Waivers: Increased Flexibility in Exchange for Increased Accountability - September 1997
Observation #1: Federal education legislation provides sufficient flexibility to support most state and local school improvement efforts without a waiver.
The Department's experience with waivers indicates that the framework Congress has established for federal elementary and secondary education programs already incorporates much of the flexibility needed by state and local educators to carry out their school reform efforts.
From school year 1994-95 until just before school year 1997-98, the Department received 435 requests for waivers from state educational agencies and school districts in 48 states. SEAs submitted 60 requests. The remaining 375 requests from school districts represent less than 3 percent of school districts in the nation. The small number of waiver requests and the broad geographic representation of applicants together suggest that school districts and states generally are able to pursue their education improvement goals without needing a waiver.
Of the 435 requests for waivers, the Department approved 46 percent and disapproved 9 percent. Sixteen percent were either withdrawn or not processed for various reasons (for example, the district altered its school improvement plans so that it no longer needed a waiver, the requested waiver was outside the scope of the Secretary's authority, or the applicant failed to address a majority of the application requirements). (See Figure 1.)
The remaining 29 percent, or 127 waiver requests, were unnecessary because applicants already had enough flexibility under the relevant laws to do what they were asking to do. In these cases, the barriers to change were perceived barriers rather than legislative restrictions, and the availability of waivers encouraged educators to think beyond the limitations of their current practices.
The small number of provisions waived, relative to the size and scope of the programs involved, also suggests that federal requirements do not function as significant barriers for states and school districts. The 202 waivers granted involved only 14 requirements. Few of the waivers requested, whether approved or not, dealt with fundamental program components. For example, many of the waivers requested related to which schools within a district could receive funds rather than to which kinds of educational activities could be funded.
For the 202 waiver recipients, the current federal program requirements, although appropriate in most circumstances, did not fully support their efforts to meet the educational needs of students in particular school districts or states. In these specific cases, waivers provide recipients with the needed flexibility. Each of these waivers was approved because the applicant demonstrated that the waiver would likely contribute to improved teaching and learning and met the other criteria for receiving a waiver, including developing clear goals for the applicant's students and programs, weighing any negative impacts of the proposed waiver against expected benefits, and seeking stakeholder comments on the proposal. In each case where the Department determined the applicant's request would not further the intent of the affected legislation and was not in the best interest of the affected students, the waiver was denied.
The waivers approved fall into five general categories: waivers granted to state educational agencies (SEAs) (8 percent), waivers of the minimum poverty threshold for implementing schoolwide programs under ESEA Title I (21 percent), waivers of provisions for targeting ESEA Title I funds within a school district (43 percent), transition waivers to accommodate temporary situations during periods of change (22 percent), and waivers of the mathematics and science priority of the ESEA Title II Eisenhower Professional Development Program (6 percent). (See Figure 2.)
In many cases, the waivers supported pragmatic alternatives for carrying out specific federal programs. In a smaller number of cases, waivers were used to support broad and comprehensive school reform efforts.
Most waivers have been granted under the general waiver authority in section 14401 of the ESEA, rather than under the similar authorities in Goals 2000 and the School-to-Work Opportunities Act. This is because, at the time many waivers were sought, several states had not completed their Goals 2000 or School-to-Work plans, a necessary step to qualify for waivers under those two waiver authorities. Furthermore, the ESEA general waiver authority covers a broader range of programs.
In addition to the general waiver authority in the ESEA, the ESEA contains two program-specific waiver authorities which similarly focus on improving teaching and learning in school districts following court-ordered or state-ordered desegregation plans and in federally supported charter schools. Eleven waivers have been granted under the ESEA Title I desegregation waiver authority, described later in this report. One waiver has been granted under the public charter schools waiver authority in section 10304(e) of ESEA, which permits the Secretary to waive federal requirements for federally-supported charter.1 3
Observation #2: Waivers support state and local efforts to improve teaching and learning.
Each of the following five subsections discusses a category of waivers granted and includes examples that highlight how waivers have promoted school reform for both state educational agencies and school districts. Appendix B provides state-by-state lists of all waivers granted.
Waivers granted to state educational agencies (SEAs) help to strengthen state school reform efforts, better align state and federal school improvement initiatives, ease consolidation of administrative funds, and increase the flexibility available to the school districts in the state. In several cases, the requirements waived apply to the SEA, while in other cases, they apply to school districts throughout the state. Waivers of the mathematics and science priority in the ESEA Title II Eisenhower Professional Development Program, the waivers most commonly sought by SEAs, are discussed in a separate section.
