U.S. Department of Education
November 2002
As everyone surely knows, the federal Education Department recently issued final regulations for the Title I program under No Child Left Behind. It's a 185-page document joined by a 190-page appendix, in which the Department explains the changes that it did or didn't make in the draft regulations published last summer. Everyone also knows that some state officials are voicing dismay at the supposed inflexibility of these regulations, and that - in a wonderfully ironic twist - some prominent Democrats are lamenting the damage that the Republican administration is doing to states' rights and local control, particularly with respect to "adequate yearly progress" and the (limited) choice provisions of NCLB. (Others complain that the regulations don't crack down hard enough on the states.) For the most part, it looks to me, the regulation-writers were faithful to the letter and spirit of the No Child Left Behind act, insisting that its provisions will be complied with even in spheres (such as public school alternatives for children stuck in failing schools) where states and communities have ignored the law or asserted that compliance is unrealistic To understand the agency's reasoning, examine the appendix. While some issues addressed there are highly technical or limited in impact (e.g. is it meaningful to talk about "adequate yearly progress" for youngsters enrolled "in a juvenile justice alternative education program for less than a full academic year"?), others deal with major disputes. On the matter of public school choice, for example, "Several commentators maintained that existing overcrowding of schools, teacher shortages, transportation difficulties, class-size limits...and other capacity issues prevent many LEAs from implementing the public school choice option." To which the Department said, "ESEA does not permit an LEA to preclude choice options on the basis of capacity constraints. Rather, the statute requires an LEA to take measures to overcome issues such as overcrowding, class size limits....This could mean, for example, adding classes and hiring additional teachers...." Overall, an appendix reader is apt to be struck by the fact that, for every objection to rigidities in the draft regs, there was at least one beef about flexibility. The regulation writers seem to have handled most of these in conscientious fashion, though politics sometimes rears its head. (They evidently yielded, for example, to the teacher unions' alarm that school reconstitution efforts would supersede future collective bargaining agreements). Because such regulations are not self-implementing, we obviously won't know for a while just how successfully NCLB will be put into practice by the nation's states, districts and schools, but it seems fair to conclude that, insofar as it doesn't work as intended, most of that failure must be addressed in the statute itself, not the Department's regulations. If you have the patience to download this behemoth, you can find it at http://www.ed.gov/legislation/FedRegister/finrule/2002-4/120202a.pdf.
