Alyson Klein over at Ed Week dug through the Department's SIG application and found two very interesting quotes. The first explains why the Department isn't giving locals more flexibility.
After nearly a decade of broad State and local discretion in implementing, with little success, the school improvement provisions of the ESEA, the Department believes, for the purpose of this program, it is appropriate and necessary to limit that discretion and require the use of a carefully developed set of school intervention models in the Nation's lowest-achieving schools.
The second explains why the Department isn't allowing a fifth, more-flexible turnaround option
Over the course of the past eight years, States and LEAs have had considerable time, and have been able to tap new resources, to identify and implement effective school turnaround strategies. Yet they have demonstrated little success in doing so, particularly in the Nation's persistently lowest-achieving schools...
I am simply unable to square these sentiments with (a) Secretary Duncan's insistence that Washington doesn't have the answers and that states and districts can get education right without federal meddling and (b) his desire for the feds to be tight on goals and loose on means.
I point this out not to just tweak my friends at the Department for the inconsistency but to reiterate that this tension is at the heart of NCLB/ESEA reauthorization (previous related posts here and here). Ed Week just noted that the Department is sharing with the Hill a reauthorization powerpoint presentation with virtually no details. At some point soon some meat needs to be added to those bones, and that will require crafting and defending a position on what the feds ought to do and ought not to do with regard to our schools.
The SIG application shows that the administration isn't quite there yet.