The state of Missouri was forced to put more than 150 school districts in improvement — with dozens of schools undergoing further sanctions — after a U.S. Department of Education monitoring team found widespread accountability failures during a March visit.

In a newly released Title I monitoring report, one of the harshest in recent years, the Education Department (ED) cited the state for circumventing the law in a series of actions that effectively slowed down the clock for No Child Left Behind (NCLB) sanctions during the first four years of the law’s implementation.

Most egregiously, the state failed to properly determine “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) for its school districts, and therefore never labeled any of them as being in need of improvement. Districts, as well as schools, are required under NCLB to show adherence to the law’s accountability benchmarks. The consequences are more severe at the school level: If a school doesn’t make AYP for two years, it faces an escalating regimen of sanctions, from implementing public school choice to completely restructuring the school. District improvement, though less prescriptive in its early stages, requires the district to set aside 10 percent of its Title I administrative funds for professional development.

At the school level, Missouri had additional problems. It allowed several schools to go into corrective action after the fifth year of missing AYP, “a schedule slower than that mandated by NCLB,” according to the report. Corrective action should kick in after the fourth year of failing to achieve AYP.

Finally, Missouri did not make AYP determinations for schools without a grade tested, such as K-2 schools. Title I regulations require states to establish a mechanism to hold accountable schools in which no grade level is tested under the state’s assessment system.

The aftershocks from the report were substantial. Missouri was forced to place 178 of its 514 districts in improvement, while 13 schools were placed in improvement as a result of the state’s failure to make AYP determinations for schools that did not have a grade tested. The corrective action problem affected an additional 25 schools.

CSPR Questions

Federal monitors said they learned of the problem when they examined the state’s Consolidated State Performance Report (CSPR) before visiting Missouri. The report listed no districts in improvement.

Zollie Stevenson, acting director of ED’s office of Student Achievement and School Accountability, said he was “surprised” by the CSPR because two large urban districts in the state, St. Louis and Kansas City, have “significant issues” that are frequently cited in the national media.

“That was one of the tip-offs,” Stevenson said. “When they submitted data to the department, they listed more stages of improvement than there are in No Child Left Behind. That was the real tip-off.”

The department may withhold a substantial portion of the state’s Title I funds and redistribute them to Missouri’s school districts, according to the monitoring report. ED officials have not discussed entering into a formal compliance agreement with the state, Stevenson said. Thus far, in fact, the department’s response has been rather lenient. For instance, ED will not force the state to address the district AYP findings retroactively, even though the problems date to 2002, the year NCLB was implemented.

“It’s not fair to go to a district and tell them for the first time that they are in improvement, and then take them all the way into corrective action or restructuring in the first year,” Stevenson said.

‘A Difficult Spot’

In an interview with Thompson Publications, a state official acknowledged that Missouri circumvented the law at least partially due to philosophical objections to aspects of NCLB. Misunderstandings between ED and the state also played a role, said Becky Kemna, Missouri’s new director of federal programs.

Another issue is that Dee Beck, Kemna’s predecessor and an outspoken critic of many aspects of the law, retired just before ED monitors visited – a fact Kemna tried to address diplomatically.

“I’m in kind of a difficult spot,” she said. “I just took this job. I don’t want to be seen as being critical of the past director.”

Nonetheless, she said, the problems outlined in the report were the result of “a combination of not agreeing with aspects of the law and not being clear about what was expected of us in some cases.”

Reached at her home in Missouri, the recently retired Beck said she was “really concerned” by the report and disputed some of its central findings.

For example, while the report said Missouri “did not make AYP determinations” for its districts nor inform school systems of their status, Beck said the state crunched district achievement numbers from 2002 until 2006, the last year before she retired. She maintained that none of the districts were informed of their AYP status because under the rubric Missouri used, there were no districts in improvement.

Kemna had a somewhat different explanation for the lack of districts in improvement: The state did not compare AYP from year to year, she said. Hence, if a district failed to make AYP for two years in a row, it would not have triggered NCLB’s sanctions. The idea of comparing district performance from year to year “was written into our accountability workbooks, she said. “But that was not applied.”

While acknowledging that the state gave districts AYP data on their performance in reading and math, Stevenson said the information notably excluded the “other academic indicator” that is required under NCLB’s accountability formula.

“The districts we visited did not understand procedures for identifying districts for improvement,” he said in an e-mail. “It is the state’s responsibility to indicate whether the district met AYP requirements or not, and to indicate each district’s improvement status considering all of the information to be used in determining AYP status. Current [Missouri] staff have indicated that AYP decisions were not being made at the district level considering the other academic indicators along with the performance and participation information that was being used.”

If that was the case, Beck countered, ED should have cited the state for making “a faulty calculation” on district AYP. “That’s very different from saying we didn’t make the attempt,” she said.

State Actions

While the state has not contested most of ED’s findings, Kemna and Beck disputed the notion that the report demonstrated lax enforcement. Missouri failed to follow district AYP measures outlined in NCLB, Kemna said, but the state followed its own protocols regarding district accountability. During the past three years, for example, Missouri has unaccredited four school districts under state education law, allowing students to transfer to entirely different districts. In one case, she said, a district was taken over by an administrative board; in another, a transitional school board assumed operations of a failing district. She also pointed to a 2005 article in Education Next, an education policy journal, that named Missouri one of the top five states in the country in terms of the rigor of its student assessments.

“The notion that we let them off the hook is not right,” Kemna said.

At the same time, there is a large difference between citing four school districts and citing 178. And there are differences between pervasively failing districts and those that generally perform well, but have long-standing achievement gaps among a few populations of students. In many ways, it is this latter group, often-hidden from scrutiny, that NCLB attempts to address. But the notion that one or two constantly underperforming subgroups could sink a school or district in the accountability gauntlet is one of the more frequent criticisms of the law. It is a criticism Kemna shares.

“These districts are not failing districts,” she said. “Some of them are the highest- performing districts in the state, but have failed to make AYP due to the performance of one subgroup.”

The failure to determine AYP in schools that did not have tested grades was the result of a weak state data collection system for tracking students, one Kemna says that Missouri has vowed to fix. Another finding related to a delayed timetable for schools going into corrective action appears not to have affected schools throughout Missouri, but rather was limited to 25 buildings that were late in getting AYP information to the state.

Beck, the state’s former director of federal programs, remained unapologetic about Missouri’s implementation of NCLB and her sharp criticisms of the law.

“I had to laugh after reading that report,” she said. “It’s a perfect example of how this law has created so many mandates that it’s impossible for states to meet them all. This kind of monitoring review is going to kill the law, if it isn’t dead already.”

Subrecipient Monitoring

Many of the findings in the Title I report appear to arise from inadequate state monitoring of districts. For example, the state had not required evidence that districts were giving the proper level of federal funds to schools. Further, the state failed to ask to see letters that districts were required to send to parents explaining their option to transfer their children out of schools in improvement.

Such findings are becoming more prevalent. Across the board, ED has increased its scrutiny of subrecipient monitoring.

Findings related to subrecipient monitoring have popped up in three recent reports — in Nevada, Rhode Island and Missouri — and there often is no correlation between the problems ED turned up at the local level and its decision to cite the state for failure to conduct adequate oversight. For example, Rhode Island had only eight local findings, yet the state was cited for inadequate subrecipient monitoring. Meanwhile, New Jersey, which was visited in January, had roughly 20 local findings but none for deficient subrecipient monitoring.

ED officials acknowledged that the recent findings were part of an effort to push states to pay closer attention to their oversight of districts. State reviews tend to be desk audits or self-reports by districts, with little or no on-site monitoring, the officials said.

“A state like Missouri with 500 school districts and a small staff uses a self-report,” said ED’s Stevenson. “It’s something the districts are asked to do, but if they don’t do it, there’s very little in the way of consequences.”

Staff issues affect even states like Rhode Island that fared relatively well under the department’s monitoring regimen. Nonetheless, Janet Carroll, the state’s Title I director, said she welcomed the finding.

“We didn’t go as far as we could or should,” she said. “I hope the finding gives me the leverage at the state level to say, ‘I need to do this, now where’s my staff?’”

--by Andrew Brownstein

Info: Recent Title I monitoring reports, as well as an update of our exclusive Excel summary charts, can be found at http://www.nclbonline.com by clicking on the “State Monitoring Reports” link.