Testimony by Wendy Harris, Director, School Improvement Division
Assembly Education Committee - Informational Hearing
October 5, 2007
Good morning, Mr. Chairman, I am Wendy Harris, Director, School Improvement Division in the California Department of Education. The work of my division work is to provide support and intervention for the schools and districts that are struggling the hardest in California to meet the state growth and NCLB performance targets, as well as those that are struggling with eliminating the achievement gap. Today I’d like to give you a short overview of our support and intervention work as called for by NCLB.
Let’s start with some numbers. With respect to NCLB, California has 2,210 schools in various stages of Program Improvement (PI) and 192 districts in PI. Almost 600 schools have failed AYP for at least 6 years; 99 of the districts have failed AYP for four consecutive years. As schools and districts are identified and continue to fail to meet AYP, various types of consequences are imposed. Schools first identified need to revise their school plan, set aside at least 10% of their Title I funding for professional development, notify parents and provide opportunity for all students in the school to attend a non-PI school in the district and to pay the transportation costs. Failing AYP another year, a school needs to provide supplemental educational services (tutoring) for those students whose parents request it. In the third year of PI, districts must take at least one local corrective action for a school such as replacing staff, appointing an outside expert to help the school, extending the year or day, etc. In Year 4, the school plans for restructuring, i.e. alternative governance such as replacing most of the staff, contracting for outside management, reopening the school as a charter, and any other major restructuring. In Year 5, the school implements its restructuring plan.
Back to the district level, districts identified for PI must work with an outside entity, after consulting with their county office, to revise their district plan and notify parents of the district’s status. We have made federal funding available to these districts for up to two years to support the costs of working with the outside entity to revise the district plan and begin implementing the improvements.
Turning to the area of technical assistance, in California we have a coordinated system of support for these schools and districts to help them focus on certain school and district improvement areas that will improve achievement. NCLB calls for a statewide system of school support, and in California we rely on county offices, for the most part, to do this work. We have school level as well as district level tools and protocols but more and more, we are focusing this work at the district level. Improving those 2000 schools, school by school, is not an option.
Our district level work is still evolving. Knowing the numbers will only increase over time and that we would be faced with the challenge of helping many districts in PI, we constructed the concept of a District Intervention and Assistance Team (DAIT) ----a group of individuals collectively expert in a number of areas of district operations who work closely with district staff to provide help on instructional issues and organizational improvement. Initially, we asked the State Board of Education in March of 2006 to adopt standards for the work of a DAIT in the following areas:
- Governance
- Alignment of curriculum, instruction, and assessments to state standards
- Parent and community involvement
- Fiscal operations
- Human resources
- Data systems and achievement monitoring
- Professional development
Knowing also the need to scale this work up, we partnered with CCSESA and received a District Intervention and Capacity Building Grant to pilot the DAIT work and extend that work across all county regions in California. This is now underway in 13 districts and about 15 county offices in all regions. We have also developed through a procurement process a list of approved organizations to provide these teams.
Once a district progresses in NCLB accountability, the state has to assign at least one of seven sanctions to districts, which range from more fully utilizing SBE-adopted materials and training to deferring or withholding funds, to replacing staff responsible for failure, to abolishing the district. California education code permits us to assign a DAIT team to make recommendations to improve a district and to support the district in its work. However, the assignment of a DAIT falls on top of a federal sanction; it cannot be a substitute for one. While we were not given the resources in the current year budget to fund this work, we continue to work on the pilot to learn from it so we can implement DAIT in the future on a wider scale. We believe the DAIT work has the best opportunity through the use of expert, outside eyes to build a district’s capacity to improve and sustain the improvement. That being said, a strong state role is necessary at some point to worry about those schools and districts whose capacity can’t be built or who are for whatever reason unable to help themselves.
Let me turn finally to a few problems we see in NCLB in this area. While we are working very hard to turn these schools and districts around, NCLB as currently constructed presents some real barriers, as we have indicated in our June correspondence to the California Congressional Delegation. The law requires that all schools in need of improvement receive similar attention by their district, with a small number of approved local corrective actions. And, all districts in PI receive similar attention by the state. The law does not allow either districts or the state to implement interventions based on the nature and extent of the cause of identification for PI. For example, districts or schools failing AYP for participation rate in one subgroup are treated exactly the same as those failing to reach proficiency in multiple subgroups for both English language arts and mathematics. What is needed is discretion to triage the schools and districts, based on their needs, giving more attention and resources to the most serious places, and to target interventions at the identified needs. Also, we believe there should be more time during an intervention process to effect change, even if those interventions require more than one year to show full results.
In the few minutes here, I've only been able to touch the surface today on a number of complex issues. Thank you for letting me comment and I hope it has been helpful.
