The federal government has been involved in public schools for decades. Yet, the relationship between the federal government and the states has evolved and recalibrated regularly over that period.

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election is widely viewed as a signal of change for the federal government’s role in American society generally, and education in particular. Following on the heels of the recent enactment of the new Every Student Succeeds Act in December of 2015, which once again rewrote the rules of the federal government’s role in the nation’s schools, the future of federal education policy is now fluid and uncertain.

On January 4, the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings will host a public forum examining the history and future of federal education policy. This event, marking the culmination of the Memos to the President on the Future of Education Policy series, will convene leaders and scholars with a variety of perspectives to discuss the federal government’s involvement with public schools.

After the session, panelists will take audience questions.

      

 

 

Download a PDF of this memo.

THE SITUATION

Untested initiatives, often based on little more than hunches, abound today across education as the field seeks to alter the aims of instruction from rote learning to learning skills, a curiosity for knowledge, and critical thinking. Some of the initiatives originate from new, yet incomplete, research evidence, while others have little evidence base at all. Either way, these initiatives often become a panoply of top-down mandates thrust upon teachers, schools, and districts without regard to local contexts and conditions, existing initiatives, and the preparation required to implement them at the scales envisioned in the short time periods allotted. This is an all too common recipe for failure. 

Authors

A

Anthony Bryk

Anthony Bryk is President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Helen F. Ladd

Nonresident Senior Fellow - Governance Studies, Brown Center on Education Policy

J

Jennifer O’Day

Jennifer O’Day is an Institute Fellow at the American Institutes for Research.

Marshall (Mike) Smith

Marshall (Mike) S. Smith is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and previously served as the Under Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education.

The variability among states, districts, and schools poses another daunting national problem: how to assure reliable, quality educational outcomes, day in and day out, for different subgroups of students across the diverse backdrops of schooling in America?

Additional resources may be necessary, but we also know from past experiences that simply adding more money, more materials, more technology, or even more people doesn’t guarantee improvement. Neither does adding new interventions that may have been shown to work in one situation but haven’t been tested to determine if they’re likely to succeed or be adaptable in other contexts. Put simply, what works in some places often doesn’t work in many others.

The lack of generalizability raises a core concern: how can organizations get better at what they do while confronting a continuing stream of new demands posed by rapidly changing external environments such as new policy requirements or shifting economic conditions?

A new context for improvement

This memo addresses the question of how federal and state policy can help build the infrastructure to support a systematic and continuous improvement approach to find solutions for many of the major educational problems facing the country. In order to substantially increase achievement, college readiness, and graduation for all students, especially low-income, African American, and Hispanic students, U.S. classrooms, schools, districts, and state offices must become continuous improvement organizations.

Passage of the ESSA law provides part of the answer. ESSA does two things that support the improvement effort. First, it reduces the intensity of top-down pressure and cedes a great deal more responsibility to the states and districts to address their problems of improvement. Second, it continues efforts of the federal and state governments over the past decade to create high-quality data systems throughout the nation and to train people to use them.

The evolution of improvement science itself holds new answers. After 60 years of being honed and refined by industry, improvement science has increasingly been adopted by social services, with dramatic efforts in health care around effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of patient experience. Improvement science promotes this adoption through its disciplined focus on processes:

• Seeing the complexity of the system that creates unsatisfactory outcomes in order to identify workable solutions
• Conducting rapid, small-scale testing of proposed interventions and embracing failures as learning opportunities
• Continuously testing outcomes with data, then revising, redesigning, and iterating to achieve quality outcomes reliably across varied local conditions

These ideas have been part of the education literature under many names and in many forms. In recent years, there has been a substantial upturn in the number of schools and districts applying the basic principles, methods, and tools of improvement science to implement change with notable successes in student achievement and motivation and professional collaboration. Districts have also improved efficiency and effectiveness of Human Resources, IT, and other operational departments that directly or indirectly support the efforts of teachers, principals, students, and their families.

The major challenge now is to take these strategies to scale—to reach more education systems and to implement them more deeply to benefit both the children and adults in those systems.

Effective continuous improvement within educational organizations

We begin with two quite different examples of systems of schools that have applied improvement strategies to increase their effectiveness and efficiency.

A turnaround in suspensions: The School District of Menominee Falls, Wisconsin, had a higher suspension rate than nearby districts in the 2010-11 school year. The district used improvement science strategies to implement restorative practice and positive behavior interventions and support projects.

Understanding a situation from the users’ perspectives is a key principle in improvement science in education, just as it is in successful businesses all over the world. The school district focused on identifying situations where inappropriate behavior most often happens and worked to prevent it by directly engaging students in the problem-solving process. District teams documented changes and continuously refined and adapted strategies based on a rapid series of iterative tests referred to as the Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) cycles. Every 45 days the principals reported the results to the School Board, analyzing which tools were making the greatest impact. As a result, students are no longer removed from their schools and the learning culture in the schools has shown marked improvements as documented through periodic student, staff, and parent survey data. In the five years since Menominee Falls introduced these measures, the district’s suspension rate has fallen by 63 percent.

Bringing the college promise to all: High Tech High, a renowned system of 13 public charter schools in San Diego County, California, serving a racially and socioeconomically diverse student population, saw significant gaps in college readiness and college-going rates between students of color and low-income students compared to their wealthier and white classmates.

Using improvement science methods and tools, High Tech High identified key processes that were impeding student success and iteratively experimented and measured changes to determine the most effective improvements. In three years, High Tech High reduced the gap in honors course completion between students of color and white students from 18 percent to 2 percent; lowered the failure rate among young men of color from 7 percent to 1 percent; increased overall four-year college attendance from 67 percent to 73 percent, cutting in half the gap for low-income students; and cut chronic absenteeism from 11 percent to 2 percent. High Tech High now uses the improvement science approach as part of a continuous process to review how well its school system is doing at making education better for all students.

Other notable examples of continuous improvement district approaches are taking place across the country and around the world. Public schools in Fresno, Garden Grove, and Long Beach, California; Austin, Texas; and Montgomery County, Maryland; and colleges, such as Georgia State, have improved student achievement and graduation rates, increased the number of students taking college preparatory courses, and improved the quality of district support systems, including the human resource departments in their districts. Efforts to bring improvement science into education are now underway in such numerous and varied countries as New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Chile, and Sweden.

Using networks to accelerate improvements at scale

Educational problems such as those illustrated above are widespread across the nation’s schools. Improvement efforts, when they occur, have been based almost entirely on the initiative of local education officials. Typically, each teacher, school, or district tries to solve these problems on its own as if no one else shares the same problem, and without access to (or building on) the progress that others have already made. This is a very slow mechanism for learning to improve and inhibits realized gains from spreading easily.

In the last 10 plus years, we have begun to see growth of a second approach for achieving greater improvement success at scale—networked improvement communities (NICs). Their strength is drawn from district leaders, teachers, and researchers working together and sharing the knowledge of their expertise to define problems, determine what caused them, and design and refine changes to address them. This collaborative process allows NICs to more easily innovate, accelerate progress on complex problems, and more rapidly diffuse results. Coordinated small tests of change may occur across diverse sites and, based on the results, the network revises, refines, and tries again and again until it gets positive outcomes to occur reliably across diverse conditions. Following are two of the successful examples of this approach.

The Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) collaborated with the Minority Student Achievement Network, a national coalition of suburban and small urban districts, to address the longstanding achievement gap in Algebra 1 classes in different schools. Researchers and teachers from eight districts joined together to explore what created the gap and how various districts tried to remedy the problem. This information gave them evidence to design and conduct rapid testing cycles on a curricular plug-in called AlgebraByExample that could work in a variety of classrooms.

A subsequent field test of AlgebraByExample in the networked schools found that students who used the program had higher gains on state assessments than peers with the same teachers who did not use the program. Additionally, students at the lower end of the performance distribution had the greatest increases. As a result, this work has now spread to numerous districts well beyond the Minority Student Achievement Network.

In 2011, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching began to work with a diverse group of academic researchers and college teachers to develop two alternative pathways to success for college students in remedial courses called Statway and Quantway. Designed to use continuous improvement principles to target low passage and matriculation rates among students placed in non-credit bearing remedial courses, these pathways show considerable promise and are now implemented in more than 50 colleges. Based on one of the author’s analyses, students in these pathways are estimated to be three times as likely to pass developmental math and earn college math credit within one year as compared to what a matched sample of traditionally-remediated students achieve in two years. Moreover, improvements have been documented in almost all colleges, with most achieving success rates in excess of 60 percent. [Full disclosure: Two of the authors work for Carnegie, which is a nonprofit corporation that offers Statway and Quantway on a fee-for-service basis.]

RECOMMENDATIONS

The goal of new federal policies should be to nudge and support state and local systems in the direction of continuous improvement and expand the infrastructure of research-practice improvement networks. This goal leads to two major recommendations.

1. Create an improvement infrastructure that supports schools, districts, and states.

A compliance orientation around implementing programs and policies pushed down from above has become normal in schools. A major change is needed. To solve the problems ahead, local educators must become active agents in improving their own work. The federal government needs to enable and support them to make their schools work better.

ESSA resources can be used to develop more effective and improvement-oriented state agencies along with their regional and county offices. Likewise, these resources can be used to deepen the improvement capabilities of current school district staff. The U.S. Department of Education should make clear in guidance to states and districts that in almost all instances it is appropriate to use ESSA funds for these purposes.

The new administration might also consider small incentive grants to colleges and universities to include specific preparation in improvement research in all teacher, principal, and superintendent training programs. This proposal could be accomplished in the Higher Education Act, which is due for reauthorization. It fits with the capacity-building function of the federal government and with other recommendations from the project (see this Friday’s memo from Doug Harris about the federal role in research).

Complementing a direct focus on strengthening state and local capacity, the federal government needs to catalyze stronger engagement of educational researchers in practical problem-solving. Federal efforts for more than a decade, principally through the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), have created incentives for researchers to undertake rigorous studies of programs and policy impact. A similar initiative should now be undertaken to bring relevant academic expertise into more active engagement with school improvement. This can take many different forms, including: a) expanding the scope of the Regional Labs; b) increasing the funding for IES and other agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, to support research-practice partnerships; and c) providing direct support for Networked Improvement Communities focused on solving high-leverage problems as illustrated above. There are a variety of other sources for funds that support a better understanding of how to implement improvement efforts including, for example, the evaluation provision of ESSA, Section 8042.

2. Creating cultures of improvement and new forms of accountability at state and district levels.

For 22 years we have lived with an accountability system that relies primarily on one source of data—student test scores—collected once per year. Schools and districts were held accountable for substantially improving these outcomes, often without the necessary support and capabilities to have a realistic chance of actually achieving these goals.

In a culture of improvement, everyone is expected to continually audit themselves to ensure that their work and their organization is as effective and efficient as possible. Everyone has a stake in the quality of the organization and, therefore, everyone is obligated to participate in continuous improvement. With the end of NCLB, the states and districts are in a position to develop new forms of accountability specifically designed to promote school improvement.

Such accountabilities require broader and more diverse types of data to determine the quality and effectiveness of internal policies and practices of schools and districts, in addition to student achievement and attainment. Many states, such as California and New Hampshire, are already exploring new accountability systems that make their environments friendlier to a culture of improvement. The Department of Education should encourage such innovation.

Information produced by inspection systems could be a significant contributor in this regard. Other countries and some states use an inspection system to review the quality and effectiveness of schools and districts. The systems use formal rubrics or protocols to produce consistent measures of quality, which inspire improvement at the local site. In New Zealand and the Netherlands, teams of reviewers make periodic visits to each school and write public reports highlighting strengths and weaknesses. When they find evidence of shortcomings, they require the school to develop and initiate a plan to address the problems. The school is then reviewed again after some time to assess the progress toward improvement. Although some inspection systems have been clearly summative and judgmental, others are continually evolving. New Zealand’s system, for example, is specifically intended to be more formative, with the inspection process itself driving and supporting school improvement. New York state is currently carrying out a trial inspectorate system in a variety of districts.

Federal financial support to states and districts for efforts such as these is important because these improvement activities will require additional resources to get off the ground and may entail ongoing expenses beyond traditional test-based accountability reports.

CONCLUSION

We live in an era in which schools are under extraordinary pressure. The idea that each school or district is left to its own devices to improve yields a weak mechanism, one that guarantees continued great variability in performance. Such variability typically shortchanges those who are already most disadvantaged. The federal government can help overcome this disparity by supporting policies that build new infrastructures for improvement.

Support for this project was generously provided by the Spencer Foundation. Brookings recognizes that the value it provides is in its absolute commitment to quality, independence, and impact. Activities supported by its donors and by outside contributors reflect this commitment. The authors did not report receipt of financial support from any firm or person for this memorandum or from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article that creates a conflict of interest.

