To Anonymous’s point that there are a lot of really good things that districts could do for kids with Title I and special education funding,this is clearly true. But in districts that are less financially secure than your own, and are facing teacher layoffs, it is hard to lay off teachers, and increase class sizes at the same time you are creating new programs for disadvantaged youth.

Federal special education funding will increase from $11.2 billion to $24.2 billion, a $13 billion increase. This will still leave the federal share significantly below 40 percent.

Together, those things imply to me that the feds would be increasing their share of IDEA costs from 12% to a little less than 20%, which would still be less than half the amount they’re supposed to pay.

But I have no idea how reliable those numbers are, esp. from Wikipedia.

Paul already asked one of my first questions. The bigger question, it seems to me, would be some sort of waiver language in the supplement not supplant language. That sounds like a no-brainer.

I’m wrestling with smaller questions in regard to my school and district. Its my understanding that peer tutoring and the Toledo plan can be funded under other Title funds. Would it be easier to get a waiver along those lines?

The recession has barely hit here, but in the last few weeks we’ve really seen its effects on the students. I have witnessed the devastation of the recessions of 1983, 1991, and 2001, and they all hit with sudden force. The cutbacks that worried adults were not nearly as important as the trauma endured by the kids, who thus brought additional violence and disorder to school. (Tom Toch’s latest post may be the first time I’ve disagreed with him. He implies that staying the course on promising experiments is more important than staving off a catastrophe in our poorest schools.)

Between 30 to 40% of my school’s students are on IEPs or equivalent, and our district will get another $6.5 million for special ed next year, but where would we find warm bodies, much less effective special ed teachers? I’m fooling around with this idea. Every day our school gets newly traumatized transfers (they wouldn’t attend a neighborhood school like our – given all of the choice options – if they weren’t trapped by something. But these vulnerable kids at this vulnerable time in their chaotic lives get no transition services. At best, they get a handshake, a “how do you do?,” and “find a seat somewhere.” Surely Title money could fund graduation coaches, attendance specialists, or other types of adults to help them.

This situation reminds me of the problem of capital spending in the time of NCLB. One glance at NCLB and central offices knew they needed new expenditures for computers and software. They were in too big of a hurry to think through the type of computer systems and learning software that would be appropriate. Its no surprise that districts across the country adopted the most primitive online tutorials. We never came close to having the resources in operating budgets that would have allowed us to properly utilize technology.

The worst came two years ago when I was assigned 240 students! That is not a typo; most teachers had more than 200. That year, we became The Wire, and our school may never recover from it. The worse tragedy was that hundreds of thousands of dollars of computer hardware and software was sitting unopened in leaky rooms. It would have been manifestly impossible for us to even have time to open the boxes, much less learn the programs and see if they were useful tools. (regardless, the spring rains took care of that issue by destroying the expensive capital purchases.)

If I were an advocate of data-driven accountability, I’d be trying to take the high road. I’d be working with others to allow stimulus money to be diverted to avoid a meltdown. Even if the policies of accountability advocates are the greatest thing since sliced bread, the value that they can add is small compared to the harm that will be done during the recession if we can’t reach a rational compromise. If I were a “reformer” who proved myself by honoring a compromise, then I would have leverage for a fair hearing from the “status quo.” Which reminds me, under any honest accounting in this economy you have to expect test scores to drop like a rock. If I’d invested so much in data-driven accountability I’d be looking for allies for dealing with the bad news that if coming.

The rest of the country doesn’t have this problem, but we will be dealing with the Radical Right that took over both state houses so we will be trying to craft solutions using local and federal money, while the legislative leadership is trying to drive a stake into the hear of the concept of public education. Which raises another question – should we build a creationism studies program and then try to shift some of those resources into science? John Thompson