Education Week - August 28, 2013 - 24

24 EDUCATION WEEK AUGUST 28, 2013 www.edweek.org
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Federal Oversight Flags Waiver-Implementation Issues
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concerns about:
• How states, including Arizona,
Arkansas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin,
will promote significant improvement
in the lowest-performing
“priority” schools that have not
received federal School Improvement
Grants to help do the work.
• How states, including Missouri,
Tennessee, and Utah, are intervening
in schools that are seeing poor
progress among specific subgroups
of at-risk students.
• How states, including Florida,
Louisiana, and South Dakota, are
making sure graduation rates play
a meaningful role in new accountability
systems.
The monitoring reports are important,
federal officials have said,
as states seek to have their waivers
renewed; most of the waivers
expire at the end of the 2013-14
school year. The department is
expected to issue new guidance
about the renewal process in the
coming weeks.
“We never do anything perfectly,
there’s always room for improvement,”
U.S. Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan said in an interview
this month, although he wouldn’t
elaborate on what, if any, changes
federal officials would seek from
states. “It’s a good time to get some
feedback from our states and
where we can be a better partner,
where we can be clearer. The second
time around gives us a chance
to do that.”
Flexibility, Consequences
The Education Department has
awarded waivers to 41 states, the
District of Columbia, and a group
of eight districts in California that
free them from many provisions of
the NCLBAct. Particularly coveted is
the freedom from the requirement
that districts set aside 20 percent
of their Title I funds to provide tutoring
and transportation to higherperforming
schools for students
in persistently low-performing
schools. As of last week, Pennsylvania
was the most recent state to
receive a waiver.
To get this flexibility, states had
to agree to a host of federal conditions,
including implementing differentiated
accountability systems
and linking teacher evaluations to
student growth on tests.
Last week’s high-risk designation
for Kansas, Oregon, and
Washington were the Education
Department’s first enforcement
action on the waivers and
came more than two years after
the first were granted. The three
states face having their waivers
revoked after the 2013-14 school
year if they don’t make progress
on tying teacher-evaluation systems
to student growth.
The enforcement action is part
of an intensive federal effort to
provide oversight to a patchwork
of 40-some new, widely divergent
accountability systems that have
been approved.
To that end, the Education
Department is working its way
through two levels of monitoring
for each state. The first level, which
has wrapped up for early-round
states and is ongoing in states that
won waivers in later rounds, involves
90-minute, in-depth phone
calls with each state, along with
follow-up reports posted on the
department’s website. The department’s
goals are to establish basic
compliance with critical elements
of each state’s waiver plan, particularly
in identifying low-performing
“focus” and “priority” schools and
designing interventions for them.
The next level of monitoring will
be more intense. Federal officials
will eventually conduct site visits
in each state for more in-depth interviews
about waiver implementation.
States with more problem
areas and with larger Title I grants
(usually because of sheer studentenrollment
size) will get priority for
those site visits.
Federal officials have piloted this
on-site monitoring already with
Louisiana and Colorado, which got
their waivers last year.
In Colorado, a two-person federal
review team visited in May and
conducted interviews with state
department officials who work on
assessments, accountability, educator
effectiveness, and programs
that deal with students with disabilities
and English-language
learners, said Megan McDermott,
a spokeswoman for Colorado’s education
department. She said there
was a noticeable shift in what federal
officials were interested in—
not just in compliance with basic
federal rules, but in how well the
state was implementing its plan.
Federal officials sent four re-
viewers to Mississippi. “We experienced
two intense days of
conversation around Mississippi’s
work in schools supporting
quality instruction and increased
student outcomes,” said its education
department spokeswoman,
Patrice Guilfoyle.
She said federal officials were
particularly pleased with Mississippi’s
cohesion around implementing
the waiver’s goals, but
also concerned about district
capacity to implement quality
interventions because of state
funding limitations.
While struggles with teacher
evaluations and school turnarounds
and interventions are
common in a lot of waiver states,
the federal reports from the first
round of monitoring also turned up
problems unique to some states.
Basket of Concerns
Federal officials are monitoring
Arizona, for example, after the
state did not award letter grades
initially as it promised to do in
its accountability system to 29
schools. South Dakota is delaying
interventions for its priority
schools that don’t receive SIG
funds until the 2013-14 school
year, which federal officials also
are watching.