Suggested citation:

Bryk, A., Ladd, H. F., O’Day, J., & Smith, M. S. (2016). A shift in the federal role needed to promote school improvement. In M. Hansen & J. Valant (Eds.), Memos to the President on the Future of U.S. Education Policy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

      

 

 

The nation’s economic and civic future depends on the success of its students who are “English Learners” (ELs), mostly immigrants and children of immigrants. English Learners, formerly known as “Limited English-Proficient (LEP) students,” have been recognized in federal law and policies since the 1960s. Attention to these students has moved from periphery to the center as their numbers have increased—about one in ten students are ELs and one in five come from homes where another language is spoken. They are also more widely distributed across the nation, with rapid growth in states not commonly considered points of immigrant entry such as Arkansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Without appropriate educational supports, ELs are less likely than their peers to succeed in school and are more likely to drop out.

Download a PDF of this memo.

Historically, the classroom focus for these students has been on learning English, with ELs often pulled out of class for language instruction. This results in having less instructional time for other subjects. But academic learning (in mathematics, science, social studies, etc.) does not happen in isolation from language, nor does language development happen in an academic vacuum. Language development and academic learning occur in tandem. Thus, a key challenge in effectively educating ELs involves moving beyond language when defining their educational needs and potential. 

The potential for the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) to drive improvement for ELs is best seen in the context of larger changes in assessment and accountability, as well as in specific provisions for ELs. ESSA represents the third phase of standards-based reform following the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994 and No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. ELs have been included in standards-based frameworks since the beginning, albeit largely via accessibility provisions in state academic assessments or the development of alternative assessments. NCLB introduced English Language Proficiency (ELP) assessments aligned to state ELP standards, and added a separate track of district accountability for ELP progress and attainment under Title III. This provision gave state directors of Title III programs a modicum of authority in working with their local agency counterparts in supporting districts identified for improvement.

ESSA significantly changes EL accountability. In addition to academic achievement in math, language arts, and science, the law now includes EL student progress toward English Language Proficiency as a central element of Title I accountability, thus “upgrading” the status of the ELP assessment within states. ELP standards and assessment are now integral to state ESSA accountability plans and subject to the same scrutiny as academic standards and assessment. For the first time in many states, directors of state accountability and Title I are seriously discussing the meaning and impact of English language proficiency, and state school chiefs, boards, and community organizations are beginning to take notice. As a result, Title III directors who are the internal advocates for these students within state education agencies are now more frequently at the table for state plan and accountability discussions. However, the longstanding bureaucratic and policy structure surrounding Title I (with a much larger appropriation) could pose institutional and program barriers to effectively integrating EL concerns into the Title I framework.

Principles for English Learners policy

To provide context for the recommendations that follow, we suggest two principles to guide policy, each of which would promote high-quality education for ELs:

• First, we should support holistic learning of academic content along with English language, as opposed to a targeted focus on English language development to the exclusion or reduction of other subjects. Students are deprived of a richness of learning by keeping content separated from language. Consistent with learning theory, policy should integrate “academic content” and “English language” in the classroom. This will require policies that build systemic supports that include standards, assessment tasks/tools, accountability systems, curriculum/materials, professional development, leadership capacity, and research.
• Second, we should move from a deficit to an asset model of bilingualism and help ELs to remain bilingual. This would recognize that bilingualism is a cultural, community, economic, and national security resource, with well-documented advantages both for the individual and society. The U.S. language policy has been a default model of immigrants rapidly shifting into monolingual English. The policy problem is that both the OCR/DOJ approach and ESEA/ESSA are oriented toward remedying deficits in English, not toward building on student cultural heritage and assets leading to more powerful learning, engaged citizenship, and national enrichment.

RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Develop policy that further promotes the integration of English learning and academic content in instruction, assessment, and accountability.

Cost: Low, if leveraging unproductive professional development costs now in place

Language and academic content learning are most effective when done in tandem; instruction, assessment, accountability, and support for educators need to take both into account without favoring one over the other. Under ESSA, local and state education agencies (LEAs and SEAs) have greater flexibility in how progress is coordinated and measured between English Language Proficiency and in academic achievement. We need to learn from the variation that is likely to result in order to ensure ELs’ full access to academic and elective content in school.

NCLB separated content from language by relegating language to Title III, which has lower priority within the eyes of the state and local systems of assessment. ESSA corrects this by placing English language proficiency as a significant element of the accountability requirements associated with the receipt of Title I. Doing so within the most visible section of federal law sends an important message that must become reflected in other parts of the system. The administration can give high priority to this shift and set up structures, activities, assessments, and capacity building that address this integration of language and content. Research to document best practices in state and local agencies can lead to systemic improvement in learning from these practices.

While federal law states that ELs must be provided full access to content, little has been done to uphold this right and considerable research shows that ELs are denied full access to both core academic content and elective content. Indeed, federal law has inadvertently created loopholes in this educational right by allowing for sequential provision of content (i.e., providing language instruction before content instruction) without delineating when, for whom, and for how long sequential provision of content is appropriate or acceptable. Law and regulation can require the monitoring of ELs’ access to content (something that is rarely done now) by, for example, requiring that EL participation in academic courses be included in Civil Rights data collection.

2. Transform Title III into a national language policy that promotes bilingualism and recognizes that bilingualism is an individual and societal asset.

Cost: Low, if using the bully pulpit to promote bilingualism

Bilingual education should be available to all students. Cognitive neuroscientists have discovered significant benefits of bilingualism, especially in areas of cognition known as “executive function,” which even seems to translate into significant delay in the onset of dementia in later life. The value of bilingualism is growingly recognized by business leaders and parents as well as students, who enroll in two-way immersion programs and aspire to the State Seal of Biliteracy, now recognized in 17 states.

The focus on the deficits of ELs has served to label and stigmatize them while taking attention away from the fact that bilingualism is a virtue and essential in this global economy. Bilingual education is a more direct and effective way for ELs to develop academic rigor rather than waiting for their English to develop in English-only programs.

Using its bully pulpit and regulatory authority, the Department of Education should work with other agencies including the State Department, HHS, Labor, Defense, Homeland Security, and others to recognize the value of bilingualism and how bilingualism serves the national interest. This could include the development of PSAs, social media, and student performance data to raise awareness of the advantages of bilingualism.

3. Require any new innovations to proceed only with consideration of ELs from the start, not as an afterthought. Provide incentives, guidance, and capacity building for states to fully include such opportunities for ELs in a proactive manner.

Cost: Moderate to high

Educational models are finally moving away from the “identify and punish” approaches to accountability that was the hallmark of NCLB. Instead, models are moving toward the philosophy of continuous improvement and local capacity development. As ESSA is implemented over the coming years, there is great opportunity for the federal agencies to lead. They can facilitate learning from different experiences in different states, and point to a better system that promotes continuous improvement and a growth mindset while serving the needs and learning outcomes of all students and maintaining a focus on ELs.

However, there is also great risk for ELs unless appropriate guardrails are in place to ensure their equitable and appropriate and meaningful inclusion. For example, ESSA allows “innovative assessment pilots” to take place in up to seven states, which creates an opportunity for meaningful inclusion of EL needs from the beginning. This includes ensuring that these innovative systems assess both content and English language proficiency. Moreover, the intentional inclusion of EL students in the design of “innovative” large-scale assessments must be extended to all 50 states to support both equity and excellence across all subgroups. The Department of Education should both require and provide incentives and guidance for states to include the assessment of English language proficiency as part of innovative assessment pilots. Such a requirement need not be just for EL students. A simple encouragement that such pilots include the assessment of how all students use language to learn and demonstrate their learning can make a huge difference for meeting the needs of EL students in these important educational innovations.

ESSA providing states with greater flexibility in accountability is another innovation that requires explicit attention to ELs. Examples include how weights are assigned to different indicators, how assessment items and tasks are designed to provide greater access, how long students who are exited ELs can remain in the EL subgroup, and the minimum N-size for the EL subgroup for reporting. State flexibility creates a condition of state-to-state variation from which lessons can be learned about system accountability and improvement. Such findings can inform the next reauthorization of ESEA by providing examples and patterns of effective policy. However, this development will require systematic data collection and analysis by the research community, led by the Institute of Education Sciences, with political support from stakeholders.

4. Expand the National Professional Development program within Title III to build national teacher capacity to support this work.

Cost: Moderate

None of the policies for language enrichment will work without teachers who have the capacity—working as individuals and as teams of teachers—to support the budding bilingualism of students. The National Professional Development program within Title III (targeted to teachers of ELs) should be significantly scaled up through increased funding for effective programs as part of a national effort addressed through Title II (for all teachers). This may include initiatives that address the shortage of qualified bilingual teachers by connecting programs in teacher education with K-12 schools, communities, and community organizations to recruit bilingual students into teaching careers. Online access for such initiatives would enable outreach to rural communities. These policies will tap into the vibrancy of American culture that represents the rich heritage of bilingualism, including its immigrant and native Indian history as well as diversity in the humanities and the arts.

5. Convene a policy summit and commission a policy brief for stakeholders to look at EL classification and definition procedures across states, and to move beyond the EL label to differentiate the needs of subgroups and individuals.

Cost: Low to moderate

ESSA requires states to develop standardized statewide entry and exit criteria for ELs, through broad consultation with LEAs and stakeholders. Implementation of this provision can be leveraged to create a national conversation about EL classification in order to better serve the individual needs of students. The EL classification masks enormous variation among individual students. One student may arrive as a teenage refugee from a war-torn country with little or no formal schooling but able to speak one or more other languages. Another may be born in the US to middle class immigrant parents. Another may migrate across states throughout the year as his or her parents do seasonal agricultural work. Yet another may have a learning disability that impacts both English and first language ability. These students have vastly different needs that can be lost by laws and regulations that treat all ELs as one monolithic group. The federal government can begin to move EL supports forward by creating systems that probe and respond to these individual needs, as is done for special education students under IDEA. The EL classification is the product of the Civil Rights movement, and with this history comes the idea of a protected class and accountable actions by local and state systems. It is time to carefully review the EL definitions and criteria for reclassification, and refine as appropriate to match the learning needs of the different kinds of students represented.

CONCLUSION

There are an estimated 5 million ELs in the US, in addition to an almost equal number of former ELs who have exited the status and are technically bilingual. These students have been painted into a picture of deficit and deprivation that does not fully recognize their assets, shared learning needs, or unrealized potential with all students. Supporting their educational opportunities should be grounded on the two principles upon which the recommendations are founded. First, we should support holistic learning of academic content along with the English language, as opposed to a targeted focus on English language development. And second, we should move from a deficit to an asset model of bilingualism and help ELs to remain bilingual. Policy initiatives consistent with these principles will catalyze the economic, civic, and cultural integration of this significant portion of our student population.

Support for this project was generously provided by the Spencer Foundation. Brookings recognizes that the value it provides is in its absolute commitment to quality, independence, and impact. Activities supported by its donors and by outside contributors reflect this commitment. The authors did not report receipt of financial support from any firm or person for this memorandum or from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article that creates a conflict of interest.

Suggested citation:

Hakuta, K., & Pecheone, R. (2016). Supporting English Learners and treating bilingualism as an asset. In M. Hansen & J. Valant (Eds.), Memos to the President on the Future of U.S. Education Policy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

      

 

 

Too many children in the United States do not have access to affordable, high-quality early childhood care and education (ECE) during their first five years of life. Very good ECE programs can yield large and long-lasting benefits both to individuals and to society. Over the past two decades, strong public support for ECE, increased state investments in preschools, and federal efforts to improve access to high-quality programs have contributed to meaningful improvements in access to affordable early childhood programs, especially for four-year-olds.

Download a PDF of this memo.

Still, many parents of young children cannot find or afford programs that both support their children’s development and meet their needs for reliable child care. The average cost of full-time, center-based care is just under $1,000 a month, and families’ expenditures on child care often exceed that spent on food, rent, or higher education. Public programs meant to assist families find and afford high-quality ECE are disconnected from one another, leaving families to navigate between complex bureaucratic systems. Families who do find a spot are often in mediocre programs that are unlikely to yield meaningful benefits.

The lack of a cohesive system of high-quality, affordable ECE therefore represents a missed opportunity to provide a strong foundation for later learning.

Public investment in early childhood

The federal government currently supports families and children through a host of ECE programs as well as tax provisions that subsidize the cost of child care. These programs are administered by multiple agencies, target different populations, and have different goals. While some programs are child-centered and focus on providing high-quality learning opportunities, others are intended to serve as work supports for parents.

Families with working parents receive some support through the federal Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit and the Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts. Low-income families typically do not benefit from these tax credits. They may, however, be eligible for the federal Head Start and Early Head Start programs, which directly offer early childhood educational programming to low-income children. And they may also be eligible for subsidized care through the federal Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), which provides states with block grant funding to subsidize child care for low-income parents who are employed or attending school. Currently the fund provides over $5 billion dollars to state subsidy programs, and states match and supplement using their own funds.

