California Districts Stumble on CORE Waiver, Ed. Dept. Finds
Crossposted from the District Dossier blog
By Lesli A. Maxwell
The California districts that won a special reprieve from portions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act are falling short on several key pieces of their waiver agreement, and, in some areas, made major changes to their plan without first getting permission from the U.S. Department of Education.
In an undated monitoring report posted on the website of the California Office to Reform Education (or CORE, as the coalition of districts is called), Education Department officials flag several problems with the districts' adherence to the first-of-its-kind waiver. They include delays and changes to how the districts are dealing with their lowest-achieving schools. (I searched for the monitoring report on ed.gov, and it's either buried somewhere or not yet published.)
The CORE districts that won the waiver late last summer are Fresno, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sanger, San Francisco, and Santa Ana. Sacramento was also part of the original group, but withdrew from participation earlier this spring over deep divisions that the waiver had caused between the district and its teachers' union.
Earlier this month, CORE requested an extension of the one-year reprieve for the seven remaining districts, and along with it, a delayed timeline for fully implementing teacher-evaluation systems (which will be unique to each district but with shared guidelines) by the 2016-17 school year. That timeline is outside what the Education Department has greenlighted for any state waiver recipient, with the exception of Illinois, where the waiver was hung up on the issue for over a year.
As part of its review of the CORE waiver, Education Department officials visited four of the eight districts in February: Fresno, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Sacramento (which dropped out two California Districts Stumble on CORE Waiver, Ed. Dept. Finds - Politics K-12 - Education Week: