Comment by Chester E. Finn Jr.
[Can Title I Attain Its Goal?]
The fine paper by George Farkas and L. Shane Hall makes me angry. Not, let me hasten to add, at the writers, for I have only the smallest quibbles with what they have done. No, I am angry at the mounting signs that the 1999-2000 federal legislative cycle will, once again, make Title I worse, or at least not better, despite tons of evidence--much of it recapitulated in Farkas and Hall's paper--that the program is failing and needs a top-to-bottom overhaul that probably is not going to happen. Much the same can be said of the entire Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in which it is embedded.
The central problem is that, after three and a half decades, this largest of all federal K-12 education programs is encrusted with vested interests, hoary assumptions, and lots of inertia. The efficacy of the activities that it pays for, and the educational well-being of the disadvantaged youngsters who are its putative focus, seem substantially less important than the maintenance of the program's vast apparatus and the flow of its dollars.
As of mid-summer 1999, the White House view is clear. Its mantra is "Stay the course." Senior officials contend that Title I was properly redirected in 1994 and now needs only minor tweaking. They have no doubt that the five-year-old press for "schoolwide" programs is well warranted and that the complex, top-down, command-and-control accountability structures enacted in 1994 are the proper framework for program success. The pending White House ESEA proposal would double and redouble the amount and intrusiveness of top-down control. It reminds me of the old merchant's joke line: "We lose money on every item we sell, so we're planning to make it up in volume."
Congress is at sixes and sevens, lacking significant ideas of its own except for a general sense that the program's accountability features ought to be strengthened in some nebulous way so that it will work better. Members and staff seem unwilling or unable to imagine anything different from Title I's current, basic assumptions, and they act as if they are terrified lest the money go anywhere different from where it has always gone.
Two proposals for change are worth considering. Each would make significant changes in ESEA, though only for states that opt to embrace them. The Academic Achievement for All ("Straight A's") proposal would treat states much like giant charter schools, allowing them great freedom [End Page 104] from ESEA's regulatory regime in return for markedly improved academic results, including those of their disadvantaged youngsters. And Senator Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) has suggested a "child-centered" funding option for Title I under which the dollars (in participating states) would accompany eligible children to the school of their choice.
Each proposal signals a radical shift. The first would replace Title I's historic emphasis on inputs and regulations with a sharp focus on academic results. The second would shift the basic funding strategy away from aiding districts and instead make the federal dollars assist individual children. Radical, but optional. Neither proposal would alter the underlying program for the rest of the country, nor is either assured of enactment.
Staying the present course would be okay if Title I were a successful program that was accomplishing its historic mission of narrowing the achievement gap between disadvantaged and middle-class kids. But everyone knows by now that, thirty-five years after President Lyndon B. Johnson persuaded Congress to enact it, this is not happening, the evidence of gap narrowing is trivial or transitory, and millions of poor children are not learning basic skills in school. Yet in response to all the evaluations and evidence that Title I is failing, one of three things is typically heard:
First, it is not a real program anyway, it is more like a funding stream. It has long since proven its ability to move federal money into nearly every school district and congressional district. That is all that should be expected from it.
Second, it is beginning to succeed--anecdotes are popular in this connection--but unfortunately the evaluations are too slow to capture that truth satisfactorily. In other words, its imminent success is masked by sluggish analysis. (Never mind that this has been said during every previous reauthorization cycle.)
Third, it may not be working well now, but it would if it had more money, more accountability mechanisms, more this, or more that. In this view, nothing is wrong with the program's theory or structure. Instead, its implementation is stingy or cowardly.
Those are the most common rejoinders to allegations of program failure. As for alternatives--radical overhauls--they are making little headway against the combination of inertia, Panglossian rhetoric, and entrenched interests. I detect no passion for trying to re-create this important program along fundamentally different lines. [End Page 105]
That is why I am angry. This huge program essentially wastes $8 billion a year and fails to keep its promise to America's neediest girls and boys. The reasons for its failure have been identified. No dearth of promising ideas exists for how to fix it. But none is expected to be embraced by the 106th Congress, by the executive branch, or by the major education interest groups. As for other influential groups that might offset the establishment's wimpishness, business, governors, civil rights organizations, editorial writers, and the Christian right have all been relatively quiet. Everyone seems to be saying "I don't have a dog in that fight."
