ASSOCIATED PRESS January 18, 2008

HEADLINE: U.S. ed secretary praises California's No Child plan

By Juliet Williams

SACRAMENTO – U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on Friday praised California's plan to hold 98 failing school districts accountable under the No Child Left Behind Act and pledged to allow states more flexibility in implementing the law.

Spellings, in San Diego to meet education and business leaders, talked with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger about his plan for the 98 California districts that face sanctions for the first time this year.

The governor has focused on his No Child Left Behind intervention plan as the state struggles with a $14.5 billion budget deficit, which has scuttled his larger plan for a year of education reform. It also forced him to propose cutting California's education budget by $4.8 billion.

The state's intervention plan would send teams of state experts into the districts to figure out what's not working and make varying changes.

Unlike previous initiatives in other states, California would implement a sliding scale of intervention actions depending on how poorly the districts have performed.

The most severe measures, such as replacing administrators or a state takeover, would be saved for districts that have consistently failed to raise achievement levels, particularly for black and Hispanic students.

“It is the raging fire in American education, this achievement gap that continues to plague us,” Spellings told a business round-table at the San Diego Chamber of Commerce. “It's painful, it's uncomfortable to find out this stuff ... but we ought to have anxiety when only half our minority kids are getting out of high school on time.”

The six-year-old federal law is credited with shining a light on the unequal quality of education. The 98 school districts listed as failing in California are those that have not met their benchmarks under the law for each of the past four years.

Other states also must take action against consistently underperforming school districts.

Spellings said the law is forcing schools to improve but conceded there have been problems, some of which will be addressed as Congress works to reauthorize it, perhaps this year.

Among the most promising changes, she said, has been the move to let more states measure the progress of individual students over time.

Under the current method, schools must compare different classes. For example, a fifth-grade class this year would be compared to the performance of the previous year's fifth-grade class in math and reading. School officials say that is an inaccurate measure and have sought to track individual students, although many states do not have enough data to do it.

But federal officials rejected California's approach, saying the state does not have an accurate way of tracking such progress. Spellings said new approaches must be rigorous and still aim to have all students proficient by 2014.

“We're going to have to pick up the pace. Any old growth every year is not going to get kids to grade level by 2014,” she told the business forum.

Also Friday, Spellings sent a letter to states warning them they still must comply with the law, despite a recent court ruling allowing a lawsuit that challenges its funding.

She said her department will vigorously fight the Jan. 7 ruling by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, which revived a challenge to the federal law by allowing a lawsuit filed by school districts in three states and the nation's largest teachers union. The plaintiffs claim the No Child Left Behind law is an unfunded mandate.

“The Sixth Circuit's decision undermines the efforts we have made under NCLB to improve the education of our nation's children, particularly those children most in need,” Spellings wrote to state education leaders. “If the decision stands, it would represent a fundamental shift in practice.”

The Pontiac, Mich., school district, eight districts in Texas and Vermont, and National Education Association affiliates in several states filed the lawsuit. They argued that school districts should not have to comply with requirements that are not funded by the federal government.