National Conference of State Legislatures Pushes Back Against Federal Top-Down "Education Reform"

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun Feb 07, 2010 at 12:45

The report was produced by a 15-member task force of state legislators, with co-chairs from both parties, along with a co-chair representing legislative staff.  The report overview began:

In recent years, driven by members of Congress and presidents from both parties, federal involvement in the day-to-day operations of the K-12 system has radically increased and is "upside-down," overemphasizing compliance with federal process requirements and underemphasizing results-specifically improving the academic achievement of all students, especially poor and minority students. Student achievement is improving marginally on the same trajectory as it has for the past decade, but the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students persists. Clearly neither federal top-down mandates nor categorical and competitive grant resources have significantly affected student achievement.

The commonalities between Bush and Obama's approach to education "reform" are characteristic of the Versailles consensus between conservatives and neoliberals in opposition to "the left" and in defiance of both objective reality, and broad political sentiment in America as a whole.  The NCSL report is a bracing reminder that there are sane alternatives that offer real solutions--and that have bottom-up bipartisan support in sharp contrast to sort of elite bipartisanship so prized by Obama, but so barren of actual results.

Specific recommendations of the report include:

• Concentrate available federal funding on those populations most at-risk, using a research-based formula that emphasizes the neediest students instead of trying to leverage system-wide reforms with the 7 percent federal contribution.
• Funding IDEA [the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] at promised levels would immediately free $16 billion annually that, because of federal maintenance of effort requirements, would be redirected to reform and innovation at the state and local levels.
• Make permanent changes to the tax credit provisions of the bonding laws that apply to school construction.  This action also would free tens of billions of dollars in state and local resources that would otherwise be spent on debt-service for school bonds.
• Revitalize the federal focus on research and reporting on what works and why without picking or mandating how and when "winning strategies" should be required by law or "encouraged" by withholding additional federal resources.
• Use any remaining funding to reward and encourage true innovation-not conformity with others or compliance with a checklist of reforms, but progress toward performance gains.

I participated in a press conference call the day the report was released, and asked a question specifically about the contradiction between the need for broad, large-scale aid to fill state and local budget gaps and the highly-competitve, narrowly targeted Race To The Top program.  Extended quotes and additional comments on the flip.

David Shreve starts out by acknowledging the success of federal involvement in the past:

What we found was that the Federal government has played a pretty important role in K-12 education, but that was the initial stages of federal involvement, 30 and 35 years ago, when the federal government was dealing with some pretty egregious examples of exclusion and discrimiation against  disadvantaged kids and disabled kids.  We found that the way the federal government dealt with those policies and those problems was to deal with them through a process and compliance action, because we had process and compliance issues that were similar to civil rights issues, and access and equity issues.

But what worked before is not appropriate to the problems being faced today:

We acknowledge that the federal government is relatively good at that, but now what we're seeing is that the federal government is applying the old weapons and the old tactics to new problems, and old processes and strategies of compliance to new problems of student achievement and differential achievement between advantaged and disadvantaged students. And one of the main points of the taskforce report is that the federal government is not very good and its proven over the last 12 or 14 years as not being good about dealing with student achievement and fundamental school reform issues, primarily because they use a top-down cookie-cutter approach that again is very focused on process, and ignores outcomes.

He then turns specifically to the problems with Obama's Race To The Top:

As I said, the feds are pretty good at process, but they're not very good at results.  A good example of the process is the Race To The Top fund and activities, where the department has identified four elements of school reform, that they believe are essential to provide a base for fundamental school reform, and three of those four  items that are included for the eligibility requirements for Race To The Top money have little or nothing to do with student achievement.  The only one of the four that had anything to do with student achievement is highly effective teachers, the other three have a tenuous at best relation to what's going on in student achievement.

And contrasts that with a results model:

We think that we need to get away from a process model and get a focus on a results model.  A results model would be [that] instead of saying what you needed to be successful in reforming, that you focus on the results, and say we want you to drop your drop-out rate by two percent a year, or we want you to cut into the achievement gap by [inaudible] a year rather than saying that you have to implement these systems, etc. and that that will somehow or other inexorably lead to  school reform and better school performance.  

I think we would say that No Child Left Behind was the pinnacle of the one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter approach, and took pieces of standards-based reform efforts-in other words, standards, testing, assessments and punishments that were working in one or two or a half-dozen states, and apply them to 50 states with results that were relatively monolithic across the states, in that they disrupted standards-based reform, because they had to [be] coopted and corrupted in order to make it fit the 50 states [model].

What we're suggesting is that there's a better way.  That the federal government needs to take a look at what they're doing, what they're good at, and perhaps take a step back in order to accomplish things they want to accomplish, but certainly to focus on the outcome orientation vs. the process orientation.

Turning to specifics--albeit broadly stated in terms of national policies--he talks about NCSL's recommendations:

Our conclusions, what I just spoke about, our recommendations have to do with asking the federal government to concentrate its funding on the most at risk youth, using research-based formulas, instead of congressional-based formulas that are often perverted by the political process. We believe that the federal government should fund IDEA [the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] at the promised levels. The current gap between what's promised at 40% and what's been provided over the past 30-some years is in the tune of some $260 billion shortfall in the federal commitment to disabled youth in the education system.