Notably, neither child-care subsidies nor Head Start are entitlements; not all eligible children are served. One recent analysis suggests that less than one-third of federally eligible children under six years old receive subsidies, approximately 42 percent of eligible three- and four-year-olds attend Head Start, and less than 4 percent of eligible children are served by Early Head Start. Some additional children are served through state or local ECE programs, which have expanded over time. Since the early 2000s, enrollment in state-funded pre-kindergarten programs has doubled. Today, public pre-kindergarten programs in 42 states and DC serve about 29 percent of four-year-olds nationwide. Still, families—and particularly those with infants and toddlers—struggle to find high-quality, or even safe, child care for their children.

A number of recent federal initiatives have sought to improve access to high-quality ECE and to facilitate coordination across agencies. The Improving Head Start Act of 2007, for example, mandated that all states create Early Childhood Advisory Councils to help develop coordinated systems of early childhood education and care. The federal Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) competitively allocated roughly one billion dollars to 20 states since 2011 to improve quality and access in early childhood through coordination across child-care and preschool initiatives. In 2014, the Obama administration set aside $635 million for Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships to help private centers and family child care providers give higher-quality, comprehensive services to low-income children. And the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 authorizes new, competitively allocated Preschool Development Grants specifically aimed at providing coordination across early childhood sectors.

These efforts have signaled an encouraging federal commitment towards systems building, improved access, and a focus on quality. However, even with these heightened investments at the state and federal levels over the past decades, the United States continues to make a much smaller public investment in ECE than peer nations. In 2011, the United States invested less than 0.5 percent of the GDP on child care and early childhood education programs. Only three OECD nations spent less, while eleven of them—including France, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Israel, and Korea—spent at least twice as much. Without a major increase in our public investment in early childhood, high-quality affordable programs will remain out of reach for many American families.

Challenges in the current system

The cost of child care—particularly care for infants and toddlers—is too high for many low-income and middle class families. In 2015, full-time care for preschool-age children ranged from $12,781 per year for center-based care in Massachusetts to $3,675 for family day care in Mississippi. The rates are even higher for programs that serve infants and toddlers who require more individualized attention.

CCDF provides states with considerable discretion in terms of both subsidy eligibility and generosity. Unfortunately, state subsidy generosity has decreased over time, both with respect to eligibility income cutoffs and subsidy size. In 2015 only one state had reimbursement rates at or above 75 percent of the market child-care rate, and the average subsidy for center-based child care was only $4,900, considerably less than the average cost of care. Low reimbursement rates force families to trade off paying out of pocket or choosing a lower-cost option—a trade-off that reduces the chances low-income children will enroll in high-quality programs.

The 2014 CCDF reauthorization introduced changes that are intended to improve the stability of subsidy receipt and improve quality of care. However, these provisions have not been accompanied by a significant increase in federal investment, raising concerns that states will meet the requirements by serving fewer children.

The early childhood workforce is characterized by very low levels of education and pay, and high turnover. Just as they are in K-12, great teachers are essential for providing children with experiences that truly support their development. To date, however, too few discussions about providing high-quality early childhood programs have explicitly stated that improving quality in early childhood requires a major investment in supporting the early childhood workforce. The economic penalty for teaching young children—even relative to teaching elementary school students—is steep. Nationally, kindergarten teachers make an average of $53,000 per year, state-sponsored pre-K teachers with a bachelor’s degree make $43,000, Head Start teachers make $33,000, and other ECE teachers make $29,000. Early childhood teachers with bachelor’s degrees have the lowest lifetime earnings of any college major.

Our current system offers few incentives for workers to stay in the field or to invest in their professional development. Turnover among child-care workers is four times higher than for elementary teachers.

Further, many early care workers lack the knowledge and training needed to effectively support young children’s learning. Even when ECE teachers do invest in their professional development, the courses and trainings they receive often do not focus on the skills and competencies needed to support children’s early learning, and hardly benefit young children.

The early childhood care and education landscape is fragmented and includes programs with starkly different quality regulations, funding streams, and goals. Head Start and pre-kindergarten programs face much stricter quality guidelines than do licensed centers. For example, while Head Start and nearly all pre-kindergarten programs require teachers to complete some pre-service coursework, less than a third of states’ child-care regulations require the same preparation. In part, these differences reflect historical differences in mission. Subsidized child care has primarily served as a work support for low-income families. In contrast, programs like Early Head Start and Head Start are explicitly focused on improving children’s developmental outcomes.

These long-standing distinctions make no sense. Families need programs that simultaneously provide a reliable work support and an engaging learning environment. Further, given the unique importance of children’s earliest years, we cannot be satisfied when the quality of care options available to infants and toddlers is far lower than the quality of programs available to preschoolers.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Overhauling ECE will require a major economic investment. The next president must lead the way by (1) ensuring low-income and middle class families are not forced to make decisions between high-quality and affordable care, (2) supporting efforts to transform the early childhood workforce, and (3) building cohesion within a highly fragmented system.

1. Substantially increase child-care subsidy spending. Direct states to spend the increased funds on both increasing the income eligibility up to 200 percent of the poverty rate and increasing the reimbursement rates so that they are at least 75 percent of the prevailing market rate.

These efforts will not only enable more low-income families to access quality child care, but will also provide programs with the resources needed to support the provision of higher-quality care. To be sure, meeting this requirement requires a major increase in public spending on child care. While it is difficult to precisely estimate the cost of such a change, we estimate it would require more than a doubling of current levels of state and federal expenditures (now approximately $7.2 billion).^[1]

Why expand child-care subsidies rather than expanding the child-care tax credits? Tax credits are not given to families who do not owe taxes, and many of the lowest-income families are ineligible. Even those families who are eligible for tax credits may not be selecting the higher-quality programs the tax credits are meant to facilitate. The funding model for much of the child-care market requires advanced payments and significant upfront deposits. Families seeking care must have the ability to pay up front. When care is expensive, the sticker price may dissuade them from choosing a high-quality child-care option, even if they can recoup the cost later in the year.

Why expand child-care subsidies rather than increase funding for Head Start or support state pre-kindergarten efforts? Children who enroll in state pre-K and Head Start begin kindergarten substantially more ready to learn than children who did not have access to these programs. States’ efforts to serve more three- and four-year-old children through pre-kindergarten programs and to improve the quality of these programs are encouraging. In the context of expanding state and local prekindergarten programs, it is important to recognize that most early education programs need to be supplemented with child-care funding in order to meet the needs of low-income working parents. Moreover, given the focus of these programs on children in their year before kindergarten, working parents of younger children face greater obstacles to accessing quality care, especially center-based care, than parents of older children.

Through a substantial expansion in child-care funding, as well as through expansions of the center-based Early Head Start program, the federal government can help build an ECE system where the educational needs of the youngest children (0-3) and preschool age children are met while also meeting the care needs of low-income working parents. The first priority should be supporting low-income families and doing so through existing state systems, which should be made more comparable and more generous across all states. Second-order priorities should be further expanding the number of children who enroll in Head Start as three- or four-year-olds and providing a more generous refundable tax credit to all families with incomes under 400 percent of the poverty line.

2. Improve program quality by supporting efforts to professionalize the early childhood workforce.

Currently, too many early educators struggle to earn a living wage. It is unrealistic to expect quality to improve in early childhood settings without increasing compensation in order to attract and retain skilled caregivers. At the same time, low-income families cannot, on their own, carry the cost of making this happen in a private market. For this reason, significant public investment is needed.

Some local governments, including cities like New York, Boston, and Seattle, have made a commitment to gradually eliminating the pay gap between K-12 and public pre-K teachers. At the federal level, the increased spending on subsidies, described above, may help address this issue, particularly in the programs serving the youngest children, as would additional Head Start funding targeted to teacher salary. Offering states matching funds for salary increases, increasing tuition assistance and loan forgiveness for early childhood teachers, and helping to develop competency-based career ladders would help, too.

But pay isn’t enough. Changing core teaching and learning processes—the daily lived experiences of young children in a classroom—requires not just better-paid teachers but also better-trained teachers. This requires reforms in how teachers are trained before they enter an early childhood classroom and how they are supported once they do.

As with K-12 schools, we have only limited evidence on how to effectively train pre-service ECE teachers. However, the way early childhood teachers are trained now—in general child development and practices, without adequate attention to specific developmental trajectories and specific instructional strategies, and with wide variation in training across states—matches neither the evidence we do have nor common sense.

We concur with recommendations from the National Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, which include that training for all teachers of children 0-8, irrespective of sector, emphasize specific core competencies including both training in child development within specific developmental domains (e.g., language, literacy, mathematics, and socio-emotional skills) as well as training in instructional strategies that support development in those domains. Once teachers are in the classroom, the most promising routes to improving the low-quality instruction that is common in most early childhood programs is pairing regular coaching with a proven, evidence-based curriculum.

Given the state of the teacher training research and the complexity and diversity of the 0-5 workforce, there is not one right answer to quality improvement. However, we do have enough evidence that all federal efforts around quality improvements in early childhood settings should be more narrowly defined to focus on improving the quality of learning opportunities children receive by specifically focusing on their teachers. This means supporting increased compensation initiatives but also ensuring that federal investments in programs are targeted towards practices that are directly connected to improved child outcomes.

As one example, the federal government can provide states with more direction on how the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) funding set aside for quality improvement can be used. Currently the list of activities that can be funded is quite broad; any activity that promotes professional development, regardless of the content of the training, can count toward the quality set-aside. Funds should be limited to more narrowly defined activities that support the early childhood workforce and are directly connected to proven classroom practices. In addition, current federal financial aid and loan forgiveness programs for teachers could be revised to encourage teachers to train in programs that follow the recommendations of the National Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. The federal government could also support innovative partnerships with both two- and four-year colleges and universities and preschool systems. We need an era of systematic, creative experimentation in ECE teaching training accompanied by increased compensation.

3. Proactively encourage novel approaches to systems building.

The federal government should make reducing fragmentation a key goal for all federal investments in early childhood. A recent GAO report concluded that the current system, in which multiple federal agencies are administering early childhood programs, is leading to both duplication and gaps in service provision. That report called for an interagency workgroup involving all federal agencies with programs serving young children as a strategy towards reducing fragmentation and service duplication. While that may help, the best way to reduce fragmentation may be to reduce the large differences across programs in structure, funding streams, eligibility requirements, and quality regulations.

A cohesive early childhood system must align ECE with the K-12 system and align programs that serve infants and toddlers with those that serve preschoolers. Doing this requires breaking down longstanding, but false, distinctions between subsidized child care and more child-centered, developmentally oriented programs like Early Head Start and Head Start.

We suggest the federal government give selected states the flexibility to experiment with novel approaches to this complex systems building. We propose a competitive granting process through which states that have shown a longstanding commitment to ECE and systems building could propose initiatives that allow them to pull resources from diverse local, state, and federal early childhood programs towards building a more practical, streamlined, and high-quality early childhood landscape. To be eligible, state proposals would need to include active participation from all the key players—Head Start, state or local pre-kindergarten programs, and child-care providers. Proposals for coordinated systems would be required to maintain (at least) the same level of state spending and the same percentage of children served. The federal government should provide careful oversight to ensure quality is not compromised in these structured flexibility experiments. Critically, the federal government must embed a requirement for rigorous research into the selection process so that lessons from these flexibility experiments could inform efforts nationwide.

CONCLUSION

Early childhood investments have the potential to yield great returns. In this unique moment with widespread public support for early childhood, the president has the opportunity to “go big” on early childhood, not just tinkering on the edges but leading a transformation. Doing so will ensure that all families with young children can find and afford programs that not only allow the parents to work but give the children—including infants and toddlers—opportunities to explore, engage, and learn.

[1] Evidence suggests that about 30 percent of state income eligible children are receiving subsidies. About 38 percent are not receiving any public assistance subsidies. If a little more than half of these children enter the subsidy system (20 percent of eligible children), that would increase expenditures by about two-thirds. Based on current market rate information, a rough approximation suggests that on average reimbursement rates are about 20 percentage points lower than the 75th percentile of the market rate, suggesting it would cost 25-percent increase to raise rates to the 75th percentile of the market rate. Finally, a rough approximation suggests that states on average set income eligibility at 160 percent of the federal poverty threshold, so a 40-percentage-point increase (20-percent increase in funding) would be needed to cover families up to 200 percent of the federal poverty threshold.

Support for this project was generously provided by the Spencer Foundation. Brookings recognizes that the value it provides is in its absolute commitment to quality, independence, and impact. Activities supported by its donors and by outside contributors reflect this commitment. The authors did not report receipt of financial support from any firm or person for this memorandum or from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article that creates a conflict of interest.

