiable through the outcome data that states are still required to gather. But identifying such jurisdictions and overcoming high-inertia organizations takes time, and in the meantime, improvements in schooling for low-income and disadvantaged students might not happen.

Perm solvency?

Compliance with Title I relies on SEAs – means that the plan can increase and the states can help enforce

Gordon, Associate Professor, Georgetown University, McCourt School of Public Policy, and Reber, Associate Professor, University of California, Los Angeles, Luskin School of Public Affairs, 2015

(Nora and Sarah, “The Quest for a Targeted and Effective Title I ESEA: Challenges in Designing and Implementing Fiscal Compliance Rules”, The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Volume 1 Issue 3, December 2015, http://www.rsfjournal.org/doi/full/10.7758/RSF.2015.1.3.07, accessed 7/8/17, GDI-JG)

Early in the program's history, and in response to highly publicized and egregious misuses of funds, Title I's fiscal rules transformed it from something close to general aid into a much more restricted and closely monitored source of categorical aid for the disadvantaged. Observers soon noted that these restrictions hindered the ability of schools to best use their grants, and new rules soon emerged attempting to preserve the targeting of aid while simultaneously seeking to promote effective uses of funds by allowing some flexibility in the use of funds. That tension is the subject of this article: how successful are the fiscal rules governing Title I today and especially its schoolwide program option—both on paper and as perceived by program administrators—at striking this balance? We argue that many programs are schoolwide in name only, and more needs to be done to address these long-standing but low-profile issues.^†

In this article, we argue that though progress toward more effective use of Title I funds has been made, the problem is far from resolved. Our argument draws on three main categories of evidence: the policy history up to and including the fiscal rules in place today; interviews with school district Title I administrators, which provide information not only on how they spend their funds but also on how they understand the fiscal rules; and analysis of how Title I funds are spent in two large, highly disadvantaged districts.

In sum, we find that in many cases perceptions of the fiscal rules have not caught up with the legal reality for schools operating schoolwide programs. Many of these schools appear to still use Title I funds to pay for things that appear more extra or supplemental, as opposed to core, though it is difficult to assess just how integrated Title I expenditures are with the rest of a school's functioning from available data sources. This may be in part due to the fact that total Title I funding in many schools is not enough to finance substantial components of the core instructional program on its own, but we also find evidence of misperceptions about what is allowed on the part of administrators. The interviews also revealed that district Title I administrators rely on state administrators, more than federal documents or actors, for information about permissible uses of funds. Thus, any federal or other efforts to provide more transparent guidance on Title I rules should pay particular attention to the role of state education agencies in disseminating such information and to the variation in capacity across state education agencies.

Perms solves teacher salary differential

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)

As noted earlier, because most districts allocate funding to schools based on student- staffing ratios and because teacher salaries are typically based on experience and standardized within school districts, the distribution of teacher experience across schools within districts has direct implications for how funding is distributed. A large body of research shows teacher experience, aptitude, and qualifications are all inequitably distributed across schools (Darling- Hammond, 2000; 2004; Clotfelter et al., 2006; Loeb et al., 2010; Peske & Haycock, 2006). More recent studies show that teacher effectiveness – as measured by value-added scores, which estimate teachers’ contribution to student achievement gains on test scores – is also distributed inequitably (e.g., Glazerman & Max, 2011; Isenberg et al., 2013; Sass, Hannaway, Xu, Figlio & Feng, 2010). Most of these studies use detailed administrative data from one or several districts. A small number of studies examine teacher experience / quality gaps in districts across an entire state (Clotfelter, Ladd, Vigdor & Wheeler, 2006; Goldhaber et al., 2015), but no recent studies examine teacher experience gaps in all states nationally.

Several factors contribute to the inequitable distribution of teacher experience within school districts (Boyd, Lankford, Loeb & Wyckoff, 2005; Ladd, 2011; Krieg, Theobald & Goldhaber, 2015; Scafidi, Sjoquist & Stinebrickner, 2007). Both the initial match of educators to schools and lower retention rates in high-need schools contribute to the teacher experience gap. Less supportive school administration, greater accountability pressure, and unprofessional work environments are all associated with higher teacher attrition within school districts (Boyd et al., 2011; Clotfelter, Ladd, Vigdor & Dias, 2004; Johnson, Kraft & Papay, 2012; Hanushek, Kain & Rivkin, 2004). Some researchers contend that restrictive teacher contracts contribute to inequitable access to experienced teachers (Anzia & Moe, 2014; Goldhaber et al., 2015), although others find no such evidence (e.g., Cohen-Vogel et al., 2013). Despite the many studies examining teacher attrition and inequitable distributions of teacher experience within school districts, no studies systematically assess district characteristics associated with larger teacher experience gaps.

A federal program to reduce district-level teacher quality gaps requires states education agencies to measure teacher quality gaps and identify potential root causes (State Plans to Ensure Equitable Access to Excellent Educators, DOE, 2015). The initiative lists primarily school-level issues as potential root causes of teacher quality gaps such as poor teacher recruitment strategies, school working conditions, and school leadership, but does not consider differences in state funding and teacher salary levels across districts (see Baker and Weber, 2016 for further discussion). Because state legislatures govern the district finance system, states education agencies are limited in their ability to alter teacher salaries or district funding levels.

