Letters 01

EPP March 2001 Letter on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act

March 8, 2001

Hon. Chuck Schumer
United States Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510

Dear Senator Schumer:

The Educational Priorities Panel is a coalition of 24 civic organizations that work together to improve the quality of public education for New York City’s children so there is no longer a performance gap between city schools and those in the rest of the state. In light of our mission as a coalition, we have serious concerns with several provisions of President Bush’s plan for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as well as some of those put forth by a competing proposal, called "Three R’s" (S.303) introduced by Senator Lieberman.

Our overall criticism of these proposals to restructure the ESEA into large block grants is that reporting requirements and penalties are replacing program and funding accountability. There is a saying, You can’t fatten a cow by weighing it, that exemplifies this counterproductive effort to document achievement gaps between low-income students and higher-income students while, at the very same time, eliminating specific federal programs targeted to low-income students that are closing these achievement gaps.

A January 1998 GAO report on school finance found that, in 45 of the 47 states included in the analysis, state funding practices do not level "the instructional playing field" as well as federal funding practices. The report found that for every $1 of federal funds that school districts receive on a per-pupil basis, these same districts receive, on average, an additional $4.73 in federal funding per low-income student. Block granting ESEA programs will, in effect, make federal funding vulnerable to inequitable state education finance practices.

President Bush’s initiatives in Texas benefited enormously from a successful lawsuit to require more state funding for low-income school districts. But most states have not made sufficient progress in school funding reform. In the state of New York, for example, the per-pupil expenditures of low-wealth school districts are one third of those of high-wealth districts. In January of this year, the New York Supreme Court in Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York ruled that the state school finance system has failed to provide 1.1 million students in New York City with an adequate education. Rather than settling the suit, our Governor has appealed this decision, thereby prolonging for several years a pattern of underfunding school districts serving high-poverty and high-immigrant communities. The federally funded class size reduction program, Title I concentration grants, Title VII Bilingual Education Act and Foreign Language Assistance Program, and the E-Rate funded by the Universal Service Fund, in particular, have provided low-income students in public schools in New York City with additional instructional resources denied them by the state’s finance system. The Educational Priorities Panel urges you to make every effort to save the following programs from a faulty and problematic restructuring of ESEA:

Class Size Reduction (CSR) This program has resulted in the hiring of 817 additional teachers for the New York City public school system, which still has the largest class sizes in the state. The proposal to combine this program with the Eisenhower Professional Development program (which is geared to staff development in math and science) to create a Title II Teacher Quality block grant will eliminate the incentives for school districts to pursue this instructional strategy. Researchers have found CSR to be the single most successful intervention in closing the achievement gap between inner-city, low-income students and their peers in more affluent school districts. Well-regarded analyses by David Grissmer for RAND, Federick Mosteller of Harvard University, Harold Wenglinsky of the Educational Testing Service, and Alan Krueger of Princeton University have found that smaller classes in the early grades raise the average achievement levels of students by a half a year to a full year. Class size reduction in high-poverty school districts is critical because one of the effects of inequitable state funding is larger class sizes, on average, in schools serving minority children than in schools serving non minority children, even when the schools’ pupil-to-teacher ratios are similar.

We have these additional objections to CSR block granting:

• The proposed funding level of $2 billion for Title II masks the fact that funding has been reduced for both programs.

• The current formula for the distribution of CSR funding from the federal government to the states is based on 80% poverty and 20% population; the proposed Title II distribution is based on 50% poverty and 50% population, in effect, reducing funding to states like New York with numerous high-poverty school districts. The requirement that the states, in turn, distribute 75% of Title II funding on the basis of poverty appears to be equitable but masks the fact that states with the most high-poverty school districts will experience the greatest reduction in funding.

• A June 2000 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Guy Mitchell v. Mary Helms found it permissible for religious schools in Louisiana to receive federal Title II Eisenhower funds for computers and other instructional materials. The creation of a Teacher Quality block grant goes beyond a "child benefit" theory of government funding of private and religious schools by providing these schools with personnel funding for recruitment, hiring bonuses, and other salary supplements. The Eisenhower grants program, which was initiated to meet a national need for better math and science instruction, could be transformed through block granting into a mechanism for subsidize private and religious schools personnel costs.

Recommendations: Keep CSR funding separate, at current funding levels, with its current distribution formula to states. The Educational Priorities Panel also recommends that the CSR program be improved so that more of the funds go directly to the classroom. Currently up to 25% can be used for recruitment, teacher sign-on bonuses, and staff development, all of which merely supplants local systemic efforts to improve teacher recruitment and training efforts. Furthermore, there is little monitoring of the deployment of teachers hired through these funds to ensure that school districts are actually reducing average class sizes in the early grades.

Title I Concentration Grants The proposal to make Title I allocations "portable" in order to sanction low-performing schools will actually make school improvement more difficult and will reduce accountability for taxpayer funding. On the surface, the proposal appears to offer "choices" to parents. It allows the parents of students to enroll their children in higher-performing public schools if their children’s school does not improve within two years. After three years, parents are allowed to use the per-pupil Title I allocations to hire tutors, to purchase instructional services, or to pay tuition to a private and religious schools. This proposal offers false hope to low income parents and constitutes a "back door" voucher program.

