Parent Involvement and the New Title I

The Improving America's Schools Act legislation of 1994 greatly increased the responsibility and requirements for parental involvement activities in Title I schools. Though the requirements for annual meetings and involvement of parents in planning, review, and implementation of projects remain from the old Chapter 1 wording, expansion of the parental involvement role signifies its importance. Because schools have so much to learn following the changes to Title I, the school-parent compact has often been at the center for parental involvement activities as the new legislation is implemented. Many compacts have been generic to entire districts or buildings. Some model designs have gone from general school concepts to concepts specific to each child and family. Those with some explicit points, where parents and/or guardians and school staff can demonstrate the action, seem to have the greatest effect. It is important to note that the legislation talks about shared responsibility, not just what more a parent should do. Of further interest is the denotation of the involvement of the "entire school staff" and not just the Title I staff. Though it is not a requirement, many schools have also delineated a portion of the compact for the child to develop and/or sign. Meaningful partnership between home and school can only strengthen the support for learners to achieve high state standards.     

An integrated assessment of the effects of Title I on school behavior,resources, and student achievement

We examine the effects of Title I on school behavior, resources, and academic performance using a rich set of school finance and student-level achievement data from one large urban school district using a regression discontinuity design. We find that Title I eligibility raises Federal revenues of schools by about $460 per student. This is partially offset by decreases in revenues from state categorical aid grants, so that the net increase to schools is about $360 per student. We find no impact on overall school-level test scores, but also no impact among the subgroups of students most likely to be affected by Title I. A novel finding is that schools appear to respond to the incentives embedded in the Title I allocation process by manipulating the fraction of their students signed up for free lunch to secure more Federal funds.     

Strengthening the Ties Between Title I and Family Literacy

When schools work together with families to support learning, children are inclined to succeed not only in school but throughout life as well. Three decades of research show that parental participation in schooling improves student learning. Title I, as amended by the Improving America's Schools Act (Public Law 103-382), reflects these research findings and emphasizes the importance of family involvement as a means to help address more completely the full range of student needs that affect their learning. Although parental involvement can take many forms, in this article I focus specifically on family literacy services. The Title I statute requires any Title I program to include "strategies to increase parental involvement, such as family literacy services." In addition, any school district with a Title I allocation above $500,000 must spend at least 1% of its allocation for district- and school-level parental involvement activities, which can include family literacy activities. Title I also recognizes that schools and patents share responsibility for the education of children. Therefore, each Title I school is to develop school-parent compacts that outline how parents, the entire school staff, and students will share responsibility for improved student achievement and the means by which schools and parents will work together to help children achieve high state standards. School-parent compacts area logical tool for addressing family literacy needs. Equally important, Title I has a history of parental involvement that literacy can help enrich further.     

Creating Good Schools for Children in Poverty Through Title I Schoolwide Programs

The Improving America' s Schools Act--the 1994 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act--will make schoolwide Title I programs available, beginning with the 1996-97 school year, to schools in which at least 50% of students are from families in poverty. Through schoolwide programs, eligible schools may combine Title I funds with other federal, stare, and local resources to upgrade the quality of education for all children. The legislation explicitly encourages schools and districts to design their own ambitious curricula for all students, keeping them in Title I programs within their regular education classrooms while minimizing the time they spend in "pullout" programs. In this article, we synthesize research on schoolwides with the views of experienced practitioners in 21 highly regarded schoolwide projects under Title I's predecessor, Chapter 1, to identify the principles guiding effective schoolwides. Findings are based on in-depth interviews with teachers and principals and on evidence of success found in reviews of project materials and outcome evaluations. Although schoolwide programs are locally devised and unique, the most successful build on a framework that includes these eight features: a shared vision, time and resources for planning and program design, skillful management and a well-defined organizational structure, a clear focus on academics, continuing professional development schoolwide, a commitment to cultural inclusiveness, patent and community involvement, and an accountability orientation. The study highlights promising practices that future Title I schoolwide programs can adopt to reorganize schools, streamline management, and upgrade the curriculum for children in schools serving communities with the highest concentrations of poor families.     