And in Louisiana, federal offi-
cials want to know more about the
effects of giving a small amount of
weight in the school grading system
to the number of students who
FEET TO THE FIRE
The U.S. Department of Education is monitoring states as they implement their No Child Left
Behind Act waivers, focusing initially on basic compliance with key areas, such as identifying
low-performing “focus” and “priority” schools. So far, federal officials have identified challenges
in most states in a range of areas, including:
ARIZONA
“Priority” schools: Federal officials want to make sure
that all “priority” schools in the bottom 5 percent, aside
from those that get federal School Improvement Grants,
are implementing “meaningful interventions” for at least
three years.
LOUISIANA
Graduation rates: Federal officials want more
information on how the state is using GED-attainment
data in its school rating system. Specifically, federal
officials want to ensure that GED attainment “is not
masking low graduation rates and that students are not
being pushed into a GED track.”
MASSACHUSETTS
New or small schools: Federal officials want to monitor
how the state holds accountable small schools, schools
that serve nontested grades, and schools that do not
have a sufficient number of years of data.
MISSOURI
Subgroup accountability: Federal officials want
to ensure the state is appropriately identifying and
intervening in Title I schools that are not among the
bottom 15 percent that, based on “annual measurable
objectives” and other measures, including graduation
rates, and that are not making progress in improving
student achievement and narrowing achievement gaps.
In particular, federal officials will monitor the extent to
which the districts’ school improvement plans developed
and implemented during the 2012–13 school year take
into account the progress of all students, as well as
subgroups, toward the state’s new AMOs.
TENNESSEE
Turnaround schools: The state committed to turning
around a total of 83 schools, including 25 that are not
receiving School Improvement Grants for the work.
Federal officials are monitoring how the state will ensure
those 25 schools will implement either one of the four
SIG models or interventions aligned with the turnaround
principles by the 2014–15 school year.
SOURCES: Education Week; U.S Department of Education
“
We never
do anything
perfectly, there’s
always room for
improvement.
It’s a good time
to get some
feedback from
our states.”
ARNE DUNCAN
U.S. SECRETARY OF EDUCATION
obtain a General Educational Development,
or GED, certificate.
Louisiana Superintendent of
Education John White said that
while he understands the federal
policy of pushing the four-year
route to a traditional high school
diploma, he also wants to encourage
his schools not to ignore a
20-year-old student who is never
going to achieve that. By awarding
just a few points to schools
whose students achieve a GED certificate,
he said, “it gives a school
a reason beyond the moral reason
to focus on kids who are overage
and undercredited.”
For the state, he said, “the chal-
lenge is to create an incentive for
schools to serve those kids at a
time when you’re not rewarding
them either.” To that end, he said
including GEDs in the state’s rating
system so far hasn’t changed
any school’s score and has been
more symbolic in nature. He
doesn’t foresee any problems with
federal officials renewing the
state’s waiver.
Advocates on Alert
As the federal department works
through its own monitoring process,
advocacy groups are closely
watching waivers’ implementation
and the federal renewal process.
The role of graduation rates in
new federally approved state accountability
systems is of particular
concern to many civil rights
and advocacy groups. In March,
the federal department issued
revised guidance to states making
clear that if a school misses
graduation-rate targets for a
particular subgroup of students,
such as racial and ethnic minorities,
it has to implement some
sort of intervention.
While that’s a good first step,
federal officials have to make sure
that it actually happens, said Phillip
Lovell, the vice president of
federal advocacy at the Alliance for
Excellent Education, which works
on high school issues.
“We saw this as a very help-
ful step forward that needs to be
implemented. From our analysis
there were a number of states
that had no or very little subgroup
graduation-rate accountability,”
Mr. Lovell said.
His group is also closely watch-
ing a growing trend in states to
create multiple pathways to a
diploma. “There’s a concern that
lower-performing students could
be either informally or formally
directed toward pathways that are
less rigorous,” he said.
The Education Trust, which
advocates on behalf of at-risk
students, also has concerns about
the attention to subgroups in the
new waivers. While states had to
set new academic-achievement
goals for individual subgroups of
students, missing those targets
doesn’t necessarily trigger any
required interventions as was the
case under the NCLB law.
In many states, those goals are
separate from the state’s school
rating system—a problem that
should be fixed in the waiver renewal
process, said Daria Hall,
the director of K-12 policy development
at the Education Trust.
“We need to go back in and much
more explicitly spell out that if a
school is not consistently making
their goals ... if they are consistently
not meeting their goals for
black students,” she said, “what
is that school going to do to help
those students?”

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