Group items tagged

As education lawyers who work with states and school districts on federal education programs, part of our job is to advise clients on those programs' fiscal and administrative compliance rules. For the most part these compliance rules are largely unknown and rarely discussed among the education policy crowd and other important stakeholders, like parents and teachers. Federal compliance requirements like supplement not supplant or time distribution (also known as time and effort) are not exactly hot topics of conversation. They should be.

DOE is not in compliance with the SED's Physical Education Regulations for elementary-level students and middle-level students in elementary schools. DOE does not have an overall written physical education plan nor does it monitor schools' compliance with the regulations. Therefore, DOE has no assurance that the students in elementary schools are receiving the minimum required physical education. In fact, our review of a sample of 31 elementary schools found limited evidence that any of the sampled schools were in compliance with the SED physical education requirements for all of its students.

In this final post, we propose strategies for tackling the compliance rules that interfere with good educational programming. As we explored this week, these rules shape the culture of education organizations because they create compliance fears that discourage effective spending. This makes little sense, especially in an era where every dollar matters.

In our last post, we introduced the idea that federal compliance rules can have an unintended effect on what goes on in the classroom by encouraging defensive spending, discouraging comprehensive programs, and creating administrative burdens that take away resources from students. Over the next two days we will give examples of how two seemingly unrelated rules - supplement not supplant, and time and effort - interfere with comprehensive school improvement.

NCLB's fixation on testing has sabotaged the law's noble intention. Schools have become focused on compliance rather than on innovation and achievement. We've become obsessed with hitting test-score targets and sanctioning schools and educators; instead, we should be focused on improving teaching and learning. We've narrowed the curriculum; instead we should be paving a path to critical thinking and problem solving -- the very kinds of knowledge and skills our children need to be well-educated and to compete in today's global economy.

For years, the plaintiffs in the case have argued that charter schools are not serving their share of special education students and that the Illinois State Board of Education has found compliance problems. Lawyers for ISBE and CPS (the defendants in the case) have recently argued that the situation has improved enough that monitoring is no longer needed. But a response filed in February by a lawyer for the plaintiffs notes that a detailed look at the disability population in charters shows some broad differences. Among the points made by the lawyer is that the overall percentage of students with disabilities in charter elementary schools is 25 percent lower than in regular elementary schools.

Tucson's Mexican American studies program remains in violation of state law, Arizona's public schools chief ruled Friday, ordering that millions in state funding be withheld from the school district until the program is dismantled or brought into compliance.

In some cases, charter schools are managed by for-profit entities (referred to in this article as "management companies"). The management agreements documenting these relationships range from agreements to provide general administrative support to agreements to provide virtually every service to be offered by the charter school, including curriculum, payroll, compliance reporting, providing teachers and staff through employee leasing, and the purchase and leasing of facilities. Many charter schools are intended to be operated as 501(c)(3) public charities. Historically, the Internal Revenue Service ("IRS") has carefully reviewed other types of charitable organizations operated by management companies to determine whether they qualify as a tax-exempt charities because they are, in fact, operating for the private benefit of the for-profit management company. However, the IRS has not brought a similar focus on this issue to charter schools generally - until now. The IRS is poised to increase its scrutiny of charter school/management company relationships and is now subjecting charter schools to more stringent standards defining such relationships.

KIPP, Inc. offers a draconian test factory model that specializes in its own patented varieties of behavioral sterilization and cultural neutering.  KIPP's Madison Avenue advertising campaign focuses on KIPP test scores, which are often higher than public school scores.  But then spending 60 percent more time in school drilling within a total compliance regime that regularly shoves out low performers has its own kinds of perverse rewards.