At the time of this report, the Department is reviewing waiver requests from several SEAs concerning the time line for the ESEA Title I requirement that all states have challenging content and student performance standards in place by the beginning of the 1997-98 school year. The Department has indicated to states that likely cannot meet this deadline that it will entertain requests for a limited waiver of the standards deadline; however, the Department has also noted that it will not waive the fundamental requirement to have challenging and aligned content and performance standards. Because no final determinations have been made regarding these pending waiver requests, they are not counted along with the 435 waivers reported on throughout this report. Instead, information on these requests will be included in the next report to Congress on waivers.
The list below highlights examples of waivers already granted to SEAs.
The Department disapproved waiver requests from SEAs when it determined they would not further the underlying intent and purposes of the federal programs in question. For instance, Title I requires assessments of student achievement in at least two core academic subjects, mathematics and reading/language arts, to ensure that students served by the program are making progress toward state learning standards. The Department disapproved one state's request to limit accountability to one subject, mathematics or reading, in certain schools.
Title I, Part A, of the ESEA focuses resources on schools serving economically disadvantaged children who are least likely to succeed academically without supplemental assistance. In schools with large concentrations of students from low-income families, disadvantaged students may be served best by improving the entire school, rather than by operating separate programs that target additional resources to individual students. Thus, a key set of Title I requirements addresses the issue of which schools should be allowed to implement schoolwide plans to upgrade their entire educational program.
Title I permits schools in which at least 50 percent of the children are from low-income families to use Title I funds, in combination with most of their other federal education funds, to operate schoolwide programs. Schools with less than 50 percent of their students from low-income families, by contrast, must use Title I funds to target services to particular students. Forty-four waivers granted to school districts have allowed schools with between 35 and 50 percent of their students from low-income families to implement schoolwide programs, even though they are below the statutory threshold.
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With a waiver, Kealakehe Intermediate School in Hawaii will implement a schoolwide program this year, even though the poverty rate at this school is 47 percent and below the statutory threshold for implementing a schoolwide program. Through a schoolwide needs assessment, the school identified writing and literacy skills as the primary areas of need for its students and developed a "reading through writing" strategy to help address these needs. The school will develop specialized writing standards and assessments for its students, create a format for student writing portfolios, establish a Writing Center, and establish a parent volunteer program. In addition, as a schoolwide program, the school will train teachers in all subject areas to better integrate writing into their classes. |
In exchange for the significantly increased flexibility schoolwide programs afford to schools, schools that want to operate as schoolwide programs must engage a wide range of stakeholders in one year of planning for a schoolwide program. These planning efforts must include certain components: identifying the primary needs of students at the school, selecting strategies that will effectively address these needs, designing programs to provide professional development for teachers and increase parental involvement in the school, and incorporating steps to ensure that the needs of the lowest-achieving students will be met in the schoolwide program. For each schoolwide waiver approved, the affected school or schools had developed quality schoolwide plans.
In cases where the Department disapproved requests to implement schoolwide programs, the applicant typically had not carried out sufficient planning or had developed a plan that was likely to continue focusing on individual students rather than on upgrading the whole curriculum and school.
Another set of Title I requirements addresses the issue of which schools within a district are eligible to receive Title I funds. The law focuses federal funds on schools with relatively high concentrations of poverty, in order to help the most disadvantaged children meet challenging state academic content and student performance standards. Based on the demonstrated correlation between low academic achievement and poverty, several provisions of law require districts to target Title I funds to schools with the highest percentages of children from low-income families.4 In certain cases, however, these approaches to targeting may not be the best way to meet the needs of students in a school district. To accommodate the exceptions, the Department has granted 77 waivers of Title I targeting provisions under the general waiver authority in ESEA section 14401 5 ,3 and 11 under the Title I desegregation waiver authority.
Notably, many of these waivers involve schools that are just below the poverty thresholds for Title I eligibility or are at the margins of certain funding requirements.
Most of the 77 Title I targeting waivers approved under the general waiver authority were granted to:
Under the Title I targeting provisions, schools with at least 35 percent or more of their students from low-income families or schools with poverty rates above the district-wide average are eligible for funding. In school districts that received multi-year waivers of Title I targeting provisions, the average percentage of children from low-income families is 30.5 percent. Forty-three percent of all targeting waivers were granted to districts in which the percentage of children from low-income families is below 35 percent in all schools.
| In Greensburg Salem School District in Pennsylvania, achievement data indicated that students at Metzgar Elementary School were performing below their counterparts at other district elementary schools. With 26 percent of its students from low-income families, the school falls 4 percent below the Title I eligibility threshold in the district. The waiver allows the district to provide Title I services at Metzgar, as well as at its two other elementary schools. Even with the waiver, each school receives a supplemental allocation of $890 per pupil. |
Seventy-three percent of targeting waivers allowed school districts to provide Title I services at schools with percentages of children from low-income families below the eligibility threshold. As a result, the number of schools served in these primarily low poverty districts increased by 31 percent, or by 74 schools. At these otherwise ineligible schools, the percentages of children from low-income families, on average, were about 4 percent below the districts' eligibility thresholds.
