Federal Issues Council focuses on fairness, funding and flexibility

Many of the critical issues at the forefront of CSBA’s Federal Issues Council lobbying trip to Washington, D.C., last month were familiar: fix and pay for the mandates imposed by the No Child Left Behind Act; stop cutting health-care coverage for poor children, reimburse schools for the cost of transporting special education students to and from school; preserve—rather than continually trying to eliminate—federal funding for career and technical education and for rural schools; and give school districts and county offices of education the funding and flexibility they need to do their jobs.

The council—14 CSBA officers and directors and one district superintendent, along with several staff members—powered through 20 meetings in three days, carrying these messages to key congressional committee staff, White House advisers, federal officials, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s federal education adviser and business and advocacy groups that work on issues important to children and schools.

Lame ducks and the silly season
This trip differed from previous visits during the Bush administration in that the FIC delegation spoke primarily with career employees who will likely remain in their jobs regardless of who’s in the White House next year. These meetings were invaluable, council members said. When FIC members sat down with U.S. Forest Service staff this year, for example, they expected to hear a defense of the president’s persistent efforts to do away with the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self Determination Act. The legislation compensates rural communities and schools for logging revenue lost when the federal government established national parks and halted timber harvests in many areas.

Instead, said CSBA President-elect Paula Campbell, “Forestry staff gave us advice on how to get it reauthorized. What a relief!”

Members of the FIC spoke freely as well. In meetings with officials at the Department of Education and at Gov. Schwarzenegger’s Washington office, CSBA Vice President Frank Pugh and Assistant Executive Director Rick Pratt warned that the president’s education initiatives are widely viewed as unworkable at best.

“When you have 100 percent of California districts headed for Program Improvement, people treat NCLB as a joke,” Pratt said during a frank discussion with David Dunn, chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. “This is the president’s biggest domestic policy agenda, and it may be falling apart.”

NCLB reauthorization  on hold
The council came away with good news and bad. Education policy experts and congressional staff on both sides of the aisle agreed that it’s very unlikely that NCLB will be reauthorized this year. That’s bad news for schools, because they will have to continue grappling with problematic requirements like testing participation rules, inaccurate formulas for calculating graduation rates and the overidentification of Program Improvement schools and districts.

The Bush administration, like many that came before it, is hampered by lame-duck issues that are inherent in the final year of a president’s second term. Plus, Congress is increasingly preoccupied with the presidential campaign—the “silly season,” federal sources told the FIC—making it very doubtful that any tough decisions will be made until a new president takes office in January.

“We heard that they had tried to get things done, but it’s probably not going to happen this year,” said CSBA President Paul H. Chatman. “We’re building the foundation for next year’s trip with a new administration.”

This means that, absent any last-minute flexibility from the federal Department of Education, (which Dunn said is a goal of the department), California schools can still be punished when parents exercise their legal rights to opt their children out of testing. Some of the state’s highest-performing schools have failed to make adequate yearly progress under NCLB because parental opt-outs have lowered testing participation rates.

FIC members also raised concerns about inflexible rules for testing special education students and about graduation rate calculations that count students who do not graduate in four years as dropouts. Basically, the federal dropout definition punishes schools for doing the right thing by encouraging students who have failed the California High School Exit Exam to continue in school for a fifth or sixth year to shore up their academic skills so they can earn a diploma. Students who begin taking advanced classes at community colleges to get a jump start on their higher education can also be counted as dropouts.

Overidentifying PI schools
FIC members stressed that every school in California will be in Program Improvement by 2014. “By essentially identifying every school as needing improvement, NCLB has made it impossible to identify the schools that really need help,” said Holly Jacobson, CSBA’s assistant executive director for Policy Analysis and Continuing Education.

At the Department of Education meeting, Chief of Staff Dunn asserted that Secretary Spellings will continue to work on “improvements” to NCLB during her final 10 months in office. “She’s no lame duck,” he said. “Keep your eyes open. You’ll be seeing more from Secretary Spellings. Some you’ll like, and some you won’t.” Earlier this year, Spellings introduced a new pilot program for what she calls “differentiated accountability” for Program Improvement schools, but California is not eligible to apply.

Congress rejects Perkins cuts
On the plus side, FIC members got word that Congress will likely again reject President Bush’s annual call to eliminate funding for the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act and the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act.

“Congress recognizes there continues to be a sizeable constituency for Perkins,” said CSBA executive director Scott P. Plotkin. And in meetings with congressional committee staff, the FIC found bipartisan support for continuing the forest community subsidies.

Staff at the U.S. Forest Service also told the FIC that there are no longer any plans to sell forest land deemed “surplus” by federal officials to raise money for assistance to rural communities and schools. Those funds were previously provided as part of the Secure Rural Schools Act to compensate logging communities for revenues they lost when huge tracts of old-growth forests were set aside in national preserves.

Clearcutting for Kids plan is dead
CSBA President-elect Paula Campbell said the proposal to sell surplus national forest land, advocated two years ago by the Bush administration is now “off the table.” The land-sale plan, disparagingly nicknamed “Clear Cutting for Kids” by environmental groups, proved too controversial to win political support. Congress instead has approved stopgap funding to continue the rural assistance in the short term. But rural community advocates like the National Forest Counties and Schools Coalition, based in Red Bluff, continue to press for a permanent funding commitment for the program.

SCHIP again under attack
In meetings with children’s health advocates, the council got the latest information about the vigorous campaign to preserve the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, which provides coverage for low-income children, and learned more about how school boards can support those efforts.

Cindy Mann, president of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University Health Policy Institute, spoke with the FIC the day before she testified before a congressional subcommittee about the importance of SCHIP. She warned about an Aug. 17, 2007, directive from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that would eliminate coverage for 34,000 California children whose parents earn 250 percent or more above the federal poverty level, or about $44,000 for a family of three. Children’s advocates are seeking a moratorium on the new income caps, and a number of states have already filed suit to challenge the new rules.

“California school board members need to communicate their concern about the directive’s impact on children’s coverage to members of Congress,” Mann said. “They need to make calls and send letters. Remind Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi that she appeared on the dais during her swearing-in ceremony surrounded by children. This is a critical children’s issue, and we have to act now.”

Business group supports expanded curriculum
This year’s council also built bridges with the business community, spending more than an hour with Charles Kolb, president of the nonpartisan Committee for Economic Development. Kolb was so engaged in the conversation that he stayed with the council an additional 20 minutes beyond the meeting’s scheduled conclusion. He was supportive of quality preschool and enthusiastic about adding foreign language, arts and critical thinking to a curriculum that, he agreed, focuses too much on reading and math testing because of NCLB’s emphasis on these subjects.

“This is a man who works closely with the CEOs of major corporations,” said Bob Cruz, CSBA Region 23 director. “He’s the perfect person to help us get traction with the business community about the importance of teaching foreign language and culture, music, and art as well as investing in early childhood education.”

FIC members said they believed they’d forged important connections during their three-day lobbying trip.

“Our main goal, of course, is to advocate for our position on issues important to us, and I think our group did a wonderful job,” Campbell said. “School board members from different parts of the state, and different types of districts, reflected how these issues affect them as well as other districts in our state. This, with input from our staff, gave a well-rounded view of our issues. I came away from the week convinced of the importance of figuring out the appropriate role for the federal government in education before reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act,” NCLB’s formal name.