When the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) became law in 2002, it provided large sums of money to states for education. The program also had very strict performance requirements, including a 2014 deadline for all students to be proficient in mathematics and language arts. To provide some relief from the provisions of NCLB, the Obama administration…

Data are a valuable national resource for a variety of stakeholders across all sectors of society. Dramatic advances in information and communication technology have opened up unprecedented opportunities for broad public access, innovative research, and citizen engagement, but this potential can be realized only if data are properly managed and…

Grant recipients risk losing millions of dollars in Race to the Top money if they fail to live up to their promises, federal education officials make clear. By threatening to revoke Hawaii's $75 million Race to the Top award for failing to make "adequate progress" on key milestones of its education reform plan, U.S. Secretary of…

Nearly half the states have adopted a new set of common academic standards, barely a month after their final release and, in most cases, with little opposition. As of July 9, 23 states had decided to replace their mathematics and English/language arts standards with the common set. Another flurry of adoptions is expected by Aug. 2, since the $4…

Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a federal program to provide additional assistance to academically struggling students in high-poverty areas, has long contained a provision called the "supplement-not-supplant" requirement. This provision was designed to ensure Title I funds were spent on extra educational services…

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), also known as the stimulus package, appropriated $100 billion for education and included $3 billion for school improvement grants (SIGs) to help reform low-performing schools. This amount was in addition to the $546 million provided by the regular fiscal year 2009 appropriations bill for…

The School Improvement Grants (SIG) program, which was created in 2002, funds reforms in the country's lowest-performing schools with the goal of improving student outcomes, such as standardized test scores and graduation rates. Congress greatly increased SIG program funding from $125 million available in fiscal year 2007--the first year the…

The Data Quality Campaign (DQC) submits these comments in response to the US Department of Education's (ED) draft requirements, priorities, selection criteria, and definitions for the Race to the Top District (RTT-D) competition. DQC applauds ED for including the following components of the proposal: (1) Data is acknowledged throughout the…

Recent amendments to Chapter 1 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act required the U.S. Department of Education (ED) to involve the public in the development of proposed Chapter 1 regulations. The law required ED to conduct a series of regional meetings and to implement "a modified negotiated rulemaking process as a…

Evaluating the charge that federal regulation of education is "excessive" entails a political analysis of regulatory problems and of the relative cost efficiencies of providing equal educational opportunity, the goal of much federal regulation. The theoretical framework for this political explanation emphasizes the "implementation…

The Education Amendments of 1978, Part B of the Elementary Secondary Education Act Title IX were implemented because of the growing concern about illiteracy, test score decline, and educational accountability. They establish funds and technical assistance to state and local education agencies for program implementation and test development. Both…

This issue of the quarterly newsletter of the Institute for Research on Educational Finance and Governance contains five articles summarizing five papers on the regulation of education that were originally presented at the institute's Law and Education Seminar. Each summary was written by the author of the original paper. David Kirp's article…

Head Start Administrators must be fully knowledgeable of all applicable Federal requirements and skilled in applying these requirements in the daily operation of their program, whether starting a new program or striving to maintain a high quality program. This manual provides Head Start administrators with a compilation of the program requirements…

Partly because of the rise of block grants, federal distribution mechanisms raise the issues of federal control and distributional equity in elementary-secondary grant programs. Data--drawn from such major programs as aid for education of the disadvantaged, aid for education of the handicapped, vocational education, and bilingual education--were…

Directors of 39 projects funded by the federal Consumers' Education Program were interviewed about their attitudes toward federally mandated evaluation. The projects were varied, and included activities such as consumer workshops; development of curriculum, materials or policy; inservice training; consumer advocacy/counseling; and television…