Twenty-nine percent of the targeting waivers granted were for cases where the range of poverty rates among schools in the district is 10 percent or less. In such cases, the schools within a district did not seem to differ much from one another and tended to fluctuate in and out of Title I eligibility from year to year. For instance, Belleville Township High School District, Illinois, consists of two high schools, each with about the same percentage of students from low-income families (16 percent and 18 percent). Under Title I, the school with the larger percentage of students from low-income families each year would be eligible for Title I, while the other school would not. With its waiver, the district is able to continuously provide Title I services to students at both schools.
Title I requires school districts to fund schools in rank order, according to the percentages of children from low-income families at each school, so that per pupil allocations to higher poverty schools are at least as large as those to lower poverty schools. Twenty-seven percent of the targeting waivers allowed school districts to allocate additional funds to lower poverty schools. In districts with these waivers, the average differential in poverty rates between the high and low schools funded was 16 percent, and the average differential in funding was $409 per pupil. A waiver of this allocation requirement allows Fort Worth Independent School District in Texas to provide extra Title I dollars to four inner-city, elementary schools that were identified for extensive restructuring based on low achievement and other factors. Even though over 90 percent of the students at each of these schools are from low-income families, the schools are still not the poorest schools in the district.
| In Palm Beach County School District, Florida, a waiver allows the district to provide Title I services at one additional elementary school which has been identified as a low-performing school. Without the waiver, the district could not provide Title I services at Poinciana Elementary School without also serving seven other schools with slightly higher poverty rates and, as a result, diluting the amount of Title I funds given to the district's poorest schools. In six cases, waivers permit school districts to not serve some Title I-eligible schools so they may serve schools with smaller percentages of children from low-income families. (See Palm Beach County, Florida example.) |
To each school served by Title I, the ESEA also requires school districts to provide Title I per pupil amounts that are at least 125 percent of the Title I per pupil allocation received by the district. (This is possible because each district's Title I allocation is based on a formula that counts all of the low-income children who live in the district, and not just the children enrolled in the schools served.) Thirty-two percent of all targeting waivers were for this per pupil allocation requirement. In districts with waivers of this requirement, eligible schools receive per pupil allocations of approximately $560 per pupil -- about 27 percent lower than the allocation they would have received without a waiver.
The Department disapproved requests for targeting waivers that lacked a compelling educational justification or, in other words, when the applicant failed to demonstrate why a waiver would be in the best interest of its students. For instance, some applicants requested waivers to provide Title I services in otherwise ineligible schools, even though students in those schools outperformed children in schools that would have received fewer funds with a waiver. In other instances, applicants did not adequately demonstrate that the needs of students in higher poverty schools were being addressed enough to justify a transfer of funds away from those schools.
Within Title I is a specialized waiver authority that permits the Secretary to waive within-district Title I targeting requirements for school districts following court-ordered or state-ordered desegregation plans. This waiver authority gives districts greater flexibility in using Title I funds to serve students who are transferred from Title I schools in their neighborhoods to other schools as a result of a mandated desegregation plan.
To receive a waiver under this authority, a school district must demonstrate that the waiver would further the purposes of Title I. The Department has granted 11 waivers under this authority. Four other requests for waivers under this authority were withdrawn.
Forty-four "transition" waivers were granted to accommodate temporary situations in school districts and during this reporting period. Typically, these transition waivers were for one year only.
The reauthorized ESEA contained a transition year to phase in the lower poverty threshold for schoolwide programs. Prior to reauthorization, only schools with at least 75 percent of their students from low-income families were allowed to use Title I funds for schoolwide programs. The threshold was set at 60 percent of students from low-income families for the 1995-96 school year, then reduced to 50 percent for subsequent years. Four waivers granted allowed schools in which between 50 and 60 percent of the students were from low-income families, and which had already developed comprehensive schoolwide plans, to implement these plans a year earlier than they otherwise could have under the statute. Another 40 transition waivers were for Title I targeting requirements.
