NCLB: Act II

Can the nation meet NCLB's goal of universal proficiency? Yes, says Deputy Secretary of Education Raymond J. Simon. No, say Michael Rebell and Jessica Wolff of the Campaign for Educational Equity.

In a speech this week to the British Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce, Simon said that he's visited schools that already have achieved 100 percent proficiency.

"These schools believe that their students can achieve to high standards. These standards, and the expected behavior to reach them, are clearly communicated to the students and their parents. Highly qualified, effective teachers use data to guide instruction daily and they work with an outstanding school-level administrator who has knowledge and authority to effect change, reward innovation and enforce high expectations," Simon said.

While some schools are having such success, it is unreasonable to expect it in every school, according to Rebell and Wolff, whose project based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

"In place of the impossible goal of 100 percent proficiency, Congress should establish as its mandatory goal for 2014 the more achievable aim of providing meaningful educational opportunity for all children by that time," Rebell and Wolff write in their new book, Moving Every Child Ahead: From NCLB Hype to Meaningful Educational Opportunity.

P.S. I can only imagine how confused Simon's British audience must have been. Why would the United States have 50 sets of standards and 50 definitions of proficiency, they must have thought?

P.P.S. Rebell will give a lecture based on his new book at Teachers College on March 5. After the lecture, eduwonkette suggests you pass on dessert.

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 6:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Regular readers may have noticed that I haven't reported anything about the House's progress on an NCLB bill. That's because there's not much to report, according to Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., the senior Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee.

Rep. McKeon, at right, hasn't had a substantive conversation about NCLB with Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the committee's chairman, since October.

"We're in a climate where it doesn't look very favorable to get the reauthorization done," McKeon told the Education Industry Association at a breakfast this morning in Washington.

The prospects don't look much better in the Senate, he added. With the top Democratic presidential candidates on the Senate's education committee, it's unlikely Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., the committee's chairman, will be able to generate consensus around a bill. Because both Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., have been critical of the bill and are still fighting over the nomination, neither would endorse anything less than a total overhaul.

"I don't see how Sen. Kennedy introduces a bill with that situation over there," McKeon told the EIA members, who mostly represent companies that provide tutoring under NCLB.

Even so, Democratic and Republican aides on the Senate committee are working long hours to write a bill that could be marked up in March. Stay tuned.

P.S. EdWeek blogger Marc Dean Millot is blogging about the EIA meeting over at edbizzbuzz. His first entry explains why tutoring companies need to expand their lobbying efforts to address the future of accountability.

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings might be best known for her assertion that NCLB is 99.9 percent pure. (That, and her collection of eyeglasses.) She later backtracked, saying she meant the goals and structure of the law are close to perfect, even if some of its details need fixing.

Last week in Kansas, Spellings acknowledged that the requirement that states identify "persistently dangerous schools" isn't working. State officials have been reluctant to label schools as such, she said. The secretary's position lines up with a Department of Education advisory group and the views of Democrats who have tried to redefine the program, I point out in the Federal File in the current issue of Education Week.

Other NCLB stories in the Feb. 27, 2008, issue of the newspaper:
Democrats' K-12 Views Differ, Subtly (see also this blog item)
Analysis Finds Time Stolen From Other Subjects for Math, Reading, based on the Center on Education Policy report mentioned in this blog item
Researchers Propose NAEP Look Beyond Academic Measures

P.S. In the Commentary section, "Troublemaker" Checker Finn writes about the lessons he's learned after years in the education policy trenches. (He's promoting his new book; check out the good parts here). Near the end, he warns: "Don't read too much into test scores," and offers anecdotes from his children's lives explaining why. An interesting statement from someone who's associated with the idea of national testing.

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The debate over whether NCLB has narrowed schools' curricula has a new player—a group called Common Core.

"Everyone’s children deserve to receive a comprehensive, content-rich education in the liberal arts and sciences," Lynne Munson, the group's executive director, writes in the introduction of a report released by the group today. "Of course they must be able to read and compute. But they must also possess real knowledge about important things, knowledge of civics, biology, geography, art history, languages—the full range of subjects that comprise a complete education."