Title I and School--Family--Community Partnerships: Using Research to Realize the Potential

Title I's requirements for parent and community involvement in both schoolwide programs and targeted assistance schools, along with requirements for funding such involvement, challenge Title I schools to think seriously about and to plan for involvement that will help make a difference in children's learning. In this article, we (a) review the requirements and how they may be interpreted (especially the requirement for school-parent contracts); (b) briefly summarize recent research on the effects of school-family partnerships on students, teachers, and parents; and (c) discuss two major research-based comprehensive programs for building school-family-community partnerships that provide a foundation upon which Title I schools could develop, in conjunction with parents, their own comprehensive and effective programs.     

Relationship Between Educational Resources and School Achievement: A Mixed Method Intra-District Analysis

This study examines the relationship between educational resources (fiscal, personnel and facilities) and school achievement within a large urban/suburban elementary school district. A sequential mixed methods approach reveals inequitable resource allocation trends and patterns between schools within a school district by producing different student outcomes. The educational resources positively correlated to higher school achievement are: higher teacher salaries, newer schools, more multi-purpose space per pupil and less portable classrooms. Without question, White students receive more of these resources than Latino students, low-income students and English Language learners. This study also conducts a multiple comparative case study analysis comparing between Title I and non-Title I schools, within Title I schools and within non-Title I schools. The study contains policy and practice implications to improve opportunity and school achievement in urban/suburban school districts.     

Title I Schoolwide Programs: Improving Schools for All Children

Three decades have passed since the historic enactment of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA). The most recent reauthorization of the ESEA, the Improving America's Schools Act of 1994 (IASA), reaffirms the federal commitment to focusing on equity of and access to quality education for disadvantaged students. As in 1965, Title I remains the cornerstone of the reauthorized ESEA, providing assistance to those children who need it the most. However, it adopts different strategies for meeting those needs. The new Title I signals a fundamental change in the direction of the program. The focus has shifted from an emphasis on isolated remedial add-on services to a concentration on leveraging overall improvement in the highest-poverty schools through comprehensive schoolwide improvement in teaching and learning. The goal of this improvement is to enable educationally disadvantaged children to meet the same high academic standards expected of all children. For this reason, the new Title I is designed to work with other IASA programs and reinforce overall reform efforts in schools, districts, and states.     

Policy issues: Student Performance and Congressional Support

In the first issue of this journal, I wrote about policy issues with which all stakeholders associated with at-risk children and youth should be involved (Carroll, 1996). Continuing in the policy arena, I now speak to student results. The Title I program serves more than 5 million children with a $7 billion appropriation, and school districts need only report to the state the achievement of Title I participants who are tested as part of the annual state assessment program at three grade groupings--Grades 3 to 5, 6 to 8, and 10 to 12. Districts and states are no longer required to conduct pretest and posttest assessments that show the normal curve equivalent growth of children. Instead, adequate yearly progress toward meeting the states' definitions of advanced, proficient, and partially proficient student performance measures is the new yardstick of accountability and program success. These definitions apply no later than the year 2000-2001, when the states must have their student assessments aligned with their content and student performance standards. Even though the new Title I regulations ease up on frequency and coverage of assessment, Title I schools and programs should not. Schools must assess the performance of all their students and show results if we are to garner continued financial and program support from members of Congress and out constituencies at the state and local levels.     

Title I: The Evolving Research Base

For the past 35 years, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act has been the largest and most important federal resource for reforming high-poverty schools. Drawing on recent research, this article documents what we know about Title I's overall effectiveness and discusses how it may become a more effective intervention. The author concludes by making 3 policy recommendations for fostering better research and better programs: implement a rigorous and uniform national accountability system; support continued research and development of replicable programs and methods for improving schooling for disadvantaged children; and encourage large-scale randomized experiments of promising programs and practices.     