EPP has several objections to "portability" of Title I funding:

• How will low-performing schools turn around if they lose a portion of their Title I funding? Sanctions, by themselves, are not a strategy for improvement. The New York City’s nationally heralded success in turning around schools on the state’s list of low-performing schools has been accomplished, in part, by driving $1 million in additional funds, on average, to each low-performing school in the "Chancellor’s District," in effect, doubling and sometimes tripling the current per-pupil Title I allocation. The proposal to withdraw Title I funding is counterproductive to school improvement efforts.

• The logic of making public schools more accountable for Title I funding is not extended to private and religious schools that also receive this funding. They are not required to be accountable as to their performance levels, their admissions policies, or administering achievement tests to their students and publicly reporting the results. If private and religious schools are to be the beneficiaries of additional Title I funding through "portability," shouldn’t these private institutions also be held to standards of performance?

• Less than 4% of Title I funds now go to administration, and the rest go for direct services to children. But this may change if "portability" is implemented and LEA’s must begin to administer and monitor the "purchases" of instructional services. If no monitoring is intended, how will there be any assurance that Title I purchases of instructional services are genuine? Experiments in creating an education "market place," such as the federal government’s ill-conceived loan program for tuition to vocational schools, allowed profiteers to victimize millions of low-income parents and students. Similarly, fly-by-night operators in Milwaukee’s voucher program subjected hundreds of children to highly inferior instruction and swindled the LEA out of millions of dollars by claiming non-existent students. Cleveland’s experiment with vouchers resulted in a fraudulent use of one-third of transportation funding in its first year of operation. In California, there are growing concerns about the quality of instruction provided by home-schooling programs via the Internet. There either has to be additional LEA administration for Title I or a willingness to tolerate potential misuse of taxpayer funds.

EPP’s most serious reservations about sanctioning low-performing schools are that they provide few real options for parents and target schools rather than state funding practices that contribute to low-performance. New York City has had a 20-year history of identifying low-performing schools, almost of which are Title I schools serving very high poverty communities. Per-pupil Title I allocations of between $608.73 to $1,262.39 in New York City (depending on the county of residence of the student) will not enable low-income parents to pay tuition to private or religious schools or to purchase high quality instructional services. The current state policy is to allow students attending low-performing school to transfer to higher-performing public schools, but this policy has resulted in few transfers because of overcrowding in better performing schools. Almost all the low-performing Title 1 schools in New York state are in school districts that have been underfunded by the state.

Recommendation: Develop a more comprehensive strategy to turnaround low-performing Title I schools and reject efforts to use taxpayer funds to create vouchers for services and schools through "portability." EPP recommends that the GAO be requested to study the impact of state funding practices on schools that have already been identified as "Title I schools in need of improvement."

Title VII Bilingual Education Act and Foreign Language Assistance Program

These ESEA grants have provided a critical source of funding for staff development, program design, and instructional materials development for schools and LEA’s coping with helping large numbers of immigrant children learn English. The "3 R’s" proposal to block grant these programs would provide as little as $75 per child and would set an arbitrary 3-year limit on this funding. In addition, both the President’s and "3-R’s" proposals would dismantle competitive grant programs to upgrade the quality of instruction for English Language Learners and withdraw federal resources to encourage English speaking students to learn a second language.

Recommendations: Retain Title VII as a competitive grants program and continue FLAP. EPP has no position on which instructional program is the most effective in helping English Language Learners, but we believe that more research is needed before time limits are placed on federal funding for these programs. We suggest a field hearing be held in California to gather objective data on the numbers of children who have mastered English in the first year of English immersion programs in that state to verify reports that only 6% of students have tested out of these programs.

E-Rate The Universal Service Fund has provided $2.25 billion annually in discounts for schools and libraries, primarily for Internet access. In New York, these E-Rate discounts have helped to close the "digital divide" that exists between city public schools and those in the rest of the state. The proposal to fold this program into a Technology block grant may lead to a shift away from funding through mandatory contributions from telecommunication companies, to less targeted funding for high-needs communities, or even to its eventual elimination.

Recommendation: Retain E-Rate as a separate program because of its importance in proving equal access to education technology.

EPP has advocated increased federal funding for public education for over two decades. We have also supported efforts by Congressmembers and Senators, so far unsuccessful, 1) to provide "impact aid" to school districts that have been affected by changes in federal immigration policies and 2) to provide funding incentives for states to reform their education finance systems.

When international comparisons are made of student achievement, those nations that rank above our nation have fairer education funding systems. Since the passage of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, federal funding has provided critical resources to underfunded schools serving high-poverty, high-immigrant neighborhoods. ESEA has helped to counter the damage caused by inequitable state funding. Block granting so many important programs to provide "flexibility" to the states with few requirements for fairness will not raise student achievement in this nation. Please do everything you can to safeguard class size reduction, Title I, instructional resources for immigrant children, and the E-Rate.

Sincerely,

Noreen Connell, Executive Director
Marilyn Braveman, Chairperson