Suggested citation:

Bassok, D., Magnuson, K., & Weiland, C. (2016). Building a cohesive, high-quality early childhood system. In M. Hansen & J. Valant (Eds.), Memos to the President on the Future of U.S. Education Policy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

      

 

 

The passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2001 ushered in a new era of accountability and transparency by requiring that every state report students’ academic proficiency, disaggregated by specific populations. This new reporting requirement, the significant development of longitudinal data systems, and the increase in the use of new technologies in classrooms has led to richer, more robust data on student and school performance. The recently passed Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) returns a good deal of accountability authority to the states, but it maintains NCLB’s legacy of using data to illuminate and improve our schools.

Download a PDF of this memo.

The richer data picture has provided opportunities, which were previously impossible, to understand and improve schools and to tailor learning to every student. But data alone are powerless without analyses that can convert them into useful information. More specifically, data are not intrinsically valuable. Without research to turn data into meaningful information, data cannot clarify our understanding of how schools can positively impact student learning. But conducting education research is not a goal unto itself; it is a tool to uncover profound connections and identify solutions to our most pressing problems. And it has transformed our understanding of the connections between teachers, schools, and student learning.

For example, we now know that there is significant within-school variation in the quality of educational experiences students receive, due in large part to the differing effectiveness of teachers. Indeed, while the refrain that “teachers matter” is now common, it is only in the last decade that our concept about the importance of teacher quality has been transformed through research. We also now know that teacher quality tends to be unequally distributed across different student subgroups. This is a key reason that states are now required to develop plans to ensure that disadvantaged students have equitable access to high-quality teachers. Research has also led to interventions that tailor schooling experiences to the needs of individual students. For instance, Massachusetts’ Early Warning Indicator System uses K-12 indicators and outcomes to help identify and support struggling students. Chicago Public Schools has used research to identify trajectories and keep high school freshmen on track to graduation, raising the on-track graduation rate from 57 percent in 2007 to 84 percent in 2013. These examples from Massachusetts and Chicago highlight the fact that the data (combined with the research) themselves present opportunities for interventions designed to improve the lives of students.

But the increased collection, use, and visibility of data about students have raised concerns about how and why they are used, who has access to them, and how student privacy is protected. For many parents and educators, the use of data in education is unfamiliar and its value is unclear leading to the question of “what’s in it for me?” In addition, legitimate privacy concerns in almost every area of public life—from the National Security Agency to Amazon’s purchase recommendations—have spurred new and proposed data privacy laws (discussed below). Many of these laws run the risk of significantly devaluing foundational education data investments, limiting our abilities to conduct research on the policies and practices that impact student learning, and, in some cases, operate schools in productive ways.

While we have not seen the privacy violations in education that we have in other sectors, the fact these data breaches exist in other sectors underscores the need for the next presidential administration to take a proactive approach to ensure that student data are protected. But this must be done in such a way that the dual goals of supporting research and safeguarding data are seen as intertwined and inseparable parts of the effort to improve student achievement and education system performance.

The federal government has played an important role supporting education research and regulating data access—from providing critical funding for building data infrastructure, to creating incentives and mandates to reinforce the role of evidence, to establishing a common foundation for protecting personally identifiable information (PII). The next presidential administration will not be starting from scratch when working to support research and the effective use and protection of student data.

Every state now has a statewide longitudinal data system in large part thanks to close to half a billion dollars in federal grants. The creation of the Institute of Education Sciences, the What Works Clearinghouse, the Investing in Innovation program, and the new ESSA requirement to make intervention decisions based on proven results have all helped to nurture a culture that values research and evidence. And on the regulation side, the education sector’s main law regulating disclosure of student information, Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), applies to any agency or institution receiving federal funds from the U.S. government; it prohibits the disclosure of PII to parties other than school administrators or a student’s family except under specific circumstances.

The past two presidential administrations and Congress have taken a number of steps to update privacy protections to keep up with the changes toward a more digital data landscape and to ensure that student data and privacy are safeguarded as data are used to support student learning. For instance, in early 2015 President Obama announced a comprehensive approach to improving cross-sector privacy, including education. More recently, the federal government has increased the capacity of the Department of Education and its Privacy Technical Assistance Center (PTAC) to provide data and privacy guidance to states, districts, and researchers.

However, one specific area of growing concern has to do with two distinct “exceptions” under FERPA that permit much of the education research conducted but are neither as clear nor as simple as they appear. First, FERPA permits the use of individual student-level data so long as the student records are considered “directory information” (guidance for what is typically considered “directory information” is listed in FERPA and is generally understood as information which is not “harmful or an invasion of privacy if disclosed”). The second exception applies to studies that are “for the purpose of: developing, validating, or administering predictive tests; administering student aid programs; or improving instruction.” The studies exception allows PII disclosure but also requires parties to establish a formal written agreement, articulating which PII will be shared and other important details governing the terms of use.

FERPA, however, dates back to 1974, well before much of the data typically included in records today—data on student test scores, race/ethnicity, and disability and poverty status—were widely available. As education data are collected and used in different ways, it is increasingly difficult to define precisely which data should be used by whom and for what purposes. And some recent federal actions designed to clarify data protections, notably the Bush administration’s 2008 FERPA regulations which further articulated provisions related to researcher access to data, ironically added to public concern that the federal government was weakening FERPA’s privacy protections. In addition, some parents and privacy rights groups (e.g. the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy) are concerned about the disclosure of student information even if it does not include PII and are worried that education technology companies are conducting research using student data with the sole focus of increasing profits, not improving education.

In response to many of these public concerns, Congress has debated a variety of changes to FERPA, including several proposals that would both increase data protections but also significantly limit permissible research. Recently proposed amendments to FERPA would have, for instance, limited allowable research to studies that directly benefit the students or institutions providing the data, a change that on the surface might seem sensible, but would greatly limit research since the benefits of research often cannot be tied directly to the students who were included in the study. This is largely because many studies use retrospective data to examine interventions in grades that students are no longer enrolled in by the time research is complete. Other drafted amendments have required parents to be notified by schools when their students’ data was being used, even if not personally identifiable, and/or that data only be available at the aggregate (e.g. school level). These changes might help to protect the privacy of individual students but they would place a high burden on schools (likely affecting their willingness to participate in research). These changes would also likely impede the ability of research to detect the impact of interventions targeting students within schools and obscure how such interventions differentially affect individual student types.

POLICY OPTIONS

Given the federal role to date, the current landscape of opportunities and concerns, what are the options for the next administration to promote both the use of evidence in education and the protection of the data necessary to fuel this evidence?

First, the next administration could choose not to take action. Federal law governing the privacy of school records already exists and failure to amend FERPA does not necessarily mean no additional actions to safeguard data would be taken. In the past three years alone over 400 bills to regulate student data privacy and access have been introduced at the state level. Online service providers and other vendors who work with student data have created a pledge to parents that data will be protected. And education constituency organizations have issued Student Data Principles that commit to using data to support student learning and to protect this sensitive information. But researcher, company, and school system self-regulation and state laws do not ensure consistency or quality in privacy protections. Indeed, we believe that absent federal action, concerns about data security and privacy are likely to lead to additional state privacy laws; while the vast majority of the recent 75 bills signed into law have been constructive, some have been severely detrimental to both research and the functioning of schools. This does not help to make schools better for anyone.

A second option would be to focus the efforts of the federal government on building the capacity of local and state governments and data users to collect and protect data effectively. Congress took a step in this direction by calling out data privacy training as an allowable use of Title II dollars, but the work is far from finished.

A third option, the one we favor, is for the federal government to combine capacity building with a structured process that leads to revisions to FERPA. A deliberative and thoughtful federal role in encouraging and supporting education data use and research, and creating a floor of consistent data protections, is critical to building transparency and trust about how data are collected, shared, and protected across the country. Despite the risks associated with opening the Pandora’s box of revising FERPA, we believe the next administration should take this important step. In the section that follows, we propose specific recommendations for this strategic federal role.

 RECOMMENDATIONS

We suggest the following four actions to ensure student data are protected:

1. Provide clear, consistent guidance on how federal privacy laws work together to govern education privacy and research.

The federal government should provide clearer guidance on how states and districts interpret and implement federal privacy laws. Currently, data needed for important education research may exist across federal agencies, but currently states and districts must navigate a patchwork of education and privacy laws and priorities that apply to these different types of data.

In addition, members of Congress have recently expressed an interest in amending both FERPA and creating new legislation that would regulate student data collected by online service providers. This legislation would treat data collected by schools and districts differently from data collected and used by online services. In addition, these different data laws would be enforced by different agencies (the Department of Education and the Federal Trade Commission respectively).

An aligned federal foundation that is coherent and complementary across applications, and a continued commitment to coordinated communications, can provide consistent definitions and standards for those on the ground. Federal agencies responsible for regulating data relevant to education should issue joint guidance to help states and districts navigate and implement federal privacy laws and inform complementary state laws and policies. This joint guidance and information can also help clarify for the public which federal laws govern education research and how they apply in various school settings.

2. Build federal capacity to support states and districts with the tools and resources they need to conduct effective education research and safeguard data privacy.

The federal government should continue to invest in its ability to provide useful guidance, tools, and technical assistance to states and districts. Much of education policy is state- and locally controlled. ESSA’s emphasis on state flexibility and innovation affirms this. But states and local districts need expert guidance around the best practices when it comes to data access and use. Increased federal capacity to respond to state and local concerns and requests can help them craft constructive policies and practices that help protect PII, while making sure that researchers and state and local administrators have the ability to engage in high-quality research and use the results to improve student outcomes.

Federal agencies have already taken steps to support the field. The Department of Education’s PTAC, for example, has provided great value to states and districts through its hotline and its guidance on important issues such as data suppression techniques. Additional federal capacity, however, is needed to provide more timely and efficient guidance that addresses issues that arise around research and the protection of personally identifiable information. It is important, for instance, for states and localities to have exemplars for data access policies and data-sharing agreements. In addition, federal funding for improving the data literacy within state and local education agencies will also support strong, secure research practices within states and districts and nurture a culture that encourages productive research and values evidence.

3. Support the work of the bipartisan, congressionally created Evidence-Based Policymaking Commission and ensure any findings are thoughtfully translated for the education sector.

The convening of the bipartisan Evidence-Based Policymaking Commission provides an unparalleled opportunity to examine the role of data and research in creating an information-driven education sector. Commissioned by Congress and appointed by Representatives Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi, Senators Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid, and President Obama, the Commission is charged with studying and making recommendations around how to best use federal data from across agencies to inform policy decisions. The Commission represents an unheralded collaborative effort between the administration and Congress that the next administration and federal agencies should look to for guidance on data regulation, governance, and management. The Commission’s recommendations, to be released after an 18-month period of hearings, conversation, and study, will apply to all federal agencies, not only to education. Still, the recommendations should be used by the next administration and Congress to inform thinking on the role of research and data use in improving education and shape thoughtful, constructive congressional and administrative action going forward.

4. Building on the recommendations of the Evidence-Based Policymaking Commission, amend FERPA to ensure that federal law articulates clear permissions for research and that data collected through the use of education technology are governed effectively.

Federal law should establish a strong foundation of baseline privacy and security protections for educational research that addresses all types of student data and establishes a consistent floor for acceptable privacy guarantees across states. Current federal law (FERPA) describes when PII from student records can be shared with researchers, but lacks clarity and does not govern other types of student data, such as data collected through the use of online applications or services. Any changes to FERPA or its regulations must clarify how federal law protects the different types of student data, recognize the importance of education research, and provide clear guidance to states and districts about how they can permit researcher access to data and how they can best use the research analysis and findings to inform their policies and practices and achieve their education goals.

FERPA also presents an opportunity to strengthen research privacy protections by delineating the governance, transparency, and accountability measures that education agencies would need to have in place to share PII with researchers. Strong data governance allows states and districts to establish stable procedures for reviewing and approving data sharing and research requests that comply with federal laws.

CONCLUSION

We need data and research to inform education policy and decisionmaking to help ensure that our schools are productive and our students are well served. But we also have to ensure that the sensitive data that are collected about students are well protected and used in appropriate ways. The next president and Congress must take the opportunity to not only weigh in on how education data are handled and protected, but also to make clear that data and research are critical to creating a culture of evidence so that we innovate and invest in what works to further student learning.

Without strong federal leadership and guidance, the efforts to promote the use of data in education will become merely a compliance exercise with little benefit to students. If the federal government takes an overly prohibitive stance to privacy concerns such that the K-12 schooling data that are collected are no longer useful for research and other activities that help power school improvement, we will lose one of our most powerful tools for understanding and serving our nation’s students. Education is largely a state function, but the federal government plays a unique role in spurring innovation in schooling and helping to ensure equity. Data are necessary to both of these goals, and in order to accomplish them, the federal government must get its own data governance house in order and provide the resources, guidance, and tools that states and districts need to do the same on behalf of the students they serve.

Dan Goldhaber is the president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP), although the views expressed in this memo are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of AEFP.