The Farkas and Hall paper does a superb job of summarizing the shortcomings of the present Title I program, the basic errors built into the 1994 amendments, and some of the most promising ideas for fundamental reform. Their analysis does not rely on theory, opinion, or ideology. It is grounded in wide-ranging experience, observation, and research. And it leads to a handful of strong, coherent recommendations for change. Allow me to restate their five chief proposals and add a few comments:
1. Reduce dollar displacement--which means make Title I funds available for supplemental services instead of ordinary school operations--and focus those services on the lowest performing youngsters in the earliest grades. In other words, pour extra instruction into the youngest children with the widest learning gaps and at least get them literate. This seems to me indisputable good sense, but it would undo key provisions of the 1994 amendments, which neither the Clinton administration nor the public school establishment wants to do. It would undermine the schoolwide approach, which does not seem to be working for the neediest kids anyway. It would reestablish some version of add-on programs for seriously disadvantaged youngsters, which goes against the grain of contemporary education sensibilities. (It sounds too much like tracking.) It would shift money from middle and high schools into the primary grades. But these changes must be made to help the children who need it most.
2. Send some of the money into low-income schools for principals and teachers to use at their discretion to assist their at-risk pupils. I wish the authors had said more about how this would work, particularly when they also argue that there is need for a coherent nationwide Title I strategy. Either I am missing a crucial conceptual link or an internal contradiction exists between site-based decisions and nationwide uniformity. I suspect they are offering a financial cookie to those who cherish schoolwide programs and decentralized decisionmaking while also trying to [End Page 106] get teachers and principals to buy into the other program changes they are proposing.
3. Use some of the money to create a "Title I account" to be drawn upon by the parents of low-income students, particularly for after-school tutoring and summer programs. This is a good start toward parent empowerment, which Title I has never done. My own instinct is to go considerably further to place decisions in the hands of parents by insisting that the full per pupil Title I payment be made portable so that all the money accompanies the child to the school (or other education provider) of the family's choice, albeit within boundaries set by the state. The basic Title I funding stream should be redirected from school systems to individual children, much as happened with federal higher education aid in the early 1970s. But this smells like vouchers and is therefore deeply controversial. (That does not make it wrong.)
4. Tie funding to demonstrable and audited improvements in the use of scientifically validated curricula, training, and management. This is key to the authors' notion of a coherent national program strategy. It tends to fly in the face of the idea of empowering parents and giving teachers and principals discretionary funds, but this program is big enough--and sick enough--that several cures can be tried at once. The likeliest way to do this is to allow states to structure their Title I programs differently from one another. Simply requiring federal Title I dollars to be spent for scientifically validated curricula and methods would work a revolution in the program.
5. Engage in a serious effort to improve the scientific basis and outcomes orientation of the education profession in general and ed schools in particular. This one made me grin. Nobody would term the authors naïve, but this recommendation has a pie-in-the-sky quality to it. Today's education profession has lamentably little respect for science when it clashes with ideology and is palpably leery of heavy emphasis on outcomes.
Taken as a whole, the recommendations proffered by Farkas and Hall are bold and worthy. They are also complicated and, perhaps, a bit inconsistent. My own diagnosis of Title I is a little simpler. From where I sit, Title I has three central failings:
First, as noted by these authors and many other analysts, it is not producing the desired results in terms of student achievement.
Second, it does not begin to serve all needy children. Close to half of America's low-income kids receive no Title I services because of intricate [End Page 107] formulas, federally imposed spending priorities, and the fact that the basic program was designed to support school systems instead of kids.
Third, Title I funds today do not accompany eligible children to the schools of their choice. Youngsters who get Title I services in one public school cannot count on getting them in another public school. This leaves parents powerless to improve bad situations for their daughters and sons, places a major federal impediment in the path to school choice, and holds school systems harmless from their own failures by assuring them a continued flow of federal dollars based on demographic formulas, not program effectiveness or customer satisfaction.
The single most important reform that could be made in Title I would be to turn the program into a portable entitlement, one that serves all poor children, at least in the early grades, and whose dollars accompany them to the school or other education provider of their parents' choice, with the range of those choices delimited by state law. If Congress does not have the stomach to impose so sweeping a change on the whole country, it should at least allow states that are so inclined to restructure and operate their Title I programs this way.
And if that is too much to swallow, then Congress should, at the very least, allow kids trapped in failed Title I programs--the country has hundreds of schools like that--to take their money to other providers. Florida recently has agreed (amid much controversy) to let children leave failing public schools for other schools (including private schools), yet the federal Title I funds will not move with them. The federal dollars will stay in the failed public schools until and unless the district chooses to move them. Worse, if a youngster goes from a mostly poor public school to a middle-class public school in search of a better education, in most circumstances the district is barred by federal law from moving those dollars. Although this is meant to keep Title I dollars targeted on the "highest need" schools, what it often does is keep those dollars subsidizing the payrolls of failed schools. This cannot be good policy. At the very least, a student's right to select another school should be part of the Title I accountability apparatus. Federal policy should be neutral with respect to school choice. Washington should not force states or communities to go farther in that direction than they are inclined to, but it should not get in their way. Federal dollars should be as portable as a state is willing to let its own dollars be.
