Cuts or freezes also are in store for half the states in 2006-07, according to a new Center on Education Policy (CEP) report. “Title I Funds: Who’s Gaining and Who’s Losing School Year 2006-07” puts to rest any claims that federal education spending has kept pace with ever- increasing demands placed on schools under Title I and its parent law, the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Among the big losers for 2006-07 is California, which will suffer a $46 million drop in Title I dollars (see chart). Massachusetts and New York both will lose more than $20 million. The national per-pupil allocation under Title I will drop, and states will receive only 60 percent of the funds authorized under NCLB to assist schools designated as in need of improvement. These cuts and freezes will affect nearly every school district “despite expanded local responsibility under NCLB and an increase in the number of low-income children in the United States,” warned CEP president and CEO Jack Jennings following the release of the report, which is located in the publications section of CEP online    (www.cep-dc.org).

“Near level funding over the past two years for the Title I Part A program, and President Bush’s budget request for level funding for the program for FY 2007, does not even keep the program on pace with inflation nor the increase in the number of low-income children across the nation,” the CEP report warns. For schools struggling to meet higher AYP targets, “funds provided by NCLB to help … are often simply not there.” 

AFT executive vice president Antonia Cortese called on Congress to pass an education funding bill that fixes chronic underfunding of Title I at a time when more children are living in poverty. The combination “is creating a devastating effect on schools that educate these students,” she warns.

Big Losers
Cuts in Title 1 funding

From the opening keynote address by Stacy Scott from the Center for Understanding Equity to closing-session remarks by longtime ER&D trainer Deanna Woods, the participants spent a day and a half exploring the latest in education research and how to use that research to make schools work for all students. Scott reviewed some alarming current data on achievement gaps among different groups of students before discussing some of the detailed tools he has developed to help schools create what he calls a “culture of high performance.”

Decisions about curriculum and instruction have to be driven by data, Scott said, no matter whether it’s analyzing the curriculum to see if it’s challenging and rigorous or making changes in a program based on student achievement results.

Woods, who is a program adviser with the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, discussed the newest research about how adults—and children, as it turns out—learn. She reinforced Scott’s message that solid scientific information about what works in teaching and learning is available, but it needs to be incorporated more widely in schools. That’s where the AFT’s ER&D program comes in because it exposes teachers and other educators to that latest research, then uses a train-the-trainer model to spread the findings in a practical way to an even greater number of educators and classrooms.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the ER&D program. In closing the conference, which attracted about 120 of the union’s professional issues activists throughout the country, AFT executive vice president Antonia Cortese called ER&D “AFT’s gem,” bringing together talented, smart and creative people to help the union fulfill its mission to improve schools. She urged those involved with ER&D to look at it as a tool to attract new members to the union, especially in states without collective bargaining. “If it helps teachers be better, they’ll believe in the union,” Cortese said.

Union volunteers from California to New York fanned out into city neighborhoods to talk to UTNO members and assure them that the union is continuing to fight for their interests and for the needs of students in New Orleans. UTNO has been particularly critical of the chaos that has characterized the opening of schools in New Orleans, and the union has called for a centralized body to handle essential services for schools in New Orleans—including the hiring of teachers and school employees.

In just four days, the AFT and AFL-CIO volunteers made 3,000 house calls to UTNO members, reports AFT staffer Ann Mitchell, who helped coordinate the effort with UTNO president Brenda Mitchell. Almost all of the educators visited by the volunteers said they were grateful that UTNO was remaining visible and continuing to advocate on their behalf.

Before Hurricane Katrina, Orleans Parish operated 128 public schools. By the end of this September, 53 public schools were expected to open under several separate “systems,” most of them charter schools and some regular schools administered by the state as “Recovery District” schools.

The New Orleans school district is operating just a handful of regular public and charter schools. The state has admitted that there are not enough teachers available for the Recovery District schools and said it would fill the shortfall with substitutes, according to the Associated Press.

But virtually all of the city’s certified teachers and other school staff were terminated in February, the union pointed out, and were given no assurances they would be called back.

“After months of promises that the new New Orleans school system will be a model for the country, the state is debuting an utterly chaotic and dysfunctional system,” said UTNO’s Brenda Mitchell.

Meanwhile, UTNO members have had plenty to say about how the bureaucracy has treated them. “Never have I heard such incredible stories of anger and betrayal by an unscrupulous and despicable employer than I heard in late August of 2006,” wrote San Antonio union volunteer Bob Comeaux of his experience making house calls. “Teachers, even those with double master’s [degrees], are having to apply for their old jobs, not at one location, but at the multiple bureaucracies being created to siphon education dollars away from the schoolchildren.”

Teacher after teacher talked about the humiliation of having not only to take a proficiency test but also to write a paragraph about why they wanted to work for a charter school, Comeaux added. One teacher working in a charter school, he reported, told him she still had no books, no manipulatives and no support, but she refused “to provide her own since these schools are better funded than they were pre-Katrina.”

The house-call blitz “demonstrated to not only the school employees in New Orleans but also to the larger community that the union is not gone,” added AFT’s Ann Mitchell. “Regardless of which system teachers and school employees work in, they deserve a voice in the workplace—and UTNO is that vehicle.”

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