We also believe that there's a better way for the federal government to support schools without being involved intimately in the day-to-day activities. One of the things the federal government could certainly do is to deal with the bonding issues, the federal bonding laws that are represented in the Qualified Zone Academy Bond Program, which essential substitutes a fedreal tax credits for interest payments, and allows school districts-which almost always fund their capital improvements through bonding issues-to issue bonds that have no interest payments. We think this is a good way for the federal government to be involved in supporting the infrastructure, without getting involved in the day-to-day, or even hour-to-hour activities in the school district.

We also believe that the federal focus on research and reporting on what works should be reemphasized, and that the feds should do this without being partisan about it, and without picking or mandating how and when winning strategies should be required or applied to the states.  If they could just provide us with the information we'd be more than willing to pick up the ball and run with it.

And finally, we have a recommendation that remaining funding could be used to reward and encourage innovation that's true innovation, as long as that was not in terms of conformity with other states, or compliance with some kind of checklist, but focused on progress toward some kind of performance gains, instead. Again, results over process.

When the presentation was over, I asked the following question:

My concern covering these issues here from California is that the Race To The Top money is sort of being used to try and mandate state level policy changes, and at the same time, we're experiencing an extreme budget cuts due to underfunding of state governments through the stabilization fund vs. what the need was. Does that contradiction between those two types of policy approaches--do you have anything to say about that?

Robert Strange responded first:

I think the important thing to consider when you're thinking about Race To The Top is  Race To The Top is part of the economic stimulus package for states that was designed to provide fiscal relief.  And when you're holding that carrot in this economic situation, it begins to look a lot more like a stick,with the way the state budgets are.  States are scrapping to get as much money as they can to fill their commitments to public education, and when you're taking federal stimulus dollars and only giving them out to a few states based on a checklist of reforms, that aren't really proven to increase student achievement, you're really narrowing the impact of those federal stimulus dollars. And you're picking winners and losers, and our position would be that given the severity of the recession, it's unfair to treat things in that manner with those dollars.

And let me add-this is David Shreve again-let me add, there was a lot of talk that stimulus dollars were going to do two things: stimulus dollars were going to prop up state education systems, keep them afloat, keep their heads above water.  And then there was also a lot of talk about all the reforms that were going to be instituted as a result of the stimulus money.  And to those people who believe that reforms ... I just say that if you're treading water, and the education system is treading water right now, it's really hard to learn a new stroke.  And that's exactly what's happening with our systems of education.  They're all treading water now, and as a reuslt of the federal stimulus, we have to give some credit to the federal government for allowing us to tread water, keeping our heads above water. I think it's quite a reach to ask that, again, when you're treading water that you're also learning a new stroke. It just doesn't happen.  So, we're not seeing reforms as a result of stimulus money and we're not likely to see that, again because of the fiscal pressure on the entire system.

Robert Strange then spoke up:

Some of the priorities of Race To The Top also go counter to the best allocating of resources.  If you look at Texas, from their internal study, if they were to adopt a common core standard, an element of the Race To The Top application, it would cost them about $3 billion. And the maximum award they could receive under Race To The Top is $750milion.  So for them, it doesn't really add up.

Another example is in small rural states that traditionally have not had experience with charter school laws, because they have many towns and counties where there's only one school, and if another charter school pops up next door, especially in this economic climate, it's really just spreading thin resources already [even] thinner.

So, some of the priorities in Race To The Top really don't make sense for a lot of the states.  And our position really is that the states are the ones to make the best decisions as to how to address these reform goals, and that whichever reforms they chose to make, whether it's increasing the effectiveness of teachers or expanding data systems, improving their standards and assessments, that those decisions are really best made at the state level, and the focus should be on the outcomes, and not the way the state gets those outcomes.

David Shreve then interjected:

In an ideal world what the federal government would be saying is you don't have to do this, this and this, which is what they typically say-you have to implement this standards-based reform, assessments, punishments, data systems, teacher evaluation systems, whatever they happen to be pushing, just to get another checklist.  What they should be pushing is to encourage states to lower dropout rates by a certain percentage, or decrease the achievement gains between advantaged and disadvantaged students, and focus on those outcoems, rather [than] on processes that may or may not led to the same outcome.

And finally, Robert Strange concluded:

Another example of this is the state of Maryland, which is always held up as one of the models for other states in terms of educational reform efforts.  And traditionally, they have chosen  not to include a large  number of charter schools in their mix of reforms, but they're cited as one of the states for other states to follow as an example, and under Race To The Top,  they're punished for that decision to not promote and increase [charter schools] in their charter school laws.  But, really, you know, what's the difference?.  If they're improving student achievement, and they're the leader in the nation, why does it matter how they chose to get there?

The example of Maryland is probably the most telling of all.  They're producing the best results, but they're doing it the "wrong" way (even though the right way has yet to show any reliably reproduceable results), and so they're being penalized for it.

The conservative/neoliberal consensus in action!