States bad

Reliance on states and local intermediaries part of the problem with Title I – increase that relationship worsens outcomes

Moffitt, Mary Tefft and John Hazen White Senior Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Brown University, 2016

(Susan L., “The State of Educational Improvement: The Legacy of ESEA Title I”, History of Education Quarterly, May 2016, Vol. 56, No. 2, accessed 7/3/17, GDI-JG)

Recall that the original ESEA sought to “provide financial assis- tance . . . to local educational agencies serving areas with concentra- tions of children from low-income families to expand and improve their educational programs.”4 Considered relative to its original goal of “pro- viding financial assistance,” Title I delivered a steady funding stream allocated according to its formula grant. Title I contributed to state building, in part, by helping federal and state governments develop fis- cal accountability capacity to target those funds in the 1970s and 1980s and to ensure that Local Education Agencies met other fiscal account- ability criteria. Yet despite the development of fiscal accountability mechanisms such as “supplement not supplant” and “comparability and maintenance of effort,” Title I continued to layer on interstate, in- trastate, and intradistrict fiscal inequalities. Title I was a modest fiscal intervention relative to the scope of American inequality, in part, be- cause it spread its funds across all Congressional districts and 90 percent of school districts and did so building on unequal fiscal foundations.5 Considered relative to the goal to “expand and improve educational programs,” Title I purchased, on average, about thirty minutes of addi- tional instruction several days per week in reading or math for children who received Title I services during the late 1970s and 1980s. It did so relying largely on teachers’ extant practice, supplemented with help from teachers’ aides. On average, students receiving services displayed modest gains in reading and math, commensurate with Title I’s modest intervention in schools.6∂ However, Title I’s original mission to deliver financial resources, track how the money was spent, and provide marginal educational ser- vices came to seem too modest. As expressed in the No Child Left Behind Act, Title I became charged with twelve paragraphs of goals, not just one paragraph as in the 1965 ESEA. Among these include “en- suring that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education” and “closing the achievement gap.”7 Considered relative to these goals, Title I’s legacy is even more mixed, especially in terms of instructional improvement and in terms of its contributions to state building.∂ Herein lies the paradox of Title I’s form of state building. Rely- ing on intermediaries—state governments, professions, and nonstate service providers—helped the original Title I get off the ground and contributed to its modest intervention. However, this reliance has been problematic for Title I’s goal of achieving its more ambitious mission related to instructional improvement. In relying on subnational and nonstate intermediaries, Title I has done much less to refashion core aspects of teaching and learning, which has limited its ability to achieve its more recent goal of eliminating the achievement gap.

Fed solves – standardization

Federal educational standardization of services can solve educational inequality and racial disparities—empirics prove

Reed, Associate Professor and Director of the Program in Education, Inquiry, and Justice at Georgetown University, 2016

(Douglas S., “ESEA at Fifty: Education as State-Building”, History of Education Quarterly, May 2016, Vol. 56, No. 2, accessed 7/3/17, GDI-JG)

Desmond King and Marc Stears contend that the defining charac- teristic of the American state-building experience is the federal govern- ment’s efforts to standardize policy.6 For all the rational and Weberian reasons that states and state builders have, standardization offers many advantages: greater efficiency, greater ability to penetrate into social structures, and greater ability to pursue national, rather than particu- larized and local, policy goals. So whether it is uniform weights and measures, the gauges of railroad tracks, the voting age, or the treatment of racial minorities by public officials, standardization (and its near cousin, equalization) affords national state officials many advantages and typically augments their power.∂ In public education, we see this not only in the recent debate over educational standards but in the older efforts to ensure that different groups of students had access to roughly equal educational experiences. The processes of breaking down Jim Crow schooling in the South and promoting greater racial integration in the North were a form of stan- dardization that attacked the local patterns of distributing education un- equally by race. ESEA played a major role in that effort by using both fi- nancial carrots and sticks to promote greater racial equality in education. In fact, as Gerald Rosenberg has shown, Congressional actions under ESEA achieved far more racial standardization than judicial efforts be- gun by Brown v. Board of Education and a nearly twenty-year train of court decisions that culminated in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg in 1971.7∂ Similarly, Congress began in the early 1970s to force school dis- tricts to educate special-needs students, at a time when many districts were only just beginning to recognize the needs of these students. Many states provided limited or no services to deaf or blind students in lo- cal districts but, instead, segregated them from the rest of the student population and often refused to provide any schooling for children with Down syndrome or other cognitive impairments.

Ks

Race Ks

AT: Reforms fail

Reforms in education policy can redress segregation and unequal quality of school

Reardon, Stanford University Graduate School of Education professor, et al, 17 (Sean F., Demetra, Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis research associate, Ken, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia with expertise in Educational Theory, Educational Policy, Econometrics, "The Geography of Racial/Ethnic Test Score Gaps", January 2017, http://cepa.stanford.edu/wp16-10, 7-8-17, GDI-EC)

The reason that the influence of out-of-school family socioeconomic disparities cannot be cleanly distinguished from the role of schooling policies and practices in producing achievement gaps is that school segregation is shaped by both factors (as well as by other forces, including housing policy, housing discrimination and preferences, and private school enrollment patterns). Moreover, the extent to which school segregation is linked to between-school racial disparities is dependent on educational policies and practices. If education policy were successful at achieving the “separate but equal” standard articulated in Plessy v. Ferguson, school segregation would not be linked to between-school differences in the quality of educational experiences. While there is no evidence that this has ever been, or is likely to be, achieved, education policy may nonetheless moderate the relationship between segregation and unequal school 9 quality. Policies that provide extra resources to schools serving large proportions of poor and minority students, for example, may weaken the link between school racial and socioeconomic composition and school quality. The effect of such policies is signified by the dashed line in Figure 1.