Oklahoman, The (Oklahoma City, OK)
April 8, 2011
HEADLINE: State schools leader seeks flexibility on federal funds

By Chris Casteel

WASHINGTON - Oklahoma schools Superintendent Janet Barresi joined a chorus of educators on Thursday asking lawmakers for more flexibility to reform schools using federal money.

At a hearing of the House Education and Workforce Committee, Barresi said she was worried state innovation would be stifled by the limits on how federal money can be used.

"We would very much welcome the opportunity to decide for ourselves how those dollar bills are spent," she told the committee.

Congress has been slow to renew the Bush-era No Child Left Behind education law that linked federal funding to a number of new requirements on schools, including annual progress reports.

Barresi said those progress reports don't provide meaningful information to parents and that Oklahoma was designing a report card for schools that would assign grades, from A through F, like students receive. Ideally, she said, federal money could be used for a grant program for those who wanted to improve the grade their school received.

Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., the chairman of the education committee, said lawmakers, in crafting new federal education policy, need to balance flexibility with accountability in how federal money is spent. He expressed confidence that Congress could do that.

California Rep. George Miller, the top Democrat on the panel, said, "For all its flaws, the current law did help us see, for the first time, what was happening in our schools. Now that we know what is happening, we have to give our schools the supports to help spur the real change that our students need."

Barresi, who took over as the state superintendent of public instruction in January, was part of a panel that also included administrators from Minnesota, Texas and Washington, D.C. All expressed frustration with the partitions around federal funds, some of which go unused because they are restricted to one purpose, while schools may need them for another.

Barresi said the funding targets should be students, rather than specific programs or schools.

"The U.S. Department of Education has guidelines that on the surface seem to offer states more flexibility to meet local needs," she told the committee. "But there seems to be a disconnect between good intentions at the top level and what actually occurs in practice, such as during program audits."

The founder of two charter schools, Barresi said requirements are lifted for charter schools at the front end but accountability is ensured by the fact that the schools go out of business if they don't perform.