| Burrell School District, Pennsylvania, received a one-year transition waiver allowing it to provide Title I services in all four of its elementary schools, two of which would otherwise be ineligible, while the district consolidates all of these smaller schools into one new school building in the course of the school year. With the waiver, during the transition, all schools are able to offer the same programming and disruption caused by the consolidation will be minimized. |
Title II of ESEA, the Eisenhower Professional Development Program, supports professional development in core academic subjects and requires states and school districts to spend a minimum amount of funds for professional development in mathematics and science. If the annual appropriation for Title II exceeds this minimum, states and school districts may use the additional funds for professional development in other subjects. The percentage of funds available for subjects other than mathematics and science was 14.7 percent in fiscal year 1996 and 22.7 percent in fiscal year 1997.
| In According to the Missouri Mastery and Achievement Tests (MMAT), students in the state are doing better in mathematics and science at both the high and low ends of the scale than they are in reading and social studies. To help raise student achievement in reading and social studies, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education requested and received a waiver of the Title II mathematics and science priority. With the waiver, school districts in Missouri may use Eisenhower Professional Development funds in other core subject areas, including reading and social studies. During the period of the waiver, Missouri will continue to use the State assessment to monitor student achievement in mathematics, science, and other subjects areas. |
While the Department recognizes the importance of mathematics and science education, it has granted waivers of this funding priority to seven states and two consortia of school districts. In these cases, the Department determined that waivers would promote professional development activities designed to help all students reach challenging standards in all core subjects, including mathematics and science. With a waiver, these states and consortia may spend a greater proportion of their total Title II funds on subjects other than mathematics and science. However, even with their waivers, these states and school districts may spend a significant portion, or even all, of their Eisenhower funds for professional development in mathematics or science.
The Department disapproved requests from two states for waivers of the Title II mathematics and science priority. Both states wanted to spend additional Title II funds in other core subjects, but neither state demonstrated how the waiver would improve student achievement, whether students were achieving at satisfactory levels in mathematics and science, or that compelling needs existed in other subjects.
Several states received waivers of the mathematics and science priority that support efforts to prepare educators to implement state content and student performance standards:
| The Vermont Department of Education is using its waiver of the mathematics and science priority to provide professional development for cross-content area activities. As with other recipients of Title II waivers, in Vermont the Eisenhower mathematics and science priority functioned as a barrier to coordinating professional development activities in all subject areas in its Common Core, including mathematics and science. |
The Oregon State System of Higher Education and the Nebraska Coordinating Commission for Postsecondary Education received waivers of the mathematics and science priority for the portions of the state Title II allocations that support professional development through postsecondary institutions. In Oregon, foreign language is one of the core subject areas in the state's systemic reform initiatives, and Oregon has set clear goals for increasing the quality of its foreign language instruction. Oregon will use its waiver to allocate up to 40 percent of its Eisenhower funds for postsecondary institutions for foreign language projects. In contrast, the waivers granted to the Wyoming Department of Education and two consortia of school districts in Pennsylvania support efforts at the school district-level to coordinate professional development activities.
Several trends have emerged during the three years since the implementation of the waiver authorities. The Department has observed that the use of waivers by school districts depends largely on the degree to which SEAs encourage their districts to apply. Although waiver requests have been received from most states, some states and their school districts have submitted many more requests than others. For example, more than half of the 435 waiver requests received by the Department came from just five states (California, Hawaii, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee), with districts from Pennsylvania submitting 27 percent of all waiver requests. A recent study of the implementation of Federal programs also confirmed variations in awareness of waivers between SEAs and school districts. Specifically, in the study, 87 percent of all SEAs reported a reasonable or full understanding of the waiver authorities while only 52 percent of their school districts reported a reasonable or full understanding of waivers. Smaller percentages of SEAs and school districts indicated they need more information and assistance with waivers: 21 percent of SEAs and 27 percent of school districts reported needs for more information or assistance. 6
As noted earlier, the waiver process also has highlighted many instances in which educators have much more flexibility in the use of federal funds than they think they do. Often educators did not need the waivers they requested because the desired flexibility was already incorporated in the reauthorized ESEA. For instance, many school districts were unaware of new options in the ESEA for calculating poverty rates (which affect Title I allocations). Similarly, several school districts did not realize that the reauthorized ESEA allows them to vary allocations to schools among grade spans of elementary, middle, and high schools. With time, states and districts have become more familiar with the requirements in the reauthorized ESEA, and the number of unnecessary waivers requested has decreased. During the first year of waivers, nearly one-third (31 percent) of all waivers requested were not needed; by the third year of waivers, that number had dropped to 9 percent.
The types of waivers requested also has changed over time, as illustrated in Figure 3. Requests for waivers of Title I targeting requirements were most common during the first year after reauthorization. More recently, requests for waivers of the minimum poverty threshold for implementing schoolwide programs have become the most common type of waiver requested.
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[III. The Education Flexibility Partnership Demonstration Program (ED-FLEX) ]
