Education Week - April 3, 2013 - 18

EDUCATION WEEK

APRIL 3, 2013

www.edweek.org

GOVERNMENT & POLITICS

POLICY
BRIEF

Cantor Raises Profile on Schooling Issues

N.J. Sets Takeover
Of Camden System

Leadership in House
may add momentum
Education issues—which haven’t
gotten a lot of attention from Congress over the past four years—may
have picked up an unlikely but powerful advocate: U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor.
As the majority leader in the House
of Representatives, the Virginia Republican has a major role in setting
the agenda for the chamber.
Throughout President Barack
Obama’s first term, Mr. Cantor
served as a key counterweight to the
administration’s agenda on a broad
swath of domestic issues, largely
aligning himself with more conservative House Republicans on everything from health care to deficit
reduction.
Lately, however, he’s turned his attention to education, signaling that
it could be more prominent in this
Congress. During the past four years,
most of the action on K-12 has come
from the U.S. Department of Education, not from legislators, who have
been consumed with fiscal issues.
Mr. Cantor has spent the past
couple of months visiting schools in
education redesign hot spots, including a Roman Catholic school in New
Orleans that’s recently benefited
from a voucher program and a charter school in Denver. Such trips are
unusual for a congressional leader.
Top lawmakers typically don’t spend
much time at schools outside their
districts, particularly when no legislation is in play.
The lawmaker said he’s used
these visits to talk to parents and
students and has come to the conclusion that the federal government
should “allow parents to have more

Nathan W. Armes for Education Week

By Alyson Klein

U.S. House Majority
Leader Eric Cantor talks
with 7th grader Ricardo
Gonzalez-Sanchez during
a tour of the Strive
Preparatory School in
Denver. Elmer GarciaChavez is his seatmate.
Rep. Cantor has made
education a centerpiece
at several recent
appearances.

of a voice in accessing [high quality]
education,” particularly for children
who “would otherwise be trapped in
failing schools.”
Rep. Cantor didn’t explicitly say
that he’d like to create vouchers
using Title I funds for disadvantaged
children or special education money.
But he certainly hinted at it, saying
he wants to see “if there’s some way
that we could reallocate federal dollars to follow” children, particularly
parents of “vulnerable populations”
and “special-needs parents.”

Visits and Speeches
Rep. Cantor is not a complete
newcomer to the K-12 arena—he
introduced a school choice bill early
in his dozen-year tenure on Capitol

Hill, for example. But he hasn’t been
seen as a big force on education during his time in Congress, in contrast
to Speaker of the House John A.
Boehner, R-Ohio, who was an architect of the No Child Left Behind Act
in 2001, when he chaired the House
education panel, and is a longtime
champion of the DC Opportunity
Scholarship program. Mr. Cantor
sees education as an issue the two
leaders can collaborate on, said Rory
Cooper, a spokesman for the majority leader.
But it’s unclear whether Mr.
Cantor views the Obama administration—which has reshaped the
federal role in K-12 policy through
competitive grants and by offering
states leeway on the No Child Left

The U.S. Department of Education and a band of outside peer reviewers are now weighing the details of a precedent-setting waiver
application from nine districts in
California that want flexibility
under the No Child Left Behind
Act even though their state’s bid
for a waiver was unsuccessful.
If approved, it would be the first
time the federal department has
granted such sweeping flexibility
to individual districts.
Until now, states have been the
only recipients of the broad nclb
waivers first announced by President Barack Obama in 2011—and
only if they agreed to the strings
attached, such as implementing teacher-evaluation systems
linked to student test scores. In
exchange, states get out from

under key requirements of the
law, such as that schools
bring all students to proficiency
in reading and math by the end of
the 2013-14 school year.
The waiver application for the
group of districts known as core,
for California Office to Reform Education, was buoyed—somewhat—
late last month by a letter of tepid
support from California state education officials.
nclb

Measured ‘Enthusiasm’
The letter to federal education
officials, signed by state schools
Superintendent Tom Torlakson
and state school board President
Michael W. Kirst, indicated that
members of the California board of
education have “expressed enthusiasm” for what the letter called an
“innovative” waiver.

But Mr. Torlakson and Mr. Kirst
also outlined their reservations
about how such a waiver would
work, including the role of the state
in monitoring the nine districts,
whether other districts would be
able to join in, and the process used
by federal officials to approve the
request.
Armed with the state’s official
input, the federal Education Department last week was in the
process of turning over the application to a team of six peer reviewers,
as the department has done with
state waiver applications, to help
sort those issues out.
Daren Briscoe, a spokesman
for the department, said the peer
reviewers would be applying the
same principles they did in judging
the state waivers. For instance, districts must implement college- and
career-readiness standards and dif-

PAGE 21 >

Calif. Districts’ Waiver Bid Heads to Review Phase
By Michele McNeil

The beleaguered 13,700student Camden, N.J., school
district will be put under state
control, becoming the fourth
district in New Jersey to be
taken over by the state and the
first by Gov. Chris Christie.
The state will have both
academic and financial control
of the district, whose schools
are some of the lowestperforming in the Garden
State: The academic records
of 90 percent of Camden’s
schools place them in the
bottom 5 percent of schools
statewide.
The legislature passed a
law in 1988 permitting state
takeovers of school systems
deemed unable to provide
a “thorough and efficient”
education. The state will be
responsible for selecting a new
superintendent and leadership
team for the district, and the
Camden school board will be
relegated to an advisory role.
Camden had been given
eight months to turn around
last year, and those eight
months expired this month.
The state government
is already a presence in
the district: A state-run
“regional achievement center”
oversees some particularly
low-performing schools, and
a monitor oversees some
spending decisions.
Christopher Cerf, the state
commissioner of education,
said that there was no plan to
dismantle the current district
board, as happened in other
state takeovers in New Jersey.

ferentiated accountability.
But, he said, the department
is also giving those peer reviewers additional guidance on how to
judge a request that looks a lot different from a state application. He
declined to give details.
The department aims to have an
answer for the core districts by the
end of this school year.

Potential Pilot
Federal officials have said they
are open to district-level flexibility
only in states that do not have a
state-level nclb waiver. So far, 34
states plus the District of Columbia have earned waivers. A dozen
more are in the pipeline, including
Pennsylvania and Texas.
California and Iowa had their
applications rejected over their
PAGE 21 >

Gov. Christie, a Republican,
is up for re-election in the fall.
And while some Democrats
in the legislature and Dana
Redd, the mayor of Camden,
supported the move, other
prominent players, including
the New Jersey Education
Association, say that the
state’s record on takeovers
is questionable, and that
Gov. Christie has thrown his
support to charter schools
rather than appropriately
funding the district’s schools.
The Jersey City system was
taken over in 1989 because of
poor academic performance
and remained under state
control for more than a decade.
Paterson, which was taken
over in 1991, and Newark,
taken over in 1994, still have
state-appointed boards, and
academic performance in those
districts remains low.
The local school board in
Newark initiated a lawsuit
in 2011 aimed at regaining
autonomy from the state.
—JACLYN ZUBRZYCKI

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Education Week - April 3, 2013

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