CSBA finds fault with proposed NCLB regulations

Renewal and much-needed modification of the No Child Left Behind Act remains in limbo in Congress, but the U.S. Department of Education is proceeding with the adoption of new regulations that would in many cases worsen the impact of the federal government’s intrusion on state education policy, CSBA warns in comments submitted to U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.

From unworkable rules and additional penalties based on faulty premises to erosion of the 50 states’ distinct academic curricula and beyond, the proposed regulations signal a continuing threat to local control, CSBA Assistant Executive Director Holly Jacobson said. And, as administrative regulations, they would impose new mandates on schools, districts and county offices of education without congressional input.

“It’s troubling that in the last five months of the Bush administration, Margaret Spellings intends to use the regulatory process to further erode state and local authority over education,” Jacobson said in a discussion of the comments she submitted to the government in a June 18 letter. “It’s frustrating, because administrative regulations have the force of law.”

Jacobson’s letter focuses on seven of the 13 sections of the proposed rules published in the Federal Register April 23. Three of them deal with identification of schools for improvement, including through the size of student subgroups and the academic subjects that students in a school or district fall short of under the federal government’s measures of “adequate yearly progress.” (CSBA has long maintained that AYP is inferior to California’s own Academic Performance Index, but that issue is not a focus of the proposed regulations.)

For example, states would have to provide additional justification for the minimum size of a subgroup of students “with the intent of increasing the number of subgroups for each school,” Jacobson wrote. Subgroups are already differentiated by race, ethnicity, English language fluency and special education needs, and “NCLB already ensures that the system is held accountable for subgroups of students by rolling their numbers up to the district or state level when the subgroup size is too small for valid scores at the site level. This is appropriate policy.”

Beyond that, “USDOE proposes to make irrelevant the reasons why a school or district failed to make AYP from one year to the next,” Jacobson’s letter continues. A particular subgroup might fall short of AYP targets in math one year but not the next, yet the responsible local education agency could still find itself ratcheted up to the next level of Program Improvement status under NCLB if, for example, a different subgroup fell short of AYP targets in English language arts.

“As much as NCLB should identify schools or districts in crisis, it should also recognize and acknowledge when schools make progress. This proposed regulation would institutionalize an approach by USDOE to interpret even significant successes in public education as failures,” Jacobson wrote.

Another new rule would require districts to notify parents 14 days before the start of a new school that they may move their children to other schools when their current school is under the “Public School Choice” provisions of Program Improvement.

“In California, this is simply not possible for most districts. Test results that indicate whether a school is in Program Improvement are not available in California until mid-August. Many schools in California begin in July and August—long before the results are even made available by the state,” Jacobson wrote.

Another proposal would require scores from statewide National Assessment of Educational Progress tests to be included on local school and district accountability report cards.

“This proposal will further confound performance data that is provided to parents” Jacobson wrote. “There is no relationship between the state’s overall performance on NAEP and the performance of a local school” because only a small sampling of students actually takes NAEP tests. “NAEP is also not aligned to state standards, confounding any meaningful comparison between a state’s performance on its own standards and the overall performance on NAEP,” Jacobson’s letter continues.

“If the goal of USDOE is to convince parents and communities to change state standards to comport with NAEP standards, then the USDOE is advocating for a national curriculum through the backdoor,” Jacobson wrote.

Related links:

Read the full text of Jacobson’s letter under “Proposed Regulations” and find more information on NCLB @ www.csba.org/EducationIssues/EducationIssues/NCLB.aspx.

Read the rules as published in the Federal Register @ www.ed.gov/legislation/FedRegister/other/2008-2/042308a.pdf