Late Choices

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today released a letter to chief state school officers regarding regulations passed back in October. In what is no April Fool's joke, his letter rolls back a regulation that could have helped provide parents of children enrolled in unsuccessful schools the option of choosing a better one.

No Child Left Behind mandates that, for every school labeled in need of improvement, districts must notify parents of an option to transfer to another, more successful school within the district. Unfortunately, only meager fractions of eligible students take up this provision, and its implementation has a lot to do with that.

The law requires districts to give parents notice by at least at least the first day of school of the following year. So, if you're a parent, imagine going through the school registration process in the fall, buying supplies for your child, and believing that your child will begin attending school X. Then, on the first day of school, your child brings home a letter that says her school failed to make adequate yearly progress last spring, and she now has the option to transfer to another school. She only wasted one day in this school, and maybe you weren't particularly keen on it in the first place, maybe the supplies will be the same everywhere, and maybe the other options would be on your route to work or your child could easily find some other way to attend the new school...in other words, a lot of maybes.

Instead, imagine you, as a parent, were notified at least two weeks in advance of the new school year, as the October regulations dictated. You would have time to consider your options, visit new schools (maybe even new teachers), and plan transportation. You might be altogether more interested in exercising your right to choose.

So who cares whether it's one day our fourteen? The truth is, for a number of reasons (including an over-burdened testing industry), states have proven to be quite poor at turning test results into accountability data. Paul Manna analyzed 2005-6 school year data to determine the date at which states released determinations of whether schools had met or failed to meet proficiency targets. Of students who were tested in the spring of 2006, only five states were able to return school and district data by the end of July. Sixteen managed to do so in the first half of August, and 16 more in the second half. After school started in most states, twenty had failed to report the spring test results: ten finished in September, four in October, three in November, and three states failed to release the data by the end of November.

Secretary Duncan's waiver allows this problem to fester. (Although you could argue the fourteen day regulation was illegal, since it expands the original law, you won't find any support in Duncan's letter: he makes it clear this is just a one year waiver. The fourteen day provision would still take effect for the 2010-2011 school year.) His waiver makes it less urgent for states to turn around test results promptly, which has implications beyond just an under-used school choice provision. Late data results also penalize schools labeled in need of improvement, because it gives them little time to implement a real school improvement plan. Instead of having a summer to figure out how best to reconfigure their school, which sections of the student body need the most help, which subjects students are most behind in, or which turnaround specialist to hire, the school and district often have to make these adjustments on the fly. That makes the process even more difficult, and it's too bad federal policy is moving in the opposite direction.