Support for this project was generously provided by the Spencer Foundation. Brookings recognizes that the value it provides is in its absolute commitment to quality, independence, and impact. Activities supported by its donors and by outside contributors reflect this commitment. The authors did not report receipt of financial support from any firm or person for this memorandum or from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article that creates a conflict of interest.

Suggested citation:

Goldhaber, D., & Rogstad Guidera, A. (2016). Powering education improvement and innovation while protecting student privacy. In M. Hansen & J. Valant (Eds.), Memos to the President on the Future of U.S. Education Policy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

      

 

 

We were motivated to undertake this task by last year’s enactment of the Every Student Succeeds Act and the upcoming inauguration of a new president. In this context of a changing federal role in education, we felt that detailed directives promoting effective federal policies would make valuable contributions to vigorous public debate.

Today, we are releasing the first product of that series. The project co-chairs—Douglas Harris, Helen Ladd, Marshall Smith, and Martin West—identified a set of principles to guide the federal government’s role in education policymaking. They present these principles, along with their historical grounding and context, in the new Brown Center report, A Principled Federal Role in PreK-12 Education.

This report on the federal role in education provides a foundation for the next part of the series: 12 policy memos from leading experts with recommendations for federal policymakers. We will release one memo on each business day from Thursday, December 8, through Friday, December 23. Each memo will take an issue facing PK-12 education, describe the current state of the issue (and the state of federal policy on that issue), and present specific policy recommendations to the incoming presidential administration grounded in current research.

We asked the memo writers not to cater their recommendations to a particular candidate, or president, but rather to present what they believe would be sound federal policy in their respective areas based on their knowledge of research on the topic, along with their insights and experiences. We hope these memos will be immediately useful to the Trump administration and the incoming secretary of education. We hope they will also be useful to others who work in education policy, whether at the federal level or not, as well as to subsequent administrations.

Of course, there are far more than 12 important issues in PreK-12 education today, and any series like this is bound to feel incomplete. In choosing which topics to cover, we prioritized issues with an important federal role and the potential for new federal policy during the coming administration. Our focus on the federal role turned us away from some topics—like the Common Core State Standards and charter schools—that rightly receive a great deal of attention but are fundamentally state or local issues. This series does not explicitly focus on topics in higher education, as we will leave that for a subsequent series, although a few memos in this series address issues beyond grade 12.

Our release schedule is as follows (and this page will be updated with links):

On the afternoon of Wednesday, January 4, we will host a public release event at Brookings (in Washington, DC) to discuss the federal role in PK-12 education.  We will provide additional details through the Brown Center newsletter as they become available.

Having spent many days over the past few months talking with—and reading the work of—an extraordinary group of co-chairs and memo authors, we thought we would close with a couple of reflections.

• First, we have been struck by the interconnectedness of these issues. For example, the country’s success in serving students’ comprehensive needs has clear implications for civil rights and students with special needs. Its success in producing high-quality, timely research has immediate implications for policies related to teachers, school finance, and early childhood. Each memo is valuable as a standalone product—and aims to be useful to a reader who reads only that memo—but reading across the Principles report and memos reveals an additional layer of richness and additional set of opportunities.
• Second, we have been heartened to see experts of different political backgrounds find substantive areas of agreement. The co-chair team, in particular, tackled an unambiguously political question—about the appropriate federal role in education—as a group that has advised and served both Democratic and Republican administrations. While months of phone conversations and back-and-forth with document drafts unearthed some policy disagreements, the co-chairs were able to localize those disagreements and find agreement on their core questions. Moreover, in the policy memos, we saw many ideas that were either fundamentally apolitical or had elements that align with both Democratic and Republican principles. This includes, for example, Bob Schwartz’s insightful comments about ESEA’s focus on elementary rather than secondary education (making “ESEA” a misnomer), as well as proposals for child care tax credits as a strategy to improve access to high-quality care. Even in a time of hyper-partisanship, we see opportunities for education policymakers of different political parties to find more than enough agreement to tackle many of the challenges covered in this series.

We hope you will enjoy the series as it unfolds on the Chalkboard and that you will join us in January for the release event.

      

 

 

Economists estimate that by 2020 more than two-thirds of jobs in the United States will require some form of postsecondary education or training. However, at the current rate of higher education completion, the nation will fall nearly 20 million degrees short of meeting that need. According to The Pell Institute, in 2014 only 35 percent of 25-34 year olds had a bachelor’s degree or higher, placing the United States around the middle of 43 developed nations.

Download a PDF of this memo

Achieving economic competitiveness demands a national response to increase the number of people earning four-year degrees or credentials. Moreover, the degree attainment rate masks pernicious inequities. According to the Pell Institute, more than half of all 24-year-olds with bachelor’s degrees are from families in the top 25 percent of the income bracket, while individuals from the bottom quarter accounted for only 10 percent of four-year degrees. 

Moreover, according to the Digest of Educational Statistics, Asians (57 percent) and whites (40 percent) are roughly twice as likely to hold a bachelor’s degree as African Americans (27 percent) and Hispanics (20 percent). Despite recent improvements in college-going rates, the overall degree completion rates, combined with disparities in educational attainment for low-income and underrepresented populations, will impede our nation’s efforts to develop a flourishing, inclusive economy.

The “leaky student pipeline” metaphor, which characterizes the transition points in our educational system where students are lost, provides a powerful framing for identifying how to increase graduation rates. At each transition, some students fall by the wayside, especially black and Hispanic students and those from low-income families. While every transition point is important from a policy and practice perspective, improving student success at three critical junctures would have the greatest impact: (1) high school graduation, (2) pre-college remediation, and (3) college graduation.

High school graduation: B+ for recent progress, but C- for black and Hispanic graduation rates

The U.S. has made progress over the last 15 years in improving on-time high school completion. A recent GradNation report describes how high school graduation rates began to rise in 2002, after flat-lining for 30 years, and have climbed sharply since 2006. The national graduation rate reached 82.3 percent in 2014—a gain of more than 10 percentage points since 2002. Gains by black and Hispanic students have been the key drivers with both of these student subgroups exceeding the national rate of improvement between 2013 and 2014 (0.9 points), and with yearly gains averaging more than 1.3 percentage points since 2011.

Even with these gains, however, there is much to do to reach GradNation’s goal of having 90 percent of students graduate on time by 2020.

The opportunity gap remains one ongoing challenge. The overall increase in high school graduation rates notwithstanding, substantial racial and economic variation persist. For example, while 88 percent of white students graduate, only 73 percent of African American and 75 percent of Hispanic Americans leave school with a diploma. That means one-quarter of African and Hispanic American students have little chance of obtaining a reasonably well paying job and are effectively shut out of college.^[1]

Additionally, the upturn in graduation rates is being criticized by some scholars who argue the higher numbers are the result of districts reducing graduation standards as a way of responding to pressure from the accountability regulations in No Child Left Behind. Critics also point to the use of “credit recovery” courses as examples of scaling down rigor and argue, therefore, that the gains are not real. If this is the case, more students who go on to college will face a second hurdle in the pipeline. At a minimum, there is more work to do at the high school level.

Remediation: D- for continuing with developmental courses that don’t work

Any action plan to improve high school graduation rates must be coupled with preparing students for success in college-level, credit-bearing English and math courses that are required to earn a degree or certificate. Although some high schools are working harder to prepare their students, many high school graduates cannot pass college readiness tests in these subjects. They are directed to “developmental” (or “remedial”) courses that do not count for college credit.

According to Columbia University’s Community College Research Center (CCRC), 92 percent of two-year colleges and many four-year colleges use reading, writing, and math placement assessments. The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) and Complete College America report that for two-year colleges, “more than 70 percent of black students and 60 percent of Hispanic students fail the assessments and enroll in at least one remedial course compared to just over 50 percent of white and Asian students.” Another CCRC report finds that 68 percent of community college students and 40 percent of open-access four-year college students are placed into remedial courses.

The critical takeaway is that developmental (remedial) courses do not work, are costly, and disproportionately harm black, Hispanic and low-income students. For example:

• Strong American Schools estimates the costs of remedial education to states and students at $2.3 billion each year.
• A CCRC study of 250,000 community college students found that only 20 percent of developmental math students and 37 percent of developmental reading students go on to pass the required entry-level or “gatekeeper” college course.
• A 2006 study analyzing data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS:88) found that only 28 percent of remedial students complete a college credential within 8.5 years.

These ineffective courses are, in fact, a gatekeeper rather than a gateway for thousands and thousands of students—and particularly for low-income, black, and Hispanic students seeking a college education.

College graduation: C for progress, but unacceptable variation in performance

College completion is the third challenge in the leaky pipeline. Data from the Digest of Educational Statistics (Table 1) show that from 2004 to 2014 graduation rates dropped slightly in two-year institutions (from 30.5 percent to 29.4 percent) but increased in four-year institutions (from 55.4 percent to 59.6 percent). Rates increased in both types of institutions for Hispanic students during this period but were more mixed for black and white students. Nevertheless, rates for all students remain dismal at under 30 percent for two-year institutions and under 60 percent for four-year institutions.

Table 1: Two-year and four-year college graduation rates by race/ethnicity

Source: Digest of Education Statistics (2014), Tables 326.10 and 326.20

An EdTrust report noted variation in college graduation rates and trends between public and private institutions. Although, in 2013, six-year graduation rates were higher in private nonprofit institutions (65.3 percent) than public institutions (57.7 percent), those rates were climbing more quickly in public institutions.

An emerging movement

The exciting story is that we know how to substantially plug the leaky pipeline to increase secondary school graduation rates, improve outcomes in developmental courses, and boost college graduation rates. Moreover, we have robust examples of successful interventions at each of the three links in the pipeline.

A recent report on college completion from EdTrust makes the argument that undergirds improvement in each of the three areas: “By now, college leaders understand that just adding an initiative or two—a First-Year Experience, a few learning communities or freshman seminars, a new tutoring or multicultural center—typically won’t be sufficient… no single strategy works everywhere. But at the core of all of their strategies is a very different use of institutional data. No longer just the stuff of institutional reports to various government agencies, data is used throughout institutions to mobilize action.”

The critical message? Use institutional data to mobilize effective, comprehensive, coherent, and continuous improvement.

A successful policy should build these capacities and capabilities:

1. Carefully define the problem and the processes and actions that create the problem (e.g., the problem is not graduating; two process/actions are skipping school and/or failing an algebra test).
2. Take steps to ameliorate the processes and actions, preferably using interventions with a strong evidence base.
3. Work within a continuous improvement policy and organizational infrastructure that facilitates rigorous and rapid testing of selected interventions. Treat initial failure as providing information to improve an understanding of the problem and to suggest new approaches.
4. Use robust data systems to guide continuous improvement.
5. Create the capacity in the institution to successfully address the problems (e.g., technology to help analyze and reanalyze data, and train counselors and others to use on-time interventions to work with the students).

The continuous improvement approach to address complex problems is not new and has been championed by organizations like EdTrust, Data Quality Campaign, and SHEEO. Below, we provide examples for each part of the pipeline.

Examples of effective models

Fresno Unified School District (FUSD), where more than 60 percent of the students are Latino and nearly three-quarters are eligible for free and reduced priced lunch, turned in 2010 to an innovative use of data systems to make sure that students stay on track for graduation. The data systems track key indicators in real time, such as student performance in classes, whether students signing up for the courses they need to graduate, and whether counselors have a manageable load. When the data system raises “on-time” alarms, staff (counselors and others) contact students and work collaboratively to address the issues. By 2016, FUSD’s graduation rate rose from less than 70 percent to 84 percent—more than double national and California’s gains and to a level exceeding the nation and California. Moreover Fresno also focused on increasing enrollment in courses required for admission to California State University and the University of California (known as A-G courses). The rate almost doubled from 25 percent to 49 percent over the past six years.

Of course, improving high school performance is only the first step. In recent years, several groups used improvement processes to redesign developmental courses, making them far more effective and efficient than traditional remedial courses. These include the Accelerated Learning Program, California Acceleration Project, Complete College America, and New Mathways Project. Participants in another project, the Carnegie Math Pathways, were 40 percentage points more likely to pass remedial math than comparison groups. A return on investment study conducted by the National Center for Inquiry and Improvement found that Pathways’ upfront costs are often less than boutique programs that serve fewer students and are not as scalable.

Georgia State University (GSU) and Florida State University (FSU) provide examples of success in increasing college graduation rates. The institutions accelerated capacity by using data and predictive analytic services of the Education Advisory Board (EAB) and by participating in EAB’s student success collaborative, an improvement network. These improvement practices are well described by EdTrust. Over a 12-year period, graduation rates increased at these institutions by 16-18 percentage points overall—and even more for minority students.

