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COMMENTARY
Title I
(Morguefile.com)

I described the complexities of school funding and why the simplistic criticisms of local and state education systems are unjustified in a previous post here on NonDoc. The same applies to the 12 percent or so of funding that comes from the federal government.

Federal policies are flawed, but we should not be too quick to judge. It makes no more sense to bash the Feds than it does to issue a blanket condemnation of state and local government. However, we can’t ignore the headaches that their regulations can create for school systems. Moreover, the mandates that have accompanied federal money during the last few years have become exceptionally costly in terms of the energy educators have devoted to meeting those dubious demands.

Title I money …

When the federal government began to make significant investments in schools, it faced a dilemma that remains intractable in many ways. The most important program was Title I, and it sought to redress longstanding inequities. Unless the national government engaged in micromanaging, how could it prevent localities from diverting this new money to other programs? The most famous example was that of Claiborne Parish in Louisiana, which had a child poverty rate of 36 percent and infamously used its Title I funds “to build not one, but two Olympic-sized swimming pools for students.”

Consequently, the key principle that guided Title I was supplement not supplant. Federal money was to be treated as an additional resource for disadvantaged students and not used to replace existing funding for general-education students.

(By the way, a second huge controversy is known as “comparability.” Since veteran teachers tend to become exhausted and transfer out of high-poverty schools, those schools tend to have less experienced teachers with lower salaries, meaning that less money, per student, is often invested in poor schools. All stakeholders would support extra resources to address that unfair reality, but teachers have to worry that the current U.S. DoE will defy Congress and impose regulations that encourage districts to force unwilling teachers, who might have no talent for teaching in the inner city but who have higher salaries, to transfer to high-challenge schools.)

A half-century of experimentation has failed to produce a regulatory system that is strong enough to protect disadvantaged students but easy enough for high-poverty schools to implement. Like so many other districts, the OKCPS has often left millions of dollars of Title I money on the table to avoid the risk of federal sanctions. Worse, much of the responsibility for making those confusing decisions is dumped on principals who are already overworked and who lack the expertise required to navigate the maze of rules.

… needs flexibility to work

Consequently, many schools and systems across the nation take the safest routes of spending Title I money primarily on instruction-linked programs, even though they often understand that those investments won’t yield benefits until after a coordinated system of socio-emotional supports is established.

But poor systems don’t have the resources necessary to lay the foundation that is needed before spending on instruction will produce results. A couple of years ago, the OKCPS’s forfeiture of more than $3.5 million was publicized, but this was due to longstanding problems with the federal process. A decade ago, when teachers suggested the funding of essential student supports with Title I, OKCPS leaders would often agree it was needed, but a common response was, “What if a 25-year-old auditor disagrees?”

Sadly, the contemporary school-reform movement has been particularly deaf to the pleas of educators for the flexibility required to properly invest federal money. Liberal school reformers convinced the Obama administration that it will remain impossible to persuade states and localities to increase education spending without a rigorous — and punitive — accountability regime. The result was a perfect storm of unintended consequences. The administration’s favored test-driven and charter-driven reforms failed miserably and prompted endless battles between accountability-driven, market-driven reformers, teachers and unions. Overall education funding stopped increasing and then declined throughout the nation, even as educators had to invest incredible amounts of time and effort to meet the aforementioned dubious mandates.

Might as well bury those millions

The federal government used competitive programs such as the Race to the Top (RTTT) and school-improvement grants (SIGs) to “incentivize” billions of dollars in spending on standardized testing, computer systems for keeping track of “output,” for using test scores to evaluate individual educators, and for “exiting” veteran teachers.

In an unsuccessful effort to receive an RTTT grant, Oklahoma changed its laws and mandated the use of unreliable and invalid metrics for holding schools and individual educators accountable. Our urban districts received millions of dollars of SIG grants to “turnaround” or “transform” low-performing schools. The OKCPS experience was consistent with that of the rest of the nation: One school, U.S. Grant High School, was a success. Meanwhile, large numbers of veteran teachers were “exited” from SIG schools and little or no sustained progress was achieved. The OKCPS actually did better than most systems where the SIG gains were meager and over a third of the nation’s SIG schools saw outright declines in student performance due to the rushed experiment.

A similar pattern accompanied huge investments by the Gates Foundation, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Broad and Walton Foundations. Their test-sort-reward-and-punish theories almost completely failed. I doubt that many Tulsa leaders would say so publicly, but it would have been better for them to have lost their competition for Gates Foundation “teacher quality” grants. It would have been better for the nation’s school systems to pay students to dig holes and bury hundreds of millions of Gates dollars in them.

A marathon that requires will, patience

So, this sad story is bound to prompt mixed feelings about education spending. Understandably, education leaders don’t welcome frank discussions of this history. On the other hand, I have often heard OKCPS leaders privately complain that they have a surplus of resources that must be invested in questionable ways, but they face severe shortfalls for absolutely indispensable programs.

Administrators, like classroom teachers, have been exhausted by an endless series of silly silver bullets, but there is one characteristic that these shortcuts share: Bubble-in accountability and charters are like technology fads and previous silver bullets in that they were seen as cheaper and easier quick fixes.

The only way to break out of that cycle is to acknowledge that improving education, especially in the high-poverty schools we have in Oklahoma City, is a marathon and not a sprint. We need both the willingness to increase education budgets and the patience required for comprehensive and complicated solutions.