California clarifies SIG grants
No agreement to clarify confusing guidelines
After a month of fruitless negotiations with the U.S. Department of Education (ED), and with the new school year beginning, California education officials took matters into their own hands Tuesday. They sent a letter to districts with grants to turn around California’s worst-performing schools explaining what they think federal guidelines require them to do. The federal government allotted $416 million over three years in School Improvement Grants for this purpose.
Page one of the California Dept. of Education's letter to SIG Schools. (click to enlarge)
Last month, the State Board of Education approved the second year of funding for the initial group of SIG schools, known as Cohort 1, on the condition that they were in full compliance with federal regulations on the first day of school. (Read our coverage here). Trouble is, some of the regulations were so confusing that no one in California – least of all the SIG schools – could figure them out.
At issue is the requirement that SIG schools extend the school day to give students more time to learn and more individual help. Most school districts thought that applied only to students who were falling behind and only in the subjects that were giving students the most trouble. So they were taken by surprise when ED officials seemed to indicate that the regulations covered each student in every class – whether they needed help or not – and included art and other enrichment courses.
When CDE staff tried to pin them down on a definition, federal officials remained elusive, according to Christine Swenson, Director of CDE’s District and School Improvement Division. So CDE drafted its own interpretation based on whatever clues they could find on the federal SIG website.
“We went ahead and took our best shot at it based on two different sources from the U.S. Department of Education,” said Swenson.
Guidelines for Increased Learning Time (Source: CA Dept. of Education) click to enlarge
CDE’s reading of the regulations suggests that schools have more choices, sort of along the lines of a Chinese restaurant. The letter informs schools that they must select at least one academic subject from column A and at least one enrichment activity from column B in their extended learning schedule.
Missing the first day of school
The four-page letter from CDE also outlines a new timeline for schools to comply with the rules. Instead of the first day of school, which has come and gone in many districts, they’ll have until September 23. Between now and then, Swenson said CDE will schedule a long phone call with each district to review the areas where they’re not meeting the grant requirements, then the districts will have to submit new plans to the state.
“I think the timing issue is problematic,” said Sherry Griffith, legislative advocate for the Association of California School Administrators (ACSA), which has a number of SIG schools among its members. “Once you start the school year I just can’t even imagine how they’re going to expand the school year in every single subject.”
Griffith said the likelihood of adding time to the day shrinks even more if a district has to go back to the union to renegotiate the contract.
But many schools in cohort 1 took a leap of faith and kept to the original timetable, especially if they had put their plans into place last year and had all the staff and class schedules ready to go –and if they had the money to get going while waiting for the state to release the funds.
San Francisco Unified School District used SIG money from last year, not because the district went under budget, but because the state was so late in sending out the checks that the district didn’t have time to ramp up its entire program.
District spokeswoman Gentle Blythe said although it was frustrating last year, it’s turned into a benefit this year, enabling schools to continue what they started without an interruption. Blythe was also reassured by yesterday’s letter from the CDE. “It is a relief to have received some guidance,” she said.
A SIG in a poke
It’s not clear to anyone in Sacramento why the U.S. Department of Education refused to negotiate. CDE’s Swenson said ED wouldn’t put anything in writing.
“A couple of time we did ask questions in email, but they didn’t respond, they weren’t comfortable responding in writing” said Swenson. Instead all conversations took place by phone.
I, too, found the department not very responsive. I called and emailed at least half a dozen times following the state board meeting in July, asking how many other states had similar concerns and how the department was dealing with them. When a spokesperson finally responded, by email, late last week, she sent a copy of the official guidelines causing the confusion and a report describing successful programs around the country that can be used as models by SIG schools.
To be fair, however, the California Department of Education has also taken heat for its handling of the SIG program from the very beginning. Back in early 2010, we reported about complaints over the selection process, ongoing revisions that delayed the start of grants months into the school year, and charges that the state blamed the schools for not complying with the very guidelines they’ve spent the past month arguing about with the federal government. (See here, here, here, and here).