All of these examples can be replicated. The gains are due to hard work, staff commitment, smart use of data, and a strategy of continuous improvement. There are no good excuses for high schools and colleges to not deliberately address these national problems.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Each of the three interventions described in this memo—improving high school graduation rates, addressing remediation, and improving college graduation rates—could operate independently. Working separately on each pipeline barrier would increase the number and diversity of college graduates. However, in order to vastly accelerate the graduation rates while reducing disparities for low-income and minority populations, all three parts of the leaky pipeline demand policy support via an integrated effort. The value would be even greater if regions of states formed alliances among K-12 and postsecondary institutions to address, together, the needs of the students at all three stages. This form of collective effort in networked improvement communities would have powerful impacts in reducing educational inequities.

Our proposed way forward focuses on the need of the federal government to help districts, institutions, and states take these improvements to scale. We suggest four areas for federal policy and support.

1. The president and Department of Education should continue to make it a major priority to dramatically improve college graduation rates.

They can do this by setting clear national goals and encouraging states to set their own challenging goals. Policymakers and educators need to consider college success as a part of a continuum that begins in high school, because the classes students take and improvements in high school graduation rates directly influence what happens in college.

2. The new administration should propose a new title for the Higher Education Act, which is due for reauthorization, that focuses entirely on improving college graduation rates.

Following on the successes of GSU and FSU and other colleges, the title would authorize resources for new real-time data improvement systems and for preparing counselors and others to implement the data systems. The new legislation would also provide resources for regional colleges and NGOs to provide support for all colleges to improve their developmental (remedial) courses. Finally, the title would provide support for improvement networks of colleges to share information and assist each other in the development and implementation of the two strategies.

3. The president and Department of Education should establish clear goals for high school graduation within four years and within six years.

They should encourage states to do the same. They should work with existing coalitions of organizations that have similar goals and should make certain that any existing regulations or practices of the federal government do not inhibit the progress of schools, districts, and states to meet these goals.

4. In order to achieve these goals the president and Department of Education should support legislation to improve existing K-12 state data systems’ abilities to provide on-demand data for high school staff to intervene and support students when they need help (and to provide training).

In addition, the Department should make it clear that various provisions in ESSA could support schools and districts as they put together the new early warning data systems and support their counselors and teachers as they learn to use the systems to help students.

5. The Department should use existing resources that they support, such as labs and centers, to carry out research and development to provide more rigorous evidence on the above ideas.

One example here is Fresno, where schools improved in both the graduation and college-required A-G course rates simultaneously. We need examples of other districts that have successfully adopted similar systems and achieved similar results. (See also the Harris memo on the federal role in research.)

CONCLUSION

Taken together, the successful implementation of these interventions would create a tremendous boost in college attainment overall and in reducing graduation inequalities based on income, race, and ethnicity. Over time, this approach would substantially help the country’s economic competitiveness. Each of the three examples provides a strong model of how to meet retention, attainment, and equity goals. These and similar examples have been locally driven without direct federal and state governments involvement. But, as we noted, federal support is crucial in scaling these proven interventions. The president’s and secretary’s support of continuous improvement infrastructure, including useful data systems along with improvement networks engaged in rapidly testing, adapting, and integrating evidence-based interventions, would provide important intellectual and practical support across the nation. Federal attention and involvement is integral to solving the national challenge of helping to create a well-educated, diverse workforce.

^[1] These rates are for on-time graduation using the new measure required by the federal government. Some students not counted may graduate after six years and others have taken the GED. Combining these various alternatives brings the estimated current rates to near 90 percent. This leaves a little over 10 percent of students entering the economy every year without any claim to graduating. The income and ethnicity gaps continue to exist.

Support for this project was generously provided by the Spencer Foundation. Brookings recognizes that the value it provides is in its absolute commitment to quality, independence, and impact. Activities supported by its donors and by outside contributors reflect this commitment. The authors did not report receipt of financial support from any firm or person for this memorandum or from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article that creates a conflict of interest.

Suggested citation:

Smith, M. S., & Parmley, K. (2016). Improving and equalizing high school and college graduation rates for all students. In M. Hansen & J. Valant (Eds.), Memos to the President on the Future of U.S. Education Policy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

      

 

 

After forty years of strong federal laws and substantial support at the state, local, and federal levels, educational attainment levels for students with disabilities have improved considerably. Consider the following: the practice of institutionalizing students with mental retardation and severe physical disabilities has been largely eliminated, record numbers of students with disabilities are enrolling in postsecondary institutions, employment rates of people with disabilities leaving high school approach those of their non-disabled peers, and more students with significant disabilities are being educated in increasingly inclusive settings. However, while progress has been made over time, most of the progress has been experienced by students from more affluent homes. Students from low-income backgrounds, and particularly students from racial minority groups, continue to experience markedly poorer and more stagnant outcomes.

Download a PDF of this memo.

Analysis of student-level data from several states reveals different educational practices and implementation patterns between more and less affluent districts. For instance, in Massachusetts, students in older core cities like Springfield, Boston, and Worcester are much more apt to be segregated in special education classes than their peers in suburban and rural districts. Further, segregated students have much poorer outcomes than similar students who are educated primarily in integrated classrooms. In Massachusetts, students with learning disabilities who were primarily integrated had an 83.3 percent four-year graduation rate, compared with a 43.4 percent graduation rate for those who were segregated. In addition, eighth graders who were integrated had much higher state test scores than similar students who were segregated, and this effect was experienced by low-income students as well as non-low-income students. Similar findings are emerging from analyses of student-level data from three other states. These are observational studies—that, in many cases, control for confounding variables—but they are the best evidence we have, in part because of the many ethical and practical obstacles to performing experimental research in this area. However, as states have collected more data on students, quasi-experimental studies may be possible and such evaluations are likely to provide further insights into more efficacious practices. 

These state-level studies also reveal that implementation patterns vary considerably between districts, with some similar districts segregating many students while others segregate few. This supports a theory that district practices, rather than differences in student populations, might account for the differences in outcomes. The studies observe the deleterious impacts of segregation for affluent segregated students as well as low-income students. Qualitative research on segregated special education classes may reveal why these placements are associated with much poorer outcomes. For example, these classes often have relatively low curriculum standards and rely on teachers to cover curriculum they are not prepared to teach. Further, many students do not experience successful role modeling from peers.

Though research has consistently found that more time in general education is associated with better results for students with disabilities, research does not support the view that all children with disabilities should be educated in general education classes all the time (full inclusion). Some students may need intensive interventions outside the classroom. For instance, a dyslexic student who has not learned word attack skills may be self-conscious about being singled out to his peers. Research indicates that some students with intellectual disabilities should receive community-based instruction, particularly as they approach the transition from school to adulthood due to their inability to generalize well. Also, when inclusion is done poorly, particularly for students with behavioral issues, other children in the class may experience negative impacts.

In addition to concerns about low-income students, there is widespread concern about the requirements and the utility of existing IEPs and their ability to leverage quality education for many students with disabilities. Too many parents still struggle with getting their children included in general education classes, and many general education teachers struggle with getting meaningful information on how to include students.

Some of these problems and frustrations with the IEP process may be associated with the currently vague IEP regulations and the fact that IEPs focus inordinately on measurable goals and objectives as opposed to creating inclusive environments in which children can thrive. Further, IEPs do not sufficiently focus on providing children with the specialized interventions they may need to be successful.

Research over the past three decades has converged on several other principles in addition to integration that are associated with better educational outcomes for students with disabilities. These include:

• Providing students who are experiencing reading and behavior issues with early interventions. This should first happen within general education.
• Providing students with specialized interventions that address their specific disabilities.
• Providing students with effective accommodations so they can access the general education curriculum through principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL).
• Providing effective transition planning to enable students to transition to higher education and employment.

Though we have developed effective practices that should provide greater opportunities for students with disabilities, the implementation of these practices has been inconsistent and low-income children are disproportionately subjected to ineffective practices. Further, many parents have difficulty securing effective inclusive education for their children.

THE FEDERAL ROLE

The federal role in special education has been multifaceted and dates back to the Kennedy administration, when the first voluntary grant programs were initiated to expand educational opportunity to students with disabilities (and particularly those with intellectual disabilities). The federal role was vastly expanded in the 1970s with the passage of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibited discrimination against people with disabilities by federal grantees, and the Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which required states to provide all disabled students with a “free appropriate public education.” The current federal role under IDEA has two primary foci: enforcing legal requirements and supporting research and technical assistance.

The enforcement role is conducted by the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) and primarily focuses on the degree to which states are implementing the legal requirements of IDEA. First, states must have policies and laws in place that implement the primary requirements of the Act. This activity has been effective in that all states have in place systems for identifying children with disabilities, generating individualized education plans (IEPs), and providing parents with mechanisms to challenge their districts’ placement proposals. These aspects of the law were enacted early in the Act’s implementation history. Though Congress has always given the secretary authority to withhold funds, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) has been criticized by many advocates for a lack of enforcement of IDEA. Indeed, ED has rarely withheld funds, and when it has, there has been pushback from states and Congress. In the last reauthorization in 2004, Congress sought to have states focus more intently on improving results for children with disabilities. Heavily influenced by NCLB, the reauthorized law required states to develop performance plans based on over twenty indicators. Further, Congress required the secretary to more aggressively monitor and enforce the Act.

I have reviewed many of these plans as well as the interactions between OSEP and the states. From my perspective, the expectation that OSEP can measurably impact results for students with disabilities through this mechanism and current staffing levels (about 40 people in OSEP in Washington DC) is naïve. Change in results for these students requires change in practice at the local level. Such change involves improving instructional practice, and we know this is a slow process. Monitoring and enforcement mechanisms also have roles to play, but, at best, these provide signals that change needs to occur.

The current system treats states as if they are single entities and fails to surface the very real disparities experienced by low-income students, particularly those served in districts with concentrated poverty. I recently reviewed a large state in which low-income children with disabilities, especially in large cities and depressed small towns, were doing very poorly. These districts generally placed many students in segregated special classes. Poor test scores and low graduation rates were the norm for these children. Yet this state received a clean bill of health from OSEP.

The federal government broadly makes many regulatory demands on school districts. Central to this role is the requirement that each child have an IEP, based on comprehensive assessment and subject to challenge by parents through due process mechanisms. This is a highly decentralized policy mechanism that relies on the good will and competency of districts and places significant burden on parents advocating for their children. Congress purposefully incorporated the mechanism into the law in reaction to the widespread exclusion and segregation of students with disabilities in the 1970s. On many levels this has been highly effective in addressing the exclusion of students with disabilities and promoting more inclusive practice. However, this mechanism seems too weak to address the problems experienced by many parents who cannot challenge their child’s district effectively. Further, in many districts, the regulatory requirements of IDEA are unfortunately viewed as “paperwork” with little connection to accessing effective education. I recently reviewed 120 IEPs of students in a district that served mostly low-income students. All of these students had emotional disabilities, all were segregated, and 119 had identical IEPs concerning their justification for removal from general education. Thus, the picture that is emerging concerning the large disparities between IDEA implementation for the poor and the affluent may be partially explained by the failure of the due process mechanisms in IDEA to influence the behavior of states and local districts.

As to the role OSEP has in knowledge development and technical assistance, many important innovations in the field have been developed and nurtured that offer hope. Captioning for the deaf, text-to-speech technology (originally for the blind but now broadly used), intensive rules-based interventions for dyslexics, and comprehensive school-wide behavior approaches are some of many research-based innovations supported under IDEA’s discretionary programs. Indeed, the program has been praised by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and reauthorized repeatedly by Congress. However, appropriations for these innovations under IDEA have remained roughly what they were when President Clinton left office ($250 million). Given the challenges districts face in improving educational practice, a much more vigorous program of research and technical assistance will be needed to help spur progress.

POLICY OPTIONS

1. Focus OSEP monitoring and enforcement

The monitoring process should be far more focused on the students from low-income backgrounds and on the most important measures associated with improving educational outcomes detailed earlier in this memo. OSEP needs to send a strong signal to states to focus their interventions and supports to districts serving these students in large numbers. Due to improvements in state data capacity spurred on by Race to the Top, states have the capacity to analyze student-level data to focus its efforts where they are needed most.

2. Provide low-income parents with representation

A practical mechanism exists to accomplish this goal. Protection and Advocacy Centers are already funded in every state under the Developmental Disabilities Act. Grants could be given to these entities to selectively represent low-income parents who are seeking more effective inclusive placements for their children. Given that these centers could collect fees from defendants, a modest federal investment of approximately $6 million might be sufficient.

3. Revise IEP requirements

The Department of Education recently promulgated guidance concerning IEPs that emphasized the importance of integration. Though this is a step forward, policy guidance does not have the force of law. The new administration should move forward with rulemaking proposing the following regulations:

• Require that IEPs address specialized interventions to maximize opportunities to be successful in school.
• Specify the accommodations and supports children will need to be successful in mainstream classes.
• Require goals for specialized interventions with the assumption that goals need not be written for areas covered by the general curriculum unless the curriculum is significantly modified.
• Require that IEPs assume students are, by default, assigned to general education classes and this default assignment should be overturned only when compelling arguments exist against integration in mainstream classes, and schools or districts should not be able to overturn the default for many students without getting flagged.
• Require that IEPs be unambiguously focused on the interventions and accommodations students need to be successful.
• Emphasize that for some children whose interventions have been proven successful, transition out of IDEA eligibility should be considered with many of these students receiving accommodations under Section 504 as opposed to having IEPs.