Among the group's trustees are Antonia Cortese, an executive vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Diane Ravitch, a noted author and half of the dynamic duo on Education Week's Bridging Differences blog.

See this USA Today story presenting what Common Core found when it asked 17-year-olds some basic historical questions. Take the quiz yourself.

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As I noted earlier, several of the National Education Association's allies don't like the union's legal position in its suit against Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. Michael Rebell, a successful school finance litigator, suggested in his blog that states could use the union's unfunded mandate claims as reasons to cut spending.

Now, a coalition of civil rights groups is trying to make a similar argument to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, which is considering the federal government's appeal in Pontiac v. Spellings.

"The panel opinion invites states that are struggling with their budgets to try to escape the conditions to which they agreed when they accepted federal funding by finding statutory language that may be characterized as ambiguous," the coalition wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the federal government's appeal of the lawsuit.

The coalition includes the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights, and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

For background on the Pontiac case, see this item.

PROCEDURAL NOTE: Because no members of the coalition are involved in the suit, the groups are asking the court to consider their arguments when it hears the appeal. The court isn't required to do so. Here is the coalition's motion.

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

How would NCLB change if a Democrat were in the Oval Office next year?

The Democratic candidates say they would continue holding schools accountable, but they would radically change the types of tests used to measure schools' success, according to the rhetoric of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.

Sen. Obama wants tests that "track student progress for college and the workplace and improve student learning in a timely, individualized manner," his campaign Web site says. Sen. Clinton believes that tests should provide "individualized accountability based on how [individual] students do," she said at a New Hampshire campaign event. She also promises to "end the unfunded mandate known as No Child Left Behind," her campaign Web site says.

But neither one says whether they would maintain the law's requirement that all students be assessed in reading and mathematics in grades 3-8 and once in high school.

You can read about it in Democrats' K-12 Views Differ, Subtly. In the YouTube videos below, you can watch each candidate answer an NCLB question.

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Some advocates have been lobbying to make high school graduation rates part of NCLB's accountability system. The current emphasis on test scores gives high schools the incentive to shove low-scoring students out instead of addressing their achievement issues, they assert.

A new study out of Texas bolsters their case. The Rice University Center for Education tracked 271,000 students in one unnamed Texas city and found "strong association between high-stakes accountability and dropping out," according to this summary.

"This study has serious implications for the nation’s schools under the NCLB law," the summary concludes. "It finds that the higher the stakes and the longer such an accountability system governs schools, the more school personnel view students not as children to educate but as potential liabilities or assets for the school’s performance indicators, their own careers, or their school’s funding."

Read a brief recap in the Report Roundup column of the Feb. 20, 2008, issue of Education Week. Other stories of NCLB note in the issue:

McCain Emphasizes School Choice, Accountability, But Lacks Specifics (with blog items here and here)
NCLB Trumps IDEA, Appeals Court Rules (with a blog item here)
NCLB Restructuring Found Ineffectual in California (with a blog item here)

And don't miss When 'Unequal' Is Fair Treatment for an explanation of one district's efforts to reduce the achievement gap.

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Over the past month, the wonkish education bloggers have been debating whether NCLB has had the effect of narrowing school curriculum. (See Sherman Dorn's excellent analytic summary, and eduwonk's recent postscript.)

The debate hinged, in part, on the interpretation of one piece of data: 44 percent of districts have increased the amount of time spent on reading and mathematics at the expense of other subjects.

The Center on Education Policy—the source of that data—is out with what it calls "a deeper analysis" of its survey.

Here's a quick snapshot:

• Some districts are finding time for additional reading and math instruction without taking away time from other subjects. Fifty-eight percent of districts reported increasing the time for reading, and 44 percent for math. But the percentage of districts decreasing the time on other subjects was smaller (36 percent reduced social studies; 28 percent, science; 16 percent, art and music; 20 percent, recess; 9 percent, physical education).

• Social studies appeared to lose the most amount of time. On average, those districts cut social studies instruction by 76 minutes per week. In terms of the percentage of time cut from other subjects, all had about a one-third decrease in the amount of time dedicated to them.