The Impact of Sustained, Standards-Based Professional Learning on Second and Third Grade Teachers’ Content and Pedagogical Knowledge in Integrated Mathematics

This 3 year longitudinal study reports the feasibility of an Improving Teacher Quality: No Child Left Behind project for impacting teachers’ content and pedagogical knowledge in mathematics in nine Title I elementary schools in the southeastern United States. Data were collected for 3 years to determine the impact of standards and research-based teacher training on these aspects of teacher quality. Content knowledge for the scope of this research study refers to the knowledge that teachers have about subject matter. Teacher quality is directly related to teachers’ “highly qualified” status, as defined by the No Child Left Behind mandate. According to this mandate, every classroom should have a teacher qualified to teach in his subject area and be able to “raise the percentage of students who are proficient in reading and math, and in narrowing the test-score gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students.” Participants were six second grade and seven third grade teachers of mathematics from nine schools within one failing school district. The implementation of standards-based methods in the nine Title I Schools increased teacher quality in elementary school mathematics. In fact, qualitative and quantitative data revealed significant gains in teachers’ mathematics content and pedagogical knowledge at both grade levels.     

School improvement plans and student learning in Jamaica

A school improvement program that provided support to poor-performing schools on the basis of needs identified in a school improvement plan was implemented in 72 government schools in Jamaica, from 1998 to 2005. In this independent evaluation of the program, we use propensity score matching to create, post hoc, a control group of schools that were similar to program schools in the baseline year. By the final year of the program, we find that program schools had received more inputs to improve literacy and numeracy than control schools, and that some inputs associated with the program were correlated with improvements school average achievement: supplementary reading materials, additional training for reading resource teachers, and functioning computers. At the student level, however, we find no evidence that students enrolled in program schools achieved higher reading or math scores than those in control schools. We suggest three possible reasons for this: (a) the lack of sensitivity of the learning measures to improvements at the lower end of the scales; (b) the availability of program-like inputs in non-program schools, provided by other programs and donors; and (c) the growth in student enrollment in the program schools, which may have diluted the program effect for incoming students in upper grades. Schools with school improvement plans did not outperform comparable schools that did not have these plans.     

The Impact of Priority School Designation Under ESEA Flexibility in New York State

Abstract

Prior to the 2012–13 school year, New York and many other states underwent changes to their accountability systems as a result of applying for and being granted waivers from the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. A key component of these new accountability systems, under what is known as ESEA Flexibility or NCLB Waivers, was the designation of the lowest performing 5% of Title I schools as priority schools with the goal of improved performance within three years of receiving their designation. The priority school policy included elements of both accountability and school turnaround to try to improve student outcomes in low performing schools. This study examines the extent to which elementary and middle priority schools in New York State improved in the three years since being designated priority schools. By the end of the 2014–15 school year—the third year of three to show improvement—I find elementary and middle priority schools did not show improvement and, in fact, performed worse than schools just above the cutoff for determining priority school eligibility.     

Individual Education Plans in the Republic of Ireland: an emerging system

The Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs Act in Ireland advocated the development of individual education plans (IEPs). However, this section of the Act has never been fully implemented and there is no obligation upon schools to develop IEPs. Research conducted across the country by Richard Rose and Yu Zhao of the University of Northampton, Michael Shevlin of Trinity College Dublin, and Eileen Winter and Paul O'Raw of the Institute of Child Psychology and Education Europe, examined the extent to which IEPs have been developed and implemented in schools, and attitudes towards their use. Interviews were conducted with teachers, parents, pupils and other professionals to gain data related to IEP development and implementation. The findings of the research suggest that schools are taking the initiative in developing IEPs, though there is inconsistency in their use and in perceptions of their usefulness.     

Title I Can Help Give a Voice of Hope to All Children

Speaking about Title I shortly before he died in July 1996, former Secretary of Education Ted Bell said, [It] is the heart and soul of national policy in elementary and secondary education in this nation. Right now, Title I can truly help drive reform .... But always remember, Title I was created because of poverty. It must often speak for those children who—by themselves—have no voices. (personal communication) In a similar vein, Secretary of Education Richard Riley has spoken of the "new" Title I as a vehicle to assist "the children for whom we have cast a tyranny of low expectations" (personal communication). As the "new" Title I enters its 2nd year of operation, the words of both secretaries serve as a reminder to those of us who administer Title I of the need to reach out aggressively to the "children who have no voices" and recognize that the circumstances of these children vary widely.     