Year two is already behind schedule. CDE is scheduled to hold a conference call later this week with every district and school receiving School Improvement Grants to review the letter and discuss what will happen during the individual calls. In the meantime, Swenson hasn’t given up on getting federal buy-in.
“Do I expect to hear back from the federal government?” she asked, repeating my question. “We’d like to, but we haven’t had great success. We’d very much like to work with ED, that’s been our goal all along.”
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Still confused … Did CDE address whether more time had to be added for ALL kids or just some of them? This seems to be the key issue.
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Emily: As I read the letter sent out by CDE, the additional time has to be available for ALL kids in the school, but not all kids have to take advantage or be served by that additional time. My guess is there are more nuanced interpretations of the federal guidance language, especially for individual school scheduling practices.
On another topic covered by Kathy’s post, I find it very troubling that the “gotta be done by the first day of school” requirement just evaporates into the dusk when CDE and ED officialdom can’t get their act together. The State Board is the state agency responsible for federal programs such as SIG, not the CDE, although the CDE does the staff work. But, the CDE has jammed the State Board into rushed decisions on SIG multiple times now, as documented by the various links in Kathy’s post. The March 2010 SBE approval of a list of 188 schools as a lowest 5% “persistently low-achieving schools” list to be elgible for this half billion dollar pot of federal money was jammed by CDE staff work. The August 2010 decisions on what applicant schools to fund were jammed by late CDE staff work. The January 2011 SBE decision to continue to use the previous extremely flawed list of eligible schools was jammed by CDE staff failure to investigate alternatives. And the July 2011 SBE decisions for both SIG Cohort 1 Year 2 funding and SIG Cohort 2 Year 1 applications (a waiver was sought to delay SIG Cohort 2 implementation for a full year) were jammed late arriving CDE staff recommendations. When a policy board is jammed like this one time, then it is shame on the staff. But when they are jammed a second time, it is shame on the board for allowing themselves to be jammed. We are up to four jammings on the the high profile SIG program now. Somebody has to take this problem by the collar and solve it — the alternative is to continue to flush taxpayer dollars in copious quantities down the drain.
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Emily,
I asked Christine Swenson at CDE if the increased learning time must include every student. She said “That is our understanding.” However, Doug has a point that it may be more nuanced than that. For example, Elmhurst Community Prep Middle School in Oakland instituted a longer school day with its SIG grant. That’s for all students, but there are different courses and programs available depending on individual needs and interests.
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So an after-school program targeted to students with low achievement … does that count?
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Emily: An after-school program avaiable to all students but targeted for students with low achievement would count. An after-school program not available to all students targeted for students with low achievement would not count. That would be my interpretation. With fedspeak, words need to be parsed pretty literally.
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Kathryn, I enjoy your informative articles. For a while in ‘98-’99 I wrote reports examining English departments at black, inner city middle schools for LACOE, as part of their compliance with the IIUSP program, which I believe was a predecessor of SIG. My reports generated some interest, I suspect for their graphic nature, though I believe they were soon after entered into the circular file. At any rate your revelations about SIG grants fits well with my world-view. If we can agree on nothing else, we can agree perhaps that education governance in the U.S. has been a bit shaky of late. Present company excepted!
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Incredible complexity and confusion and tardiness. Fodder for privatizers and charter advocates. But thank you, I think, to the California Department of Education, for trying to unravel the Gordian knot and help its school districts.
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Given the tight timeline for SIG sites and their LEAs to comply with the Increased Learning Time requirements, we hope the field considers using the existing, extensive infrastructure of afterschool providers. More often than not, SIG sites have existing federal and/or state funded programs (the After School Education and Safety program and 21st Century Community Learning Centers are the two primary examples) that can compliment and enhance the Increased Learning Time SIG requirements. By implementing a broader vision for partnering with afterschool providers the field could restructure the school day/year so all students have access to increased learning and enrichment time. This might include offering afterschool programs to all students on the campus, summer programs that build on the afterschool infrastructure, or allowing afterschool providers to offer enrichment programs during the traditional school day freeing up teachers to engage in collaboration/professional development time. Each of these program designs require the development of deeper partnerships – a more “all hands on deck” effort – than the traditional approach, and could incorporate strategies to ensure quality such as shared planning time, joint data reflection and professional development opportunities. It may not be the right fit for all schools, but where you have the right partners in place we think it could dramatically impact student outcomes.
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Any word on cohort 2?
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Chris,
As of yesterday (Tuesday, Aug. 16), the State Department of Education had not heard from the U.S. Department of Education regarding California’s request for a one-year waiver and roll-over of funds for cohort 2.
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Samantha,
School may contract with private providers and consultants, however the curriculum and instruction being proposed must be put in writing for approval by the State Department of Education (which is also the case for school-run programs). It’s my understanding that summer and weekend programs do not qualify because they exclude students who cannot attend for any number of personal reasons.
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Dear Kathryn,
Levels of student achievement and levels of student proficiency are based in part on factors schools can control and in part on factors that schools cannot control. Until the state has a longitudinal student-level data system and implements a value-added model to estimate school effectiveness, it is not accurate to say that SIG schools are the “worst performing.” In fact, some of these schools may be very effective at increasing what students know and can do, but this effectiveness may not be apparent if students enter school with very low skill levels and if students’ learning is hindered by out-of-school factors as they progress through school.
The expressions “schools with low levels of student achievement” or “schools with low levels of student proficiency,” while not as catchy as “worst-performing schools,” are accurate. Until we have better information–and a statewide longitudinal student-level data system–it is inaccurate to label these schools as being the “worst performing.”
Among other factors, the lack of a student-level data system will also hinder our ability to analyze the effectiveness of SIG. Just as we may never know whether No Child Left Behind, major restructuring, class size reduction of 1996, and many other programs were effective, it is unlikely that we will ever know whether SIG turns out to be effective.
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Love the Chinese restaurant metaphor.
Perhaps we should call this menu item “Sum Dum SIG.”
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I think requiring intentionality around program design/curriculum makes a lot of sense. On the summer piece, it may not be possible given the timing, but you could envision making it the expectations that all students participate in an expanded year (e.g. pushing into the summer weeks, reducing the intersession break time, starting earlier) that incorporates partnerships with CBOs, especially as the traditional school year is quickly shrinking in some communities and LEAs may be in the position to cut additional days in 2012.
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This conversation reminds me so much of the schoolwide (as opposed to targeted assistance) Title One program: in schoolwide programs, the funding the school receives from the feds is to benefit ALL students (regardless of whether they generate the dollars or not). My kids attended schools which were classified as schoolwide Title One yet they did not need any of these benefits, including Supplemental Educational Services; indeed, in a number of schools in LAUSD, there are plenty of students who do not need the benefits generated by Title One funding… on the other hand, because the District sets the threshold at 40%, if a school has a free/reduced lunch population of 39.5, the school is disqualified from receiving Title One funds and all the students at the school who DO qualify don’t receive any benefits.
How does this practice ethically serve children?
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@TransParent: I am not very fluent in Title 1 regs so if I am wrong I hope someone will correct me, but I believe there are two major classes of T1 funding — those for Title 1 schools, and those for Title 1 students. One must set some threshold to qualify for schoolwide Title 1 funds otherwise there would be no distinction between T1 school and non-T1 school. At the same time T1 students in any school (or just in non-T1 school?) get funds based on their count and targeted explicitly at services for them, rather than for the school.
In other words, T1 students in non-T1 school still get T1 some benefits.
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Ze’ev,
There are two basic types of Title I funding. Schools with 40% or more of their students receiving free or reduced lunch are schoolwide program schools and can use the money for all students. Schools with 35% or more of their students on free-reduced lunch are targeted Title I schools and use the funds to help students in the highest risk categories. So non-Title I students in the former group will likely receive the benefits of Title I programs.
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I want to echo Samantha’s comments about the opportunity to partner with and leverage our state’s significant investment in after school programs. Roughly 4,000 schools in our state have after school program grants, with a vast number of program providers as well as a professional development infrastructure. There’s alot we know about what works in extended/expanded learning time that should be tapped into.
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