• Schools are focusing on reading more than math. Of the schools that allocated extra time to either or both of the subjects, 54 percent reported adding 150 minutes per week (or 30 minutes a day) of reading instruction. Just 19 percent of the districts increased their math lessons by that much.

These numbers may add fuel to the fire. But they don't answer the nuanced question at the heart of the debate: Are schools that are increasing the amount of time on reading incorporating content from social studies, science, and the arts?

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

With the financial markets closed for Presidents Day, the "Nightly Business Report" on PBS aired a special report on "The New Business of Education." The reports covered the growth in the testing and tutoring industries in the NCLB era. It includes an interview of me, answering questions on the prospects for national standards and how NCLB is playing on the presidential campaign trail.

On the program's Web site, you can find a portal for the issue with the video of my interview and the other reports in the program.

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I trolled through the Internet and dialed up a bunch of Arizona sources to find out as much as I could about Sen. John McCain's background on K-12 education. Read what I found at McCain Emphasizes School Choice, Accountability, But Lacks Specifics.

You have to dig through the Republican front-runner's campaign site to find his ideas on education. Even though the site doesn't explain exactly what McCain would do as president, it's clear that McCain believes in choice and accountability. McCain tried for years to get a national pilot program for private school choice. In 2004, Congress created one such project in the District of Columbia. Back in 2001, he spoke in favor of NCLB on the Senate floor, saying he liked its accountability measures and was disappointed that it didn't include enough choice.

On the campaign trail, he has called NCLB "a good beginning" in a YouTube video I posted last week. In the video below, he says of NCLB: "Improve it; don't discard it."

But he doesn't say how he would hold schools accountable in private school choice programs. Many choice advocates suggest that parents' decision to enroll a child is the ultimate accountability. But NCLB raises the question of whether that's enough accountability, as Tom Toch of Education Sector points out.

“The logic of NCLB is that all schools that are using public money should be held accountable,” Toch told me. “He’s going to come to terms with the fact that the central element of school reform right now is to hold schools receiving public money accountable for their performance.”

That quote appears at the bottom of the story. This presidential campaign has been lacking a serious education debate so far. Sen. Barack Obama's statement on vouchers last week may mean vouchers will be part of the debate as the campaign moves forward. If so, perhaps McCain will have to respond to Toch's point.

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mike Petrilli suggests that Sen. John McCain has "zero interest in education." That may be true. But the Republican senator from Arizona does have an informed opinion about NCLB. In the YouTube video at the bottom of this post, he calls NCLB "a good beginning" that has "some things that badly need fixing." Not a very detailed policy position. Watch it and you'll see that McCain understands the law and has some ideas about how to change it. MM, does that mean McCain's grade is still "incomplete?"

Speaking of MM, she has an important post on vouchers. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told the the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he'd be open to private school choice if research documents its effectiveness. That could change the dynamics of the education debate in the presidential elections—and possibly in the future of NCLB.

But wait, there's more politics: Rep. Albert R. Wynn, D-Md., lost his primary this week. Back in October, Wynn released a letter complaining about the House's NCLB draft, showing divisions in the Congressional Black Caucus. Kevin Carey surmises that Wynn took his stands to win over the Maryland State Teachers Association. With Wynn on his way out, the union could be on the outs with his successor.

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Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, at right, is barnstorming states trying to improve NCLB's image. The press coverage of her stops so far has been rather favorable, leaving out some of the voices of the law's most strident critics. See, for example, this story in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

But when the secretary stopped in her hometown of Houston last week, commenters on this Houston Chronicle story weren't buying her message. One pointed out the logical inconsistency of all students reaching grade level if that term is defined as the 50th percentile. Another calls her a name that my sons (ages 10 and 7) like to use on each other, and then adds that the secretary enrolled one of her daughters in a Catholic school. (That's news to me. Send me an e-mail if you know this to be true). All in all, not a good hometown reception.

But I doubt Spellings will be deterred by these remarks. She's been using pseudo-religious language about NCLB's achievement goal, calling it "righteous" in interviews and public appearances. Maybe she'll find comfort in Matthew 13:57.

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After President Bush released his budget last week, Democrats in Congress treated it as if it were dead on arrival.

The budget is "completely irresponsible" and "will soon be forgotten," said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa. Sen. Harkin has some control over the Department of Education purse strings as the chairman of the subcommittee that appropriates money for education and other social programs.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he'd be willing to let President Bush leave office without signing another appropriations bill for education. One reason why: The president is "not living up to what he said he would do in funding" NCLB, Reid said. He's assuming a Democrat will be moving into the Oval Office next January.

Read these quotes and more in Democrats Aim to Resist Bush Budget by Alyson Klein.

Other NCLB stories in the Feb. 13, 2008, issue of Education Week:
Extra Funding Provided to Sustain NAEP
U.S. 'Dashboards' Offer Data on State Achievement
Spellings Asks 6th Circuit to Reconsider NCLB Ruling
Exercise Seen as Priming Pump for Students' Academic Strides

P.S. That last one is my early Valentine to you, Richard.

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Like him or not, Chester E. "Checker" Finn Jr. has been a major player in the biggest education policy debates of the past 40 years. In roles at the White House, Capitol Hill, academia, and think tanks, Finn has helped push charter schools into the mainstream and has been a stalwart supporter of private school choice. Both have expanded dramatically over the past 15 years. He explains his role in those and other education debates in "Troublemaker," published this month by Princeton University Press. The book is "a personal history of school reform since Sputnik," according to the subtitle.(The book's jacket is at right.)

In the NCLB world, Finn may be the reason why we're so concerned about "proficiency." Back in the 1980s, when he was an assistant secretary at the Department of Education, Finn complained that the National Assessment of Educational Progress didn't deliver meaningful results. The public couldn't understand, he said, the meaning of an obtuse scale score for the nation. He led the lobbying effort to persuade Congress to create a version of NAEP that delivered results for every state. Once it passed, Finn became the first chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board and served on it for eight years. He was the architect of NAEP's performance levels ("advanced," "proficient," and "basic"). When Congress was looking to set a goal for student achievement, it chose proficiency. To hold states up to a national standard, it required states to participate in NAEP's reading and math tests and increased the frequency of those tests to every other year. Today, NAEP is the most cited source for declaring states' definition of proficiency to be too easy.

Finn covers all of this in "Troublemaker," and he acknowledges that the achievement levels have been controversial. But he leaves out that their validity has been questioned by the research community. In 1991, NAGB's own consultants said it "must be viewed as insufficiently tested and validated, politically dominated, and of questionable credibility." NAGB fired the consultant, according to this Education Week story. In 1999, a National Academy of Sciences report called the process of setting them "fundamentally flawed." To this day, every NAEP report includes a footnote saying that the achievement levels are "developmental."

If you keep Finn's perspective in mind, "Troublemaker" is a good overview of educational policy over the past 50 years. And if you're interested in finding out more about Checker the person (like the time he brought a pig's head to illustrate a lesson), keep reading after the jump ...

While most of "Troublemaker" deals with policy issues, Checker Finn reveals a lot about himself in the book.

During his first (and only) year as a public school teacher, Finn decided to spice up a lesson about "Lord of the Flies." He went to a butcher and purchased a pig's head to re-enact the cult-like ceremony in which a group of boys impale a pig's head on a spear. The lesson fell flat, though. The kids were too shocked to understand their teacher's point. The next year, Finn decided to leave teaching and go to graduate school. In this era of cell phone video and YouTube, he might not have be allowed to return the next day.

In 1968, Finn followed his graduate school mentor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to work in the Nixon White House. Then a Democrat, he used his White House post to learn the ways of Washington—and get out of Vietnam service. After he wrote the Dayton, Ohio, draft board a letter describing his White House job, he never heard from the draft board again."I'm ashamed of having played that card," he said during a lunch with reporters in Washington last week. "It certainly wasn't patriotic and it was a little bit of abuse of office."

When Finn and his wife decided to enroll their children in private schools in suburban Maryland, money was tight. Finn recounts how he would purchase a week's worth of groceries for $25. "Our kids drank a lot of powdered milk," he writes. That's enough to make them supporters of using public funds to pay for private school tuition, I would guess.

In his book, Finn writes about switching his voter registration from Democrat to Republican in the late 1970s. Today, though, he's leaning toward being an Independent. "I'm not a very happy Republican, on education or much else," he said at the lunch with reporters. Still, he said he wouldn't vote for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., or Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.

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Are the testing requirements under NCLB and federal special education law in conflict? That's a question that two school districts and four families asked a federal appeals court.

Read the School Law Blog to find out the judges' answer.

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 5:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the seven-year life of NCLB, the Center on Education Policy has been digging up numbers that are fueling debates about the law. Just last week, the Bush administration relied on the Washington-based think tank's research to justify getting rid of the "hold harmless" on Title I grants so that states can put additional money into school restructuring.

The center also is the source of the survey data saying 44 percent of districts have decreased the amount of time given to social studies, the arts, and other subjects so they can emphasize reading and mathematics. That has set off a debate (which I summarized here) that seems as if it might go on forever (read eduwonkette's and eduwonk's latest salvos).

(The debate seems to have been the spark for the romance between bigswifty and eduwonkette. Here's his overture and her Valentine.)

Now CEP is out with the third annual report on the school restructuring process in California. Here are a few quick numbers you may see cited in weeks to come.

• In 2006-07, 11 percent of California's schools were either in the planning or implementation stages of restructuring. But the number schools in restructuring is rising quickly, up 45 percent from 2005-06.

• Few schools are increasing achievement fast enough to exit the restructuring process. In the 2006-07 school year, 5 percent of the 701 schools in restructuring increased their performance by enough to exit the category. That figure is up from 3 percent the year before. But still, success is infrequent.

• Sixty percent of restructuring schools are urban; 35 percent are suburban; and 5 percent are rural. Of the all the groups, the number of suburban schools entering restructuring is rising faster than the others.

The center concludes that restructuring efforts need to be more aggressive than they currently are and that federal and state officials need to provide more specific advice and more money than they currently do.

BONUS FIGURE: To make annual yearly progress, a California school must have 35 percent of its students score proficient in reading and 37 percent in mathematics. The percentages are lower in high schools (33 percent in reading and 32 in math). That makes it a steep climb to 100 percent proficiency by the 2013-14 school year.

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Nilaja Sun's one-woman show "No Child ... " is not about the No Child Left Behind Act. But the law's cameo near the conclusion draws derisive cheers.

At the end of the show, the main character—named for the actress—informs the audience what happens to the show's main characters. Among them, a boy is killed the next week in gang violence, a girl becomes mayor of New York, and the main character marries Denzel Washington and moves to the nation's capital to rewrite NCLB. The line drew cheers when I saw the show in Washington on Feb. 2. In an interview this week, the playwright told me that's a common reaction. She said she believes the loudest cheers come from teachers.

"They have a great hope for something new and different," said Sun, 33, who wrote the show based on her experiences as a teaching artist in New York City public schools. "They really do want to see a change."

So what would an actress/playwright who has spent seven years helping some of the nation's neediest students produce plays do to rewrite NCLB? "I would definitely come back to a place where teachers can teach the subjects," she said. "Teachers are really pressured to teach to these tests."

But she acknowledges that she's no policy wonk. "I don't know how to turn around a school that's deteriorating, aside from finding 50 of the best teachers ever and making it a charter school," she said. "That nitty-gritty stuff is something I'll leave for the real policymakers in Washington, D.C."

If the show isn't about NCLB, then why is it called "No Child ...," I asked Sun (pictured at right)."It is kind of like the elephant in the room in schools," she said. "There's this visible yet invisible pressure in the classroom."

She wanted a title that referred to that "elephant" because it's shaping what educators do in their classrooms. But she knew she couldn't write a show that was "an indictment of the law," she said. "Who the hell would want to see that for an hour?"

Instead, the show focuses on the emotional roller coaster she faced every time she entered one of New York City's toughest schools and cajoled seemingly disinterested students into producing a play.

Sun is performing her show at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre in downtown Washington until Feb. 17. She'll take it to Los Angeles in March and Berkeley, Calif., in May. After that, she will move on to other acting gigs and hopes to see other actors perform it.

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Rep. Thomas E. Petri, R-Wis., one of the most senior members of the House Education and Labor Committee, suggests that he and his colleagues should set aside politics and practice common sense in this online commentary.

"It’s time to set the heated rhetoric of special interests aside and pass a set of pragmatic changes this year," he writes.

Those "pragmatic changes" should be:

1. Create growth models for accountability.
2. Change interventions in schools to target "resources on the schools that need them most, without wasting taxpayers’ money on schools that are otherwise on target, save for a small category of students."
3. Allow states to use computer-adaptive tests, which he says provide better information on student performance than the tests now being used. (Rep. Petri has sponsored a computer-adaptive testing bill, which I wrote about back in October.)

Look at this list and compare it with ones enumerated by Capitol Hill aides. There's some overlap. But will Congress, the administration, and interest groups "set the heated rhetoric ... aside?"

Headlines from the Feb. 6, 2008, issue of Education Week:
Bush Latest 'Voucher' Idea May Face Same Fate as Others
Key Democrats Join President in Seeking to Revive NCLB Renewal
Commentary: Inside the 'Crucible' of School Reform and 'Scientific Research' and Policymaking

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

School improvement efforts would get a big boost under the budget proposal President Bush unveiled yesterday. By changing some administrative rules, the budget would guarantee $570 million would be spent on turning around schools struggling to meet their goals under NCLB. That would be in addition to the $491 million currently being spent on such schools through a grant program.

In the explanatory notes along with the budget, the Department of Education proposes that all states reserve 4 percent of their Title I grants for districts to intervene in struggling schools. That would total $570 million under the department's $14.3 billion proposal for the program.

Under current rules, states must ensure that all districts receive at least 85 percent of their previous year's grant before they set aside 4 percent of their money. Because NCLB dramatically shifted the way Title I money distributed, many districts qualify under the "hold harmless" rules. (See a summary of this lively discussion sparked backed in December by this story.) Citing the Center on Education Policy, the department says that in current school year three states had no money left to spend on school improvement and 29 states couldn't set aside the whole 4 percent. This would change that—and could potentially take Title I money away from a significant number of districts.

You can read the details under the heading of "Promoting Fundamental Restructuring of Chronically Low-Performing Schools" on this page of the department's budget summary.

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President Clinton's "train wreck" comments last week set off a discussion among the wonkish edubloggers. Phyllis McClure e-mailed me an several others that Clinton has amnesia. He forgets that he signed a 1994 law that had many of NCLB's key elements and that his administration didn't enforce it. Charlie Barone writes in two different items (here and here) that NCLB was the natural outgrowth of that 1994 law.

Leo Casey suggests that Clinton's statement validates his theory that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., traded his endorsement for the NCLB vote of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. But Sherman Dorn sees nothing other than bare-bones politics: "I don't think Bill Clinton gives a hoot about NCLB right now, but if he can use it to smear Kennedy and undermine that endorsement, he will."

No one answers the question about NCLB's future. Will the former president's NCLB statements help or hinder the law's reauthorization? Hinder, I say.

As I pointed out in this article now on edweek.org, all of the key players are saying they want to reauthorize NCLB this year. But they still appear to be far apart on the specifics of NCLB's divisive items, such as accountability, choice, teacher quality, and others. (See a rundown of issues in my Friday post.) Now the ex-president's statement creates a divide among Democrats, including the two top candidates for presidents. Complicating things, both Sen. Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., are members of Sen. Kennedy's committee.

The rumors are that the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee will take up NCLB on March 3. If the Democratic presidential nomination is still undecided then, what are the prospects of that happening? Predictions anyone?

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 8:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Department of Education has posted its fiscal 2009 budget proposal on its Web site. It looks as if the spreadsheet that made the rounds in recent weeks had the right figures. The budget would provide nominal increases for Title I and special education. It would restore the Reading First program back to the fiscal 2007 level of $1 billion. And it would eliminate programs for career and technical education, tech-prep, and educational technology.

