How confusion over federal rules can get in the way of smart school spending

Of the many factors that affect what school districts buy and do for their students, an often-overlooked issue is the influence of federal education grant programs.

Nearly every school district in the country receives funding from the US Department of Education (ED) through grant programs that support elementary and secondary education.1 While this funding represents a relatively small share of education spending overall,2 the rules governing how it can be spent strongly influence local decisions about student services. This influence is hard to see, but it works as follows.

ED programs are governed by complex rules. In this report, we are not referring to accountability rules, such as how to identify and intervene in low-performing schools. Instead, we are discussing program implementation and spending rules such as who is eligible for services, what activities ED funds can support, the time frame in which districts can spend ED funds, paperwork requirements, and other technical issues that receive little attention.

The complexity of the rules governing ED programs, and the way they are enforced, can unintentionally incentivize spending on the same activities from year to year, which limits opportunities for improvement. It can also incentivize a fragmented approach to education that favors unaligned interventions over systemic activities. These incentives affect more than just what districts do with their federal funds but also how they spend state and local funds.

As lawyers who help states, school districts, and other educational organizations navigate the federal rules governing ED programs, we see directly how important federal funds are for schools and students. We have helped districts use federal funds to improve the reading curriculum in struggling elementary schools, establish counseling and mentoring programs in low-income high schools, help students arrive to school safely, and engage parents in their children’s school through community school approaches. Yet, spending federal funds on these kinds of systemic activities is uncommon for reasons we will discuss throughout this report.

To mitigate some of the complexities that limit ED grant spending, this report suggests ways stakeholders across the education sector could make it easier for schools and districts to understand their spending options. Specifically:

Congress could revise program implementation rules to reduce confusion and make them easier to implement.

ED and other federal agencies could use flexibilities that are already on the books to ease spending barriers.

ED, state educational agencies, and entities that support states and school districts could provide state and district leaders with tools, such as simple clear explanations of the rules and implementation-oriented guidance with concrete examples of effective practices.

State and local education leaders can engage with the rules directly so they better understand their options and obligations.

Education advocates, policymakers, and others who care about education can study how federal rules work in practice to understand their effect on students and schools.

Helping local leaders recognize that federal requirements have a wide-ranging influence on all student services, not just those that are federally funded, and helping them better understand and more easily navigate federal compliance requirements could result in more effective spending and improved outcomes for students.

SOURCE





How early childhood education uses social and emotional learning

One of my wife’s favorite Saturday Night Live skits is titled “Baby Names,” in which an eight-months-pregnant wife suggests to her husband a series of names for their son.1 Her proposals are relatively common and banal—Joseph, John, Peter, William, Fred, Sam, Paul, Jack, Ben, Todd, Harry, and Nate—but the husband rejects all of them, offering absurd potential insults that might be used against the boy if he had any of those names. The father-to-be’s sensitivity is explained at the end of the skit, when it turns out that his own name is actually a naughty and embarrassing word.

The husband in that skit might have benefited from schoolmates whose social and emotional learning (SEL) skills were more developed, which raises a question many in the education reform world have been asking: What can schools do to help support social and emotional development? This question has generated a swath of research and suggestions, from the Aspen Institute’s SEL report and subsequent action guide to RAND Corporation’s national surveys on SEL for teachers and principals.2

But one rarely discussed idea is to learn from the world of early childhood education, which has spent decades wrestling with how it measures and implements SEL. At the moment, SEL seems to be valued more with younger children. For example, every state has social-emotional standards for early childhood, while as of 2018 only 14 had them for K–12.3 In the best early childhood programs, SEL isn’t an ephemeral concept used to avoid scrutiny of academic outcomes; it’s an integral part of the teaching strategy and an area in which performance is carefully measured. That level of integration and attention is something SEL advocates and K–12 schools should pay attention to.

SOURCE





Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue

In 2015, the Montana Legislature created a tax credit scholarship program that would provide scholarships for income-eligible students to use at qualified private schools.

Initially, recipients could use scholarship funds at qualified religiously affiliated schools. However, the Montana Department of Revenue implemented an administrative rule excluding religious schools, citing a provision in the state constitution that bars state funds from aiding religious organizations.

Parents who relied on the scholarship funds to send their kids to religious schools filed a lawsuit in state court challenging the administrative rule. They argued that the rule violates the Religion Clauses of the U.S. Constitution as well as the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

The parents maintain that the tax credit program did not violate the state constitution’s “no aid” provision since the tax credit merely incentivized private donations. The district court ruled in favor of the parents, but the Montana Supreme Court reversed and invalidated the scholarship program in its entirety.

Now the parents have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to extend the logic of Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer, a 2017 ruling, to the school choice area.

In Trinity Lutheran, the Supreme Court ruled that Missouri violated the Free Exercise Clause when it barred a church-run day care center from receiving a public grant to resurface its playground. The justices reasoned that Missouri had improperly singled out the day care center for unfavorable treatment and denied it a public benefit solely because of its religious affiliation.

The parents also point out that the Supreme Court has drawn a distinction between government directly providing aid to religious schools and providing aid to individuals who then have the choice to use those funds at religious schools.

Montana, on the other hand, points to Locke v. Davey (2004), in which the Supreme Court held that, consistent with the Establishment Clause, states could prohibit the use of public scholarship funds for college students studying to become ministers.

The Montana case offers the Supreme Court the chance to harmonize these two prior rulings and provide guidance to the many states that have tax credit scholarships.

The court will hear oral argument Jan. 22.

Expect the high court’s decisions in these two important cases, and many others, by the end of June.

SOURCE