Helping Schools

Enacted in the rush of War on Poverty Legislation, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was billed as the Federal government's first step toward improving the quality of the nation's public schools, particularly those schools serving children euphemistically described as "disadvantaged."

The core of the act--Title I--was intended to funnel Federal funds into the schools of the nation's poverty areas. But now, after three years have passed and about three billion dollars have been distributed to local school districts under the title, its effect on the children it was supposed to help remains uncertain.

Not all of the money alloted under Title I has gone to poverty areas. In 1965, the U.S. Office of Education allowed state school departments to use 1960 census figures to determine the number of children in their state from families with incomes of less in $2000--USOE's definition of an economically disadvantaged child eligible for aid under Title I. Using the census figures was a mistake that the USOE has been regretting ever since. The figure are, by all accounts, out of date, and using them has has allowed already well-financed school districts to get Title I money, much to the embarrassment of the USOE.

Such affluent school districts as Shaker Heights in Ohio, and garden City and Cold Springs Harbor in New York found themselves eligible for Title I funds, and after a little hesitation, applied for and received the money. Once the districts had the dollars, they discovered they could not find the economically disadvantaged children supposedly living in their districts and through a loophole in the wording of the law, began using the funds to finance programs for Educationally disadvantaged students. "You mean that if a kid's father is making $15,000 a year, but he is divorced and the kid is hung up and behind two years in reading, the district can use behind two years in reading, the district can use Title I money to help this student?" a reporter asked one Long Island school administrator. The administrator replied in the affirmative.

Helping well-off, hung-up students is no doubt a worthy cause, but USOE officials, feeling that it is one best paid for by the school districts themselves, have begun a campaign to eliminate wealthy districts from the Title I rolls and concentrate the money in districts where poverty is something more than a curiosity recorded in 1960 census figures. The USOE has asked state education departments to use up-to-date welfare statistics to allot the money so that it will go to the most needy districts. The states, however, plead that local programs, once established, should not be abruptly, terminated, so the USOE has relented and allowed the states to make the change in a fashion reminiscent of the Supreme Court's "with all deliberate speed."

Alloting money is not, however, the only headache bothering the administrators of the Title I program. No satisfactory evaluation of the projects financed by the title has yet been made, James Mauch, USOE director of Title I evaluation admitted recently. The USOE knows that some projects have succeeded in raising students' achievement scores--a partial, but the best available criterion of their educational worth--but any estimate, even a fragmentary one--of the overall impact of the $3 billion in Title I aid has not yet been obtained, Mauch said. He pleaded for more time, noting that Title I has been in existence for only three years--a short time to set up reliable evaluation procedures, he said.

It may not be that simple. Title I finances such a wide variety of projects that it may be impossible to get a report on the "effectiveness of the programs...in improving the educational attainment of educationally deprived children," as required by USOE rules for the states in the programs. Many of the Title I programs are remedial reading and math courses, Which it would be rather simple to evaluate, but other, more esoteric projects such as sending children on field trips to improve their reading readiness are difficult to evaluate, due to the multiplicity of factors affecting the children.

In many states, present evaluation procedures leave the responsibility for judging the worth of local projects with the people whose jobs may depend on the evaluation of the programs. New York School districts, for example, evaluate their Title I programs (without any evaluation guidelines form the state), send the results to the State Department of Education, which only collects them and sends them to the USOE for distillation and inclusion in the office's glossy-covered annual report on Title I. One New York education official admitted that local districts may sometimes gloss over the defects in their programs,but said "You have to have some faith in the judgement of officials, and professionals."

Evaluation of Title I programs has remained much like that--an act of faith in their worth supported by only fragmentary data on the successes or failures of the students they are supposed to help. When the act was passed, some local districts denounced it as a prelude to a Federal takeover of education. Local school districts have now abdicated their zealously guarded sovereignty enough to accept the $3 billion in aid under Title I, but few distircts appear to be going out of their way to help the USOE, or even state education departments, find out exactly how much good that aid has done.