Federal flexibility means cash for school intervention
(Calif.) Buried deep inside the new federal Every Child Succeeds Act is language giving states an immense new resource for providing assistance and intervention to struggling schools. For California, it could be as much as $150 million.
“It’s a game-changer,” said Mike Kirst, president of the California State Board of Education. “This is an enormous amount of money and we’re just beginning to think what we might be able to do with it.”
The nation’s newly reauthorized education law, signed by President Barack Obama in December, didn’t significantly upgrade the amount of federal support to the states. But what Congress did do, in addition to allowing states to define their own policy goals, was give them far more control and flexibility over how the money could be used.
Under the prior iteration of ESSA – the No Child Left Behind Act – schools that receive Title I grants and fail to meet federal performance benchmarks were subject to costly sanctions that included tutoring services and highly prescribed intervention mandates.
ESSA did away with all of that with the exception of requiring states to identify the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools and developing turnaround plans. The law further authorized states to reserve up to 10 percent of the Title I funding to provide “technical assistance to local educational agencies.”
For California – with a total Title I grant of close to $1.2 billion – that is an enormous new source.
Perhaps even more important, Kirst said, is the flexibility the new law provides – latitude that could promote some creative strategies for helping schools.
One option, he said, would be to add specialists at the California Department of Education to help schools. Another might be to contract out support services to outside agencies. A third could be simply pushing the money down to the local boards to decide what to do.
A fourth option that Kirst appears especially interested in would be using some of the money to Federal flexibility means cash for school intervention :: SI&A Cabinet Report :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet: