U.S. Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education Deborah Delisle. Credit: John Fensterwald, EdSource Today
A high-ranking federal education official – a woman with Secretary Arne Duncan’s ear – said she liked what she heard at the first meeting of a committee overseeing eight California districts that have received the nation’s only district waiver from the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Particularly intriguing was the discussion about using methods other than test scores to determine whether students are succeeding, said U.S. Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary education Deborah Delisle.
“I am really optimistic about the depth of conversation they are having today,” she said in an interview. “They are asking the right questions. It’s positive when people can come together in a room to talk about outcomes for kids in a meaningful way.”
Delisle flew in to Sacramento last month specifically to attend the meeting of the 14-member School Quality Improvement System Oversight Panel. Its job is to verify that the eight districts in CORE, or the California Office to Reform Education – Los Angeles, Long Beach, Fresno, San Francisco, Santa Ana, Sacramento City, Oakland and Sanger, all unified districts – have met the commitments they made in return for receiving flexibility with federal Title I dollars and a suspension from penalties under NCLB.
The CORE districts’ application for a waiver assumed a three-year timetable to meet the requirements. But last August, Duncan gave each of the districts a one-year waiver. It’s halfway through the year, and Delisle gave no hint whether, based on progress so far, she’d recommend to her boss to extend it. Next week, monitors from the federal education department will visit four of the districts to examine compliance. But Delisle also sounded like she was willing to give CORE
