Education Reform and Services to Poor Students

This paper discusses the interaction between comprehensive education reforms and curricular services for special-needs students—mainly economically disadvantaged students eligible for state and federal compensatory education services.

Concern about interaction between current education reforms and past categorical programs fuses several central issues that have evolved with federal and state educational program implementation, such as (1) can top-down initiatives for change work, (2) what rules and regulations are needed to ensure faithful implementation of key programmatic goals, (3) what local discretion is needed to ensure local commitment to substantive program elements, and (4) what central government strategies are needed to produce high program quality?

Experience during the first 15 years of federal and state categorical program implementation demonstrated that central government initiatives to provide extra services to selected students can work, but implementation takes time (10-15 years), and a clear regulatory structure is needed to ensure faithful implementation and to maintain the redistributive and targeted nature of the programs.

Yet regulations beyond those needed to ensure program integrity can encroach on the decision-making domain of teachers delivering services to students and can upset the balance between regulation and local autonomy that is needed to ensure both program integrity and program quality. Categorical program regulation ensured program integrity, not program quality. In fact, quality had eroded from regular program curricula and had never been firmly developed for most categorical programs. The education reform movement emerged in 1983 to focus on education quality issues.

The irony behind the concern that the education reform movement might derail education equity programs is that the dilemma for equity programs was precisely the issue addressed by the excellence movement: how to improve the quality of local school programs and the performance of students.

California has addressed these issues by adopting a relatively complex set of strategies designed to increase local capacity and leeway for reconciling and integrating the demands of education reform and categorical program reform. In short, California has adopted strategies that (1) fuse categorical program curricula with the core academic curricula; (2) include top-down mandates for the structure of the core curriculum program, the content for school site education improvement, and the targeted and redistributive nature of categorical programs including compensatory education programs; and (3) place responsibility for the details of program quality design, implementation, and evaluation in the hands of local school and district educators.

These initiatives represent a strategic mix of compliance and assistance mechanisms and of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms. They retrieve categorical program services from the periphery of the regular school program and integrate them fully and directly into the core of schools. Both the mix of strategies and their interconnectedness is relatively unique across the 50 states.

Data from nine schools in three California school districts provide encouraging evidence that the strategies seem to be taking hold at the school level including the intended effects on students receiving compensatory education services.

• First, all districts and schools are in compliance with federal, Chapter I, and state rules and regulations, and nearly all local respondents supported the rules and regulations.

• Second, in all districts and schools visited, significant curriculum change was at either the beginning or intermediate stages of implementation.

• Third, all districts and schools visited had developed procedures to align compensatory education service with their new core curriculum program.

• Fourth, nearly all local respondents were aware that the academic learning goals of the education system were the same for all students, that students eligible for categorical program services were expected to master the regular curriculum, and that all teachers—regular program and categorical program teachers—need to feel responsible for students' learning the curriculum program.

• Fifth, local school and district educators believe the School Improvement Program gave them sufficient leeway for tailoring the state mandated curriculum to the specific needs and context of their schools and expressed satisfaction with the requirement to align the compensatory education program to the overall school curriculum program.

• Finally, there was little if any evidence suggesting that state education reform initiatives had diluted local attention to or interests in special-needs students.

This evidence suggests that excellence and equity are not necessarily incompatible, and in fact are quite compatible. A mix of top-down and bottom-up tactics, regulations, and assistance mechanisms are the key to education improvement for both regular and categorical program students. These strategies seem to be grafting categorