Governor Martz on ESEA/NCLB

Governor Judy Martz teamed up recently with New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson on the so-called No Child Left Behind recently. Below is the letter they sent jointly to U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige.

October 6, 2003

Honorable Rod Paige
United States Department of Education
Washington, DC, 20515

Dear Secretary Paige,

As the leaders of New Mexico and Montana charged with the responsibility of providing a quality education to our public education students, we write today to request your assistance in managing new federal mandates and requirements for education.

As you know, Congress approved the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in January of 2002 with strong bipartisan support. As we have worked to implement this complex, sweeping and well-intentioned legislation in Montana and New Mexico, we remain with the impression that NCLB and its accompanying rules contain expectations that create difficulties in providing quality educational services in rural states like New Mexico and Montana.

At the core of the problem is the simple fact that 42% of the schools throughout the West are in rural areas. Nearly 33% of the students in our nation attend school in towns of fewer than 25,000 people. A rural school with fewer than 100 students lacks similarity to Los Angeles Unified School District. NCLB attempts to treat them the same; they are not. As a result, many rural states and their schools feel as though they have not been considered in NCLB.

As we have worked to implement NCLB, five critical issues have risen to the forefront that will limit our capacity to make the best educational decisions for rural students and their families. They are: 1) Mandates for "highly qualified teachers"; 2) Minimum budget levels for state administration; 3) Accountability provisions based on insufficient or inadequate data; 4) Data management requirements; and 5) Corrective action.

We have attached a summary of these issues for you and your staff to review. Each of these issues poses great challenges for rural educators and communities. Without collective determination to address these problems from both the state and federal levels, Montana, New Mexico and many other rural states will continue to experience difficulty in these crucial stages of implementation.

It is our hope and respectful request that you and the other members of the Department will express these concerns on our behalf. We are willing to work with you to make sure the spirit of this law is not lost upon the rural school districts across the United States.

We appreciate all you do on behalf of our school children. We want to see the law assist our rural children. Please feel free to contact any of us at any time with questions.

Sincerely,
Bill Richardson

Judy Martz
Governor of Montana

enclosure

ESEA Implementation Issues in Rural States

1. High Quality Teacher requirements: Both in statute and in rule, the federal government has taken a step into the state-controlled domain of teacher licensure. For several reasons many rural school districts currently face an unprecedented demand for licensed teachers. Unfortunately, this teacher shortage will only be exacerbated by new federal requirements. Worst of all, NCLB gives little regard to the innovative and successful solutions many states have already implemented to assure high quality teaching in a rural state.

In many states, teachers who obtain an undergraduate minor in their field can be endorsed to teach in that area. Similarly, provisions have been enacted to allow for broad field science and social studies certifications. This means that a teacher with an undergraduate degree in biology and a certain level of coursework in the other major sciences is considered qualified to teach any secondary science course in the school's curriculum. However, under NCLB, this same teacher would be deemed "not highly qualified."

Rural states have placed a great deal of effort and thought into our teacher preparation and licensure standards. We believe our standards work in the best interests of students and are at least partially responsible for that fact that our students consistently score well above national averages on almost all measures of student achievement, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Request: We request that the NCLB statute be changed to allow states to waive the most stringent requirements for highly qualified teachers so long as states can demonstrate that their students perform as well as or better than national averages as determined by NAEP. Additionally, waivers could specify that a state's eligibility for the waiver would be rescinded if the percentage of fully licensed teachers (as determined by current state standards) declines.

2. Budget Levels for State Administration: There are many states that receive the minimum amount of funding for ESEA Title I administration. However, small states' education agencies simply cannot provide the technical assistance and resources necessary to implement and enforce the provisions of the NCLB Act in rural states.

Request: In order for rural states to have the opportunity of fulfilling the expectations of NCLB, new provisions for administrative costs in rural states must be made. The federal minimum levels are unable to provide the technical assistance necessary. In addition, because of the limited size and scope of our states' education agencies, more technical assistance from the Department of Education is necessary. We request that the federal minimum levels for Title I administration dollars be expanded and that the Department develop a strategic action plan for providing additional technical assistance to rural states.

If full funding is not available, then we respectfully submit that broader timelines to allow states and districts to manage their workload accordingly are needed. This is especially true in regard to establishing data systems and reporting tools necessary for implementation.

3. Accountability Based on Problematic Data: Reliability of test data is essential when making the high-stakes decisions required by NCLB. While standardized tests may work well in large classes, where many students take a particular test, results may be skewed in rural schools where a class is made up of a small number of students. The possibility that a school or district's result could be significantly impacted by the performance of one or two students is very real. This will make progress difficult to measure and "failure" a virtual certainty in some cases. Rural states will needs time to analyze how we will test, analyze, and report school success given the statistical problem of accurately measuring student achievement with limited populations.

Request: We ask that our schools be exempt from NCLB accountability provisions for at least one year (until the 2004-2005 school year) based on the rationale that our current test was never intended for use in determining individual student proficiency levels. We also request that the Department of Education spend time and resources to work with rural states to determine better approaches to measuring quality than those offered in the current legislation.

4. Data Management: Given the many demands related to test scores and accountability within NCLB, states must acquire data management systems and expertise that far exceeds what currently exists in many rural school districts.

Request: To address this glaring need, we request that the Department of Education contract with public or private expertise to provide technical assistance specifically related to data management to rural states. Given important planning deadlines that are approaching, we need this technical assistance to be immediate and on-site so that we can confidently work with educators to establish meaningful standards for AYP and school district reporting.

5. Corrective Action: Another concern is that due to the requirement that all subgroups demonstrate adequate yearly progress every year on the assessment, we believe it is probable that well over 50% of rural schools that receive Title I funding will be labeled as a school in need of improvement within two or three years.

Request: There are two solutions to these concerns. The first would allow extensions of adequate yearly progress before classifying rural schools as in need of improvement. By delaying corrective action the schools will have the flexibility to meet the goals. This possibility would ensure compliance through flexibility.