There is evidence that changing the requirements in IEPs can have significant impact on practice. For instance, the 97 Amendments to IDEA required that teams address how a child will access the curriculum. Major changes in course-taking patterns occurred for high school students, with many more students taking foreign languages and advanced science and math. Though the IEP can be a powerful mechanism for change, current IEP requirements are dated and do not sufficiently promote best practices.

4. Increase funding for discretionary programs

Given the longstanding success, bipartisan support, and declining real funding, a doubling of appropriation for Part D of IDEA is overdue and would only cost $250 million. Special education is a huge component of the American education system and deserves a far more robust R&D effort that only the federal government will provide. Among the activities that could be funded out of this would be:

• Evaluation studies using quasi-experimental methods to identify effective practices through the use of state-level data
• Technical assistance centers to assist school districts in training teachers on methods, such as UDL, that enable students with disabilities to be successful in the mainstream
• Research efforts to identify the most efficacious interventions that minimize the negative impact of disabilities
• A robust research program to identify effective practices for educating the growing numbers of students on the autism spectrum

 RECOMMENDATIONS

Ideally, I would recommend a new administration pursue all four policy options. Changing the monitoring system can be done most easily as the secretary has the discretion to do this under current law. Providing representation to parents will require an amendment to the Developmental Disability Act (administered through HHS) and a subsequent appropriation. This program will take time and softening of the political ground but would likely receive strong bipartisan support from disability advocates. Changing the IEP will require rule-making, a relatively involved process specified in federal rules that can take over a year. Parent groups are likely to oppose any changes to IDEA if they fear a loss of protection. However, packaged properly with strong adherence to the foundational civil rights protections implicit in the Act, parents are likely to support changes. School districts might also support these changes, as they are likely to eliminate excessive paperwork. Expanding the IDEA discretionary programs will require a strong push first with the president’s budget and ultimately with appropriation committees. However, the funding would be small in comparison to the overall preK-12 federal budget and is likely to enjoy strong support from advocacy groups as well as support from education groups. Finally, if the new administration implements the first, second, and fourth policy options, the disability lobby, a powerful bipartisan lobby, will be more receptive to regulatory changes to IDEA.

In summary, the multipronged approach advocated here would focus federal efforts much more intensively on the greatest area of need in IDEA implementation: children from low-income backgrounds. The changes in the federal monitoring system would focus much more intently on the need to change practices for these children. Giving low-income parents representation will also intensify attention to the needs of these children. All children will benefit from a revised IEP that focuses more on creating inclusive environments in which children can thrive. Districts and states seeking to promote better practices will be assisted by a much more robust research and development program.

Support for this project was generously provided by the Spencer Foundation. Brookings recognizes that the value it provides is in its absolute commitment to quality, independence, and impact. Activities supported by its donors and by outside contributors reflect this commitment. The author did not report receipt of financial support from any firm or person for this memorandum or from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article that creates a conflict of interest.

Suggested citation:

Hehir, T. (2016). Special education. In M. Hansen & J. Valant (Eds.), Memos to the President on the Future of U.S. Education Policy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

      

 

 

Twenty-five years into the movement to raise academic standards and provide all students with a solid foundation of core academic knowledge and skills, it is clear that we have made only modest progress in improving educational outcomes. We have succeeded in reducing the dropout rate—over 80 percent of students are now graduating high school, an all-time high—and increasing enrollment in higher education. We have also succeeded in reducing the gap in graduation rates between Caucasian and Asian students on the one hand and African-American and Latino students on the other, an encouraging sign of progress.

Download a PDF of this memo.

However, the results are much less encouraging if we look at college attainment rates of young people in their mid-twenties. Only one young American in three succeeds in attaining a four-year degree. When you add into the equation those with two year degrees and even those with one-year occupational certificates with value in the labor market, fewer than 50 percent of those in their mid-twenties have any kind of postsecondary credential, while economists tell us that by 2020 two-thirds of the jobs will require some education or training beyond high school. And even those with degrees can swirl in the labor market. In 2013 over half of young Americans with four-year degrees were either unemployed (6 percent) or underemployed (44 percent). 

Meanwhile, survey after survey tells us that employers can’t find people with the skills they need to fill today’s jobs, especially middle-skill technical jobs in fields like IT, health care, and advanced manufacturing. These factors taken together would seem to argue for a much stronger push to better align our education system, especially our high schools and community colleges, with the needs of our economy in order to equip more young people with the skills they will need to take advantage of career opportunities in these high-demand, high-growth fields. This is the role that high quality career and technical education (CTE) is designed to play.

CTE today comes in many flavors. There are standalone vocational high schools, which typically provide a range of occupational programs from which students can choose along with the required core academic subjects. In some states there are part-time occupational centers, where students remain in their home high schools for their academic courses but receive specialized occupational training on a half-day basis. Perhaps the most rapidly growing CTE-related model is the career academy, which typically occurs either as a separate program within a comprehensive high school or as a freestanding small school. Career academies aim to integrate academic and technical education and focus mainly on fields like health care and IT and financial services, not the traditional trades and crafts. What is common across all forms of what I prefer to call “career-focused” education is that participants in these programs typically have higher high school graduation and postsecondary enrollment rates than their counterparts in comprehensive high schools with no career focus.

Why is support for CTE not a higher priority at all levels of government, especially the federal level? There are several reasons, but one has to do with parental attitudes. Simply put, career and technical education is viewed as a great thing … for other people’s children. It continues to be seen as primarily for young people who do not have sufficient academic skills to attend a four-year college or university. Most people associate CTE with preparation for a limited number of traditional trades and crafts: electrician, plumber, carpenter, auto mechanic, beautician, welder, etc. While most of these jobs today in fact require solid academic as well as technical skills and most pay middle class wages, until CTE is seen by parents, educators, and employers as a vehicle for preparing a very broad range of young people for a very broad range of careers, it is unlikely to be able to generate the degree of support needed from policymakers and the public to overcome this perception of CTE as a second-class system.

THE FEDERAL ROLE

Federal support for vocational education (the prior term for CTE) is nearly 100 years old. The Vocational Education Act of 1917 (known as Smith-Hughes, for its legislative sponsors) predated the Elementary and Secondary Education Act by nearly 50 years and was the first major federal aid program for elementary or secondary education. Smith-Hughes provided matching funds to states to support separate vocational high schools or, more typically, vocational programs in comprehensive high schools. While the development of comprehensive high schools sprang from a democratizing impulse—the laudable desire to bring students with diverse interests and talents together under a single roof—one consequence of having a separate federal funding stream dedicated to vocational programs was to encourage high schools to create a separate track for vocational students, isolating them from students pursuing a more academic education.

Since the passage of the Carl Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act in 1984, federal support to the states has been slowly but steadily encouraging the states to move toward a broader conception of CTE. In its most recent reauthorization (2006) the Perkins Act not only underwent a name change, substituting “Career” for “Vocational,” but more substantively emphasized the integration of strong academic preparation with strong technical education. It emphasized the importance of focusing on programs that prepare students for careers in high-growth, high-demand fields, and on “programs of study” that span secondary and postsecondary education.

Funding for the Perkins Act started at $950 million for FY 1985 (about $2.1 billion in 2016 constant dollars) and has not kept up with inflation. In FY 2000 it was $1.179 billion; in FY 2015, $1.125 billion. It is currently about $1.3 billion, against a roughly $32 billion federal appropriation for all other elementary and secondary education programs. Of the $33.3 billion appropriated in FY 2017 for elementary and secondary education, only $3.1 billion supported high schools. This suggests that despite its title, the “Elementary and Secondary Education Act” (ESEA) has in reality been the Elementary Education Act.

Although Perkins represents a small percentage of what most states spend on vocational education, the 15 percent states are allowed to set aside from Perkins funds to support state leadership and administration is typically the principal source of support for these activities at the state level. States like Tennessee and Delaware, two leaders in building statewide career pathways systems, have used these dedicated funds very creatively to drive innovation in the use of locally distributed Perkins funds as well as state CTE dollars.

POLICY OPTIONS

Option 1: The path of least resistance is to continue Perkins as a separate categorical program. The Obama administration put forth an ambitious “Blueprint” in 2012 that would have converted Perkins mostly into a competitive grants program, designed to support regional consortia bringing together high schools, community colleges, and employers to develop programs focused on meeting regional needs in high-growth, high-demand occupational sectors. The outcry from the CTE community over the proposed move from formula to within-state competitive funding made the Blueprint dead on arrival.

In July 2016 the House Education and the Workforce Committee unanimously reported out “The Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act.” This bill would essentially represent continuity with the Perkins Act while providing more flexibility and easing both application requirements and federal oversight. It has a positive emphasis on consortial arrangements and links between secondary and postsecondary CTE. Negotiations on a Senate bill broke down during the summer so it is highly unlikely that the Perkins Act will be reauthorized during the current Congress. That said, absent a strong interest from the next administration in rethinking the federal role, the House bill is likely to be the starting point for negotiations in the next Congress. If some version of this bill is enacted, it would represent an incremental improvement over the current law, but not the innovation needed.

Option 2: A second option would be to do something more radical: end the fiction that ESEA (now ESSA) provides anything like equitable support for secondary schools and create a separate piece of legislation focused on grades 9-12, “The College and Career Readiness Act.” The legislation would begin from the premise that the core mission of high schools in the 21st century must be to prepare all students for both college and career, and to acknowledge that all young people go to college to get a career, not just those in CTE, just as all young people benefit from the critical thinking and broad knowledge gained in humanities and social science disciplines.

The focus of the federal dollars would be to help high schools address this newly defined mission of helping all students acquire sufficient exposure to the world of work and careers to make an informed choice among the career education and training pathways open to them beyond high school.  The idea would be to look across Title I and the other provisions of ESSA and other categorical programs for funds currently reaching high schools, package them together with Perkins funds, and create a new, much more flexible $3-4 billion pot of money to help states and districts support this new “college and career readiness” mission. A significant proportion of the funds would need to be targeted on high schools serving high concentrations of low-income students in order to keep faith with the intent of the Title I program.

This move, while likely triggering some resistance from the traditional constituencies of affected categorical programs, is one that the leadership of the CTE community might be ready to support. Advance CTE, the organization representing the state CTE directors, recently put out a policy paper endorsed by several other key organizations including the Council of Chief State School Officers, the National Association of State Board of Education, and the Association for Career and Technical Education. “Putting Learner Success First: A Shared Vision for the Future of CTE” offers a vision of CTE that is much more integrated with academic education and is designed to reach a much broader range of students. If the tradeoff, for example, would be to retain a $1 billion-funded title to continue support for the kinds of CTE programs Perkins currently funds within a new $4 billion-funded Act more broadly focused on infusing some form of career preparation and readiness into programs serving all high school students, this would likely be seen by the CTE community as win-win.

Option 3: The downside of Option 2, at least as described above, would be that it would seem to back away from one of the most important features of Perkins, which is support for programs of study that span secondary and postsecondary education. Therefore, one might consider a third option, even more radical than the second: replace Perkins with a “College and Career Readiness Act” explicitly designed to encourage states and localities to create programs and institutions that span grades 9-14. This option would draw heavily on the experience of the Early College High School movement, especially those early college high schools with a career focus.

We now have a quite substantial body of evidence attesting to the power of the early college high school model, especially for young people from families with little prior experience of postsecondary education. There is increasing acceptance in the US of the idea that a high school diploma is no longer the minimum education required for successful entrance into the labor market, hence the growing support for free community college. High school educators have for years bemoaned the fact that for many students the senior year is mostly running in place, with little incentive to continue to work hard. The increasing participation in dual enrollment and dual credit programs suggest that many, perhaps most students are ready to get on with the next chapter of their lives by the beginning of their junior year. If we are serious about meeting the goal established by the Lumina Foundation and many others of helping at least 60 percent of our workforce attain a postsecondary credential by 2025, why not redesign our system so that a two-year postsecondary degree, not the high school diploma, becomes the new baseline?

RECOMMENDATIONS

If the Perkins Act is reauthorized by the new Congress in its present form or with only modest tweaks, it will perpetuate the notion that career-focused education is not for all students, and that despite our rhetoric, we don’t really believe that all students need to be prepared both for college and career. Consequently, I would strongly encourage the next president to submit a “College and Career Readiness” proposal along the lines outlined above in my second option, but with a section especially focused on incentivizing the expansion of career-focused early college high schools and other models that seamlessly connect the last years of high school and the first years of postsecondary education.

