Arne Duncan: Do Not Sacrifice Title I through Inconsistent Enforcement of Rules
Title I is the federal civil rights program created in 1965 as the centerpiece of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to help equalize opportunity by sending federal money to schools serving a large number or high concentration of very poor children. President Lyndon Johnson believed that childhood poverty is deeply connected to school achievement; Title I was a part of Johnson’s War on Poverty. While the Title I formula has never been fully funded by Congress, Title I has historically been a primary federal tool for equalizing educational opportunity as a civil right for every child.
Today, however, the Obama Administration’s Department of Education (DOE) persists in redesigning Title I. In 2009, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan began transforming Title I from a formula program into competitions like Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants. A much discussed problem with the DOE’s competitive grants is that competitions with winners always create losers, which means that federal support for expanded access to education is increasingly becoming a right for poor children only in winning states and school districts. It has also become apparent that too much money is going to grant writers and consultants and too little reaching the classroom.
Now we learn that receipt of Title I funding is also being conditioned on states’ complying with the DOE’s requirements for states to earn waivers from the impossible requirements and