Dive Brief:
- The Obama administration has admitted it will not be able to finish a final regulation for the Every Student Succeeds Act before President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated on Friday, dropping one of its most controversial regulation proposals surrounding the new education law.
- CNN reports the regulation, which aimed to ensure districts were spending at least the same dollar amount from local funds on Title I schools as non-Title I schools, would have required districts to collectively shift $800 million to Title I schools from their counterparts or spend an additional $2.2 billion in state and local dollars on Title I schools.
- The U.S. Department of Education closed a public comment period on the proposed rule in early November and then sent a final version of the regulation to the White House budget office just four weeks later — breakneck pace — but the department confirmed Wednesday it would halt the effort because “it did not have time to publish a strong final regulation,” according to CNN.
Dive Insight:
Teachers unions, traditional allies of the Democratic party, joined forces with Republicans in opposing the proposed rules around spending. They argued it would create massive instability in districts as highly paid, veteran teachers would be forced to move to high-poverty buildings with little warning. Title I regulations have always said that the federal dollars must supplement local spending, rather than replace it — but historically, teacher salaries have been equalized in calculating whether districts spend more on low-poverty schools versus high-poverty ones. If veteran teachers concentrate in low-poverty schools, their relatively higher salaries do not impact the “supplement not supplant” calculation.
Even without this final regulation, however, the Every Student Succeeds Act will make very clear how districts are spending their money, school by school. States must now report per-student spending at the school level, rather than the district level, which was sufficient under the last iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