A Comparison of Teachers' Assessment Practices in School Restructuring Models by Year of Implementation

Teachers' assessment practices were investigated in the context of school restructuring in Title I schools. The survey method included questionnaires distributed to teachers in 11 elementary schools in their 1st year of implementation and teachers in 11 elementary schools in their 4th year of implementation. Focus group interviews were conducted with groups of 8-10 teachers at each school. Results indicated that schools in their 4th year of restructuring had significantly higher mean ratings on the alternative assessment items than did schools in their 1st year of restructuring. These differences were significant for portfolios and student self-assessments. There were significant, positive correlations between scores on the alternative assessment scale with scores on the pedagogical change and student outcome scales. The qualitative data also suggested an increase in teachers' use of alternative assessment strategies and the development of rubrics to evaluate these assessments. There were more responses indicating changes in assessment among teachers in their 4th year of restructuring than among teachers in the 1st year. The qualitative data further indicated that teachers were concerned with the incompatibility between the alternative, authentic models advocated in the restructuring models and the district and state accountability systems that relied on standardized objective tests.     

The use and usefulness of a parent questionnaire to help schools identify disability

The Equality Act 2010 will be implemented in full in 2011, and schools in the UK will have to provide special aids or services for children with disabilities where this provision is considered reasonable. This paper reports on staff perspectives on the use and usefulness of a parental questionnaire on disability from a sample of 49 schools (mainstream and special) located in 12 local authorities. Most schools found the process of administering the parent questionnaire undemanding; just under half of the sample indicated that they would take some action as a result of the data collected from the parental questionnaire (e.g., to inform plans for targeting or monitoring support for children, and to contact parents and follow‐up issues they had mentioned); and about one‐third of schools recorded unanticipated findings from the parental questionnaire, that is, the identification of children whose disabilities were not previously known to the school. Implications for schools are discussed.     

On reconstructing school segregation: The efficacy and equity of single-sex schooling

A change to Title IX has spurred new single-sex public schooling in the US. Until recently, nearly all gender-segregated schools were private, and comprehensive data for public school comparisons are not yet available. To investigate the effects of single-sex education, I focus on within private sector comparisons, and additionally address selection bias using an index comparing expectations to outcomes and quantile regressions. Compared to graduates from private coed schools, girls’ school alumnae are no more likely to pursue college degrees, and both genders are less likely to meet their own educational expectations. However, single-sex schooling may support gender equity, as single-sex schools yield the least segregated college major choices. On the other hand, higher mean starting salaries among single-sex school graduates do not persistent in regression results. Much of the benefit from single-sex schooling accrues to students already likely to succeed, but selection bias does not explain all gains. There are some benefits for African-American men and low income students.     

The efficacy of computer‐based supplementary phonics programs for advancing reading skills in at‐risk elementary students

In this study we examined the benefits of computer programs designed to supplement regular reading instruction in an urban public school system. The programs provide systematic exercises for mastering word‐attack strategies. Our findings indicate that first graders who participated in the programs made significant reading gains over the school year. Their post‐test scores were slightly (but not significantly) greater than the post‐test scores of control children who received regular reading instruction without the programs. When analyses were restricted to low‐performing children eligible for Title I services, significantly higher post‐test scores were obtained by the treatment group compared to the control group. At post‐test Title I children in the treatment group performed at levels similar to non‐Title I students.     

From Anthroposophy to non-confessional preparation for spirituality? Could common schools learn from spiritual education in Steiner schools?

It has been suggested common schools might have something to learn from spiritual education in Steiner schools. This arguably assumes practice in Steiner schools to be compatible with the aims of spiritual education in common schools. I question this by considering whether the former is confessional, as the latter should not be. I begin by highlighting how my concern about the potentially confessional nature of Steiner spiritual education arose. I argue for a nuanced understanding of confessional education, which distinguishes between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ confessional education, as well as between confessional education as intentional and as defined by outcome. I then argue that spiritual education in common schools should prepare pupils for spirituality, without being confessional. I consider whether Steiner schools are confessional by drawing upon findings from research conducted at six Steiner schools. I conclude that spiritual education in Steiner schools is weakly confessional in an intentional sense. I further conclude that practices which might contribute to preparation for spirituality and which can be implemented in a non-confessional manner are worthy of consideration for transfer to common schools. Common schools committed to preparation for spirituality as an educational aim could learn from spiritual education in Steiner schools.