One final point. The single biggest challenge in realigning our education system to more effectively meet the changing requirements of a dynamic economy is engaging employers as full partners in this enterprise, not simply as passive customers. In the states that have made the most progress in improving the alignment between education and the economy, governors or other political leaders have led the way, making the case to their business community as well as to the general public about the linkage between the state’s economic future and the need for a better educated, more highly skilled workforce. Perhaps the most important contribution the next president can make in addressing the skills mismatch is to use the bully pulpit to encourage employers to band together by sector to act in their own economic self-interest by joining forces with the education community to address this problem.

      

 

 

The confluence of your election, passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), and emerging research presents an opportunity to more effectively and efficiently leverage existing school and community resources to improve the academic achievement and life chances of low-income children.

Download a PDF of this memo.

For over half a century, it has been understood that contexts beyond school can account for up to two-thirds of the variance in student achievement. Developmental systems theories and neurobiological disciplines have more recently shed light on the mechanisms that link socioeconomic challenges to inequality of educational outcomes. Children encounter risk and protective factors that can complement, overwhelm, or compensate for one another over time. Exposure to deprivations like persistent hunger or cold, pain due to untreated medical or dental needs, or traumatic stresses tied to abuse or domestic or neighborhood violence can undermine a child’s working memory, attentiveness, and ability to develop the social-emotional and cognitive skills required for academic performance.

National trends

Today, fifty-two percent of the nation’s public school students are eligible for free or reduced lunch. Areas of concentrated poverty continue to grow in small and large cities, while many suburban and rural communities are contending with an increase in high- needs students. In parallel fashion, the achievement gap between low-income students and their peers has grown by 40 percent in a generation. The differences between higher- and lower-income children are even starker for students experiencing long-term poverty.

In response to persistent achievement gaps and intensifying need among students, comprehensive approaches to student support are proliferating. Alternately known as “wraparound,” “collective impact,” “community schools,” “comprehensive services,” “Promise Neighborhoods,” “Full-Service Schools,” or “integrated student supports,” efforts have taken root in hundreds of schools and communities including Cincinnati, Tulsa, Jennings (Missouri), New York, and Hartford. National networks like Strive Together and the Campaign for Grade Level Reading, and programs like City Connects, Communities In Schools, and Bright Futures are responding, in widely varying ways, to urgent demand.

Evidence and principles of effective practice

New evidence demonstrates that when organizations implement research-based principles of effective practice, comprehensive approaches can cause positive student outcomes. The Boston College Lynch School of Education set out to assess the impact of these principles on student outcomes via an intervention called City Connects. City Connects creates, for each student in a school, a personalized network of resources and opportunities drawn from existing school- and community-based programs. A study of over 7,900 students in the Boston Public Schools attending City Connects elementary schools demonstrated better effort, grades, and attendance compared to peers who did not attend a City Connects school. When followed into eighth grade, these students closed two-thirds of the achievement gap in Math and half of the achievement gap in English relative to the average for all Massachusetts students. Students’ four-year high school dropout rate was cut almost in half. Positive impacts are evident across communities, educational settings, and various subgroups of students including immigrants, English language learners, and African-American and Latino boys.

See page 2 in the PDF for a description of the principles of effective practice.

An estimate of City Connects’ return on investment finds that the costs of implementation, including the external services and opportunities to which students and their families are connected, can be outweighed three-to-one by the benefits to students, and to the nation.

Effective and cost-efficient approaches to intervention tailor to the differences across children and across time, particularly for those who are growing up disadvantaged. Therefore, the key is not merely the presence of resources or inconsistent deployment, but the ability to drive the right resources to the right child at the right time, over time. Providing a child food but not glasses so that she can see the blackboard, or offering after-school programs aimed at cultivating her talents in art and science but not asthma management so she can attend, does little to disrupt the circumstances inhibiting her learning.

Where schools and communities endeavor to provide systemic approaches to student support that unevenly employ principles of effective practice, the current evidence base points to a general, but not consistent, trend of positive learning outcomes. Direct comparisons, and therefore hard conclusions, cannot be drawn against varied interventions studied with wide-ranging goals and degrees of sophistication. To date, the impacts of comprehensive services on student achievement via place-based initiatives like the Harlem Children’s Zone and Promise Neighborhoods are unclear, and further study is required in ESSA Title IV (s.4625)(f). Attending Community Schools in Ohio has, however, correlated with disproportionate gains in student achievement. Other studies looking across Community Schools have found that enrollment is associated with improved student behavior, attendance, and achievement. A 2014 national research review looked at evidence emanating from three programs focused on integrating comprehensive student supports, finding “there is emerging evidence…that integrated student supports can contribute to student academic progress as measured by decreases in grade retention and dropout, and increases in attendance, math achievement, reading and ELA [English Language Arts] achievement, and overall GPA.”

In sum, this emergent evidence base supports the strong theoretical underpinnings for integrated student support as a driver of academic achievement. Together, these yield principles of effective practice that permit improved implementation of federal programs and utilization of federal funds to benefit children and families across the nation.

Federal policy

Select federal policies have long reflected an assumption that systemic, comprehensive approaches could drive student achievement. Programs like Promise Neighborhoods, Full-Service Community Schools Grants, and wraparound components included in 21st Century Community Learning Centers are guided by an understanding that interconnected challenges require interconnected solutions. The National Research Council has found that the availability of academic, social-emotional, health, and mental health supports is predictive of students’ success as adults, and since 1998 the Centers for Disease Control has recommended that schools foster healthy child development by implementing a comprehensive, coordinated approach to the needs of students. Building on these insights, ESSA appropriately takes a broad view of the learning supports, resources, and strategies that may be needed to help disadvantaged students surmount barriers to achievement. Among these strategies is an emphasis on comprehensive integrated student support throughout Titles I and IV.

Federal policy can incentivize and improve the efficacy of investments designed to meet the comprehensive needs of students and their families. Under ESSA, your administration can leverage research on effective practices and support technology and related infrastructure building, thereby setting the stage for states, schools, and communities to use existing resources more efficiently, close achievement gaps, reduce dropout rates, and enhance educational opportunity for all students.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Your administration could, in the first 100 days and throughout your term, take steps to help support children’s healthy development and learning, narrow achievement gaps, and reduce dropout rates by (1) supporting systemic approaches tied to effective practices; and (2) improving the context for effective implementation of integrated student support strategies. We respectfully submit the following recommendations for your consideration.

1.    Support systemic approaches tied to effective practices.

A.    Leverage ESSA implementation to disseminate effective practices.

• State and district plans
  • Clarify to states that comprehensive integrated student support qualifies as evidence-based “school support and improvement activities.”
  • Include approaches to integrated student support consistent with effective practices in “evidence-based strategies” permitted to local districts under Title I.

• Grants
  • Grants issued under the Federal Full-Service Community Schools Program, Promise Neighborhoods, School Improvement Grants, Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants, and 21st Century Community Learning Centers could incentivize prospective grantees to support students and their families in a manner that is customized, comprehensive, coordinated, and continuous. Allow funding to support technical assistance, accountability for implementation, and a set-aside for evaluation.
  • McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act and ESSA provide for an in-district liaison (ESSA, Title I (1114)(C)) to coordinate in- and out-of-district resources for homeless students. In guidance to states, seek implementation of effective practices.

•  Budget
  • Include in your annual budget request to Congress for Department of Education Discretionary Appropriations language that requires grantees under the Federal Full-Service Community Schools Program, Promise Neighborhoods, School Improvement Grants, Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants, and 21st Century Community Learning Centers to implement effective practices.

B.     Invest in state-level infrastructures to create efficiencies and support effective practices.

As many local efforts and national programs can attest, a technology infrastructure, complemented by technical assistance, is imperative for integrating information, identifying resources, connecting students to a tailored set of services and opportunities, fostering accountability, and tracking progress on student achievement and related outcomes. It is also the key to augmenting limited school capacity, creating service delivery efficiencies, and making comprehensive approaches to student support cost-effective and possible at scale.

The federal government can play a vital role in supporting development of innovative infrastructure systems to facilitate integrated student support in communities serving students with complex barriers to learning. Technology backbone systems could be designed for large municipal or regional areas, or statewide, where many relevant building blocks reside, and facilitate the relatively rapid creation of local systems. A well-designed statewide infrastructure would function well in a broad array of school districts, leverage existing data building blocks, capitalize on existing school- and community-based resources, support effective and accountable practices, create service delivery efficiencies, identify gaps in available resources, and provide policymakers aggregate data. Technical assistance to support state and local implementation and capacity building should be a key part of the infrastructure needed to support effective implementation at scale. Early work to develop such a system, informed by evidence-based models, is underway in Massachusetts. This initiative is also receiving inquiries from several other states led by both Democratic and Republican governors.

• Budget
  • Establish competitive planning and implementation grants to states or to states in partnership with a private non-profit or university. Support the time-intensive work of bringing stakeholders together to develop and implement a functional infrastructure that facilitates the creation of local systems supporting the integration of education with social services, youth development, and health and mental health resources for children and families.

•  Convene
  • Follow up on the 2014 White House National Policy Forum on Integrated Student Supports by emphasizing effective practices and systems to improve efficiency.
  • Create a bipartisan commission on the state of integrated student support approaches and ask the commission to review evidence, assess the role of technology, and make policy recommendations.

2.    Improve the context for effective implementation of integrated student support strategies.

A.    Request studies to deepen research and improve the policy climate for effective implementation of integrated student support.

The role of comprehensive services in education has significant public policy implications, shaping our understanding of effective school reform and affecting public and private investments in social services, health care, mental health counseling, housing, afterschool, summer, and early education, or any line item impacting children and families. We therefore recommend further study that aims at enhancing the nation’s understanding of the evidence, and its implications for practice and policy. For example, you could:

• Seek a National Academy of Sciences report that synthesizes interdisciplinary research in order to (a) identify open research questions and make recommendations to the White House to strategically address knowledge gaps through education, health, and social services agency research grants; (b) further refine effective practices; and (c) make policy recommendations for federal, state, and local decision-makers.

• Create a National Commission or Center for Integrated Student Support that can serve as a hub for interdisciplinary research and multi-sector expertise developed across the academy, across communities, and across national programs. Seek research-based guidance to inform improvements to federal programs including Early Head Start, Head Start, Wraparound, 21st Century Community Learning Centers, Promise Neighborhoods, Special Education, Medicaid, and Housing and Urban Development programs that integrate services for residents, including children and their families.

B.   Remove barriers to resource integration for students.
The premise of integrated student support, Full-Service Schools, Promise Neighborhoods, and “wraparound” is that students are ready to learn and succeed when the needs of the “whole child” are addressed. The ability to meet the full complement of need is predicated on the availability of non-academic services and supports on site, in the surrounding community, or online. In many communities, this can be done successfully within existing resource and bureaucratic constraints. However, areas of the law are ripe for alignment and simplification in order to ease the bureaucratic and cost burdens on schools; and continued and strategic expanded investments in children and families would increase the odds of successfully closing achievement gaps and improving educational opportunity. Consistent with cross-disciplinary research on effective policies, we respectfully recommend that you also consider improvements to:

• CHIP/Medicaid/IDEA/ESSA
  • Diminish bureaucratic complexities to make it easier for schools to integrate screening, information and referral, and health services.
  • Support enhanced federal reimbursement to encourage CHIP expansion.
  • Study communities where the state requires that pass-through Medicaid reimbursement funds go directly to school districts and charter schools. Evaluate the impact of these laws on children’s access to appropriate services and continuity of care.

• Education
  • Prioritize investments that contribute to effective instruction and safe and supportive school environments. Comprehensive, integrated student support can boost, but not substitute for, educational quality

• Early education and after school
• • Pursue full funding of authorized discretionary appropriations for the Child Care Development Block Grant and Head Start Act. Access to programs providing high quality early childhood education and after-school often include some comprehensive services, and can be vital supports to students’ readiness to learn and engage in school.

• Child Tax Credit
  • Propose that the Child Tax Credit be fully refundable and indexed to inflation. Improved academic performance and child well-being result when families can provide food, shelter, clothing, and books, and experience reduced economic stress.

CONCLUSION

The research and recommendations outlined above illuminate a pivotal opportunity to ensure effective, feasible, cost-efficient approaches to meeting the comprehensive needs of students. Evidence demonstrates that integrated approaches to student support, when implemented with adherence to principles of effective practice, can significantly narrow achievement gaps and improve dropout rates for the nation’s growing numbers of students living in low-income and disadvantaged circumstances.

Suggested citation:

Walsh, M., & Wasser Gish, J. (2016). Improving student achievement by meeting children’s comprehensive needs. In M. Hansen & J. Valant (Eds.), Memos to the President on the Future of U.S. Education Policy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

Support for this project was generously provided by the Spencer Foundation. Brookings recognizes that the value it provides is in its absolute commitment to quality, independence, and impact. Activities supported by its donors and by outside contributors reflect this commitment. The authors did not report receipt of financial support from any firm or person for this memorandum or from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article that creates a conflict of interest.