The budget also proposes a significant change in the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program. The Bush administration wants to eliminate the grants for after-school programs run by community groups and school districts. The administration would replace the program with grants for families to redeem at private providers. The funding would fall from $1.08 billion to $800 million.

The department has a summary on it budget page. You'll be able to read more at www.edweek.org later today.

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Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is going to appeal a federal court decision that revived a lawsuit claiming that NCLB is an unfunded mandate. Read all about it at The School Law Blog.

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over at Campaign K-12, my colleague Michele McNeil asks a good question: Is Bill Clinton using NCLB to get back at a certain Massachusetts senator for endorsing Barack Obama?

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 1:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Maybe the hidden budget data are right.

The mysterious spreadsheet with a covert column listing FY09 numbers suggested that President Bush would propose $1 billion for the Reading First program. It's no surprise that the president would want to rescue one of his prized NCLB programs. Congress whacked it down to $393 million for fiscal 2008.

Today in Alabama, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings confirmed that the president's budget proposal would restore Reading First's funding to $1 billion in fiscal 2009.

"The president is going to work hard and ask for that billion dollars and get the Congress to restore the cuts that have been made," Spellings said in a news conference, which I listened to via telephone.

We'll see about the veracity of the rest of the data when the Bush administration releases its budget plan on Monday morning.

Also this week, Spellings sent a letter to chief state school officers explaining that schools could tap their grants from other NCLB programs to continue professional development and activities previously financed through Reading First.

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 1:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Aspen Institute organized a session on Capitol Hill yesterday with the main purpose of prodding Congress to act on NCLB—and soon. "Maybe today we can start the surge on NCLB," said Tommy G. Thompson, a former Wisconsin governor and Cabinet secretary under President Bush and a co-chairman of the Aspen's Commission on No Child Left Behind.

The most useful part of the morning for me was to hear from four Capitol Hill aides representing the members who lead the House and Senate education committees. None of them said anything newsworthy, but their comments summarized what the key players are looking for in NCLB Act II.

Here's my quick summary:

Carmel Martin, general counsel to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee:
1. Improve instructional practice in schools.
2. Improve the linkages between parents and school officials (e.g. a Boston program that places parent-coordinators in schools).
3. Address the "dropout crisis."
4. Offer schools resources to expand learning time (again citing a Massachusetts example in which low-performing schools received money to extend the school day).
5. Revise the accountability measures to ensure that states increase the rigor of their standards, to create a "more sophisticated way of measuring progress," and end the "one-size-fits-all" nature of the current system.

Alice Johnson Cain, senior adviser on K-12 issues for Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee:
1. Incorporate growth models in accountability.
2. Include data other than test scores in accountability decisions.
3. Differentiate interventions in schools based on how far short they fall of meeting their goals.
4. Address the "dropout crisis."
5. Improve assessment and accountability for English-language learners and special education students.
6. Improve the quality of tests.

Bonus Quote: "Nothing matters more to George Miller," Cain said, "than getting an outstanding teacher in front of every classroom."

For more, see the committee's list of "six key features" in the next version of NCLB.

Lindsay Hunsicker, aide to Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., the senior Republican on the Senate HELP Committee:
1. Maintain the disaggregation of data, a policy that has "pulled kids out of the shadows."
2. Address the unique needs of rural schools and "recognize that the flexibility that they need may be different."

James Bergerson, aide to Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., the senior Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee:
1. Maintain the following elements of the accountability system such as annual testing and the disaggregation of data.
2. Expand parental options for supplemental educational services and school choice.
3. Offer flexibility to states and districts.
4. Include pay-for-performance programs in efforts to improve teacher quality.
5. Add growth models to the accountability systems.
6. Differentiate interventions in schools based on how far they are from their goals.
7. Create policies that requires states to publish "accurate and reliable graduation rates."

These are long lists with lots of overlapping issues. But the overlap doesn't assure that congressional leaders will reach quick consensus. As Cain said: "The motto of this reauthorization has become: The devil's in the details."

And there will be plenty of details to work out.

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)