Reinterpreting Urban School Reform: Have Urban Schools Failed, or Has the Reform Movement Failed Urban Schools?

3. Federal Title I as a Reform Strategy in Urban Schools

55 Chapter 3 Federal Title I as a Reform Strategy in Urban Schools Kenneth K. Wong In public education, the federal government has focused on social redistribution by promoting racial integration, protecting the educational rights of the handicapped, assisting those with limited English proficiency, and providing supplemental resources to children who come from at-risk backgrounds. By far the largest federal program in elementary and secondary education is Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which was originally passed in 1965 at the height of the civil rights movement and social reforms. Despite several revisions and extensions , ESEA Title I continued to adhere to its original redistributive goal of federal assistance to learning-deficient children from low-income families. As declared in the 1965 Act, ESEA Title I was designed “to provide financial assistance to local educational agencies serving areas with concentrations of children from low-income families to expand and improve their educational programs . . . which contribute particularly to meeting the special educational needs of educationally deprived children.” (U.S. Congress 1965, Sec. 201) Thirty years later, the 1994 Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA), which reauthorized Title I, sharpened the focus on academic accountability in Title I schools. In 2002, Congress again took on the task of reauthorization. These latest, bold legislative extensions of Title I constitute a new phase in the policy development of Title I during the course of its thirty-five year history. In this chapter we will not only synthesize the lessons learned from the current literature but also trace the major phases of policy development TABLE 3.1 The Broadening Agenda in Title I Reform and Implementation 1960s–1980s 1988–Present 1994–Present Dominant Policy Paradigm • Antipoverty • Antipoverty • Antipoverty • Reduce regulatory • Reduce regulatory • compliance • compliance • Improve achievement Programmatic Mechanisms • Categorical funding • Schoolwide as experiment • Assessment standards to • Targeting aid to • for high-poverty schools • measure accountability • eligible students • Targeted assistance for • Adequate yearly progress • other schools • Schoolwide in full-scale • expansion • CSRD—adoption of knowledge • based practices Issues in Implementation • Local noncompliance • Pull-out of students • Quality of student data-driven • remains dominant • measurements • Coordination of curriculum/ • Mixed student performance as • instruction as a challenge • basis for extensive reform • (including vouchers and • district/state direct intervention) that the federal policy has gone through over the last thirtyfive years. To avoid confusion, we have used Title I throughout this paper even though the program’s label was changed during the 1980s. For analytical purposes, we differentiate three phases in the development of Title I policy over time. Each of these phases, though interrelated, is connected to a particular policy challenge, faced with a distinct set of political factors, and involved with new institutional practices. Rationales behind these changes are also discussed. As shown in Table 3.1, the policy agenda in Title I has expanded from its original intent to address poverty in the 1960s to include instructional coherence and student achievement in the 1990s. The first policy phase (1960s to 1980s) involved intergovernmental accommodation on targeting federal Title I funds on low-income children. Much of the research on Title I during the first ten to fifteen years focused on local response to federal direction in Title I as a “categorical” program. During this phase, local control was being challenged by federal antipoverty objectives. The second phase emerged during the late 1980s when policymakers and educators began to pay greater attention to the quality of instruction and curriculum in the Title I program. With the passage of the 1994 Improving America’s Schools Act, the schoolwide program gained prominence as a leading reform strategy to reduce “fragmentation” between Title I and the regular classroom in schools with high concentrations of poor children. Indeed, the number of schoolwide programs increased from about 1,300 in 1990 to over 9,000 in 1998, or a jump from 10 percent to 50 percent of the eligible schools. The third phase began around the mid-1990s when competing visions shaped the agenda to raise student performance in Title I schools. Frustrated by the lack of significant academic progress in most Title I schools, reformers made serious attempts to restructure Title I in three different directions, namely, whole school reform, district-based support, and consumer-based or voucher program. Taken as a whole, Title I has reduced its focus on regulatory compliance but increased its emphasis on outcomebased accountability. This chapter will examine the...