Supt. Ahart Reflects on Federal Law Process

Superintendent Ahart was a member of a U.S. Department of Education committee charged with helping to create rules for the new federal education law.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was signed by President Obama last December. The bipartisan measure reauthorized the 50-year-old Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), America’s national education law. The previous version of ESEA, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, was enacted in 2002.

In March the U.S. Department of Education named DMPS Superintendent Dr. Tom Ahart as one of 24 members of a committee charged with drafting some of the ESSA regulations.

Ahart was nominated to the committee by the Council of Great City Schools which represents 68 urban, diverse school districts across the country, from Anchorage to Washington D.C. He was the only Superintendent from a CGCS district included on the regulatory committee and the only committee member who was later invited to testify at U.S. Senate hearings on the proposed ESSA rules.

While Ahart’s seat at the negotiating table represents a clear reflection of the rising profile DMPS is gaining nationally, he came away frustrated by the ED’s intention to impose one criterion in particular on school districts eligible for federal Title I dollars that support schools in impoverished areas. More than half of DMPS schools are slated to receive Title I funding in the 2016-17 school year.

School districts spend most of their money on personnel, and one of the proposal’s biggest impacts would be on how teachers are assigned.

“The most troubling regulatory proposal…was the Education Department’s draft regulation to impose per-pupil expenditure comparability requirements under the Supplement Not Supplant provision of the Act,” Ahart testified to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions on May 18th. Supplement Not Supplant is a provision of the law that says districts can’t replace state and local dollars with federal funding.

Under the ED proposal, school districts would have to calculate what they actually spend on teacher salaries in each school and rectify gaps in spending between Title I and non-Title I schools. Otherwise federal funding would be withheld. In practice, attempts to comply would result in annual scrambles that would cripple staffing continuity in schools districtwide and nationwide.

Ahart and his CGCS counterparts contend that’s unworkable in practice and, moreover, is based on the fallacy that there is a correlation between a teacher’s salary and their effectiveness in the classroom.

“We allocate staff to our schools every year in terms of FTE (fulltime equivalent) positions,” Ahart said, “not on the basis of salaries. The objective is to assemble the most effective teaching staff possible at each school, not to achieve salary balance because there is no evidence that it equates to higher student achievement.”

Since the committee — which included representatives from the Education Department, parents, teachers, principals and members of the civil rights and business communities — could not reach consensus on spending comparability the Education Department is responsible for writing the rule itself subject to a 60-day period during which the public can comment on the proposal.

“As a member of the Education Department’s Negotiated Rulemaking Committee, representing local school district officials, I expressed serious concerns with proposals to expand federal ESSA requirements beyond those specified in the Act, as well as the proposed regulations that directly ignored ESSA-legislated prohibitions,” Ahart said in his testimony in Washington last month.

“School districts clearly do not have the state and local funds to cover the salary differential costs of compliance with these draft regulations, nor would districts want to summarily transfer higher paid staff in order to comply. Many districts literally would be faced with an impossibility of performance under these draft regulations – which have no reasonable basis in the Act and appear to violate at least three separate statutory prohibitions in ESSA.”

Ahart was quoted in a Washington Post article about the impasse on ESSA’s spending comparability provisions: “It is going to wreak havoc in any district that has Title I schools. There’s just no way that we won’t be completely disrupting our entire system to comply with this rule that, by the way, will not result in improved results for kids.”

Back in his office in Des Moines, Ahart reflected on his mixed feelings about the invitation to be part of the implementation process at the federal level. Outside his office window an American flag flapped and clanked against the pole where it hung.

“Yes, on the one hand it’s flattering that DMPS was included in the rule-making discussion,” he said, “but at the same time it’s disappointing that the combined wisdom and experience of the nation’s urban school districts is not reflected in the Department of Ed’s proposed rules.”

DMPS is becoming a leading voice on behalf of the nation’s urban school districts and the children they serve. Now if the powers that be at both state and federal levels will only listen to that voice as expressed in Ahart’s parting words at the senate hearing:

“Finally, I am proud of the progress my district has made over the last four years, despite insufficient state funding. We are becoming the model for urban education in the United States. The proposed ESSA regulations will force us to disrupt some of the most effective school reform efforts in the country and threaten the progress of some of the most disadvantaged students in the country. We can do better if ESSA regulations align with the letter and the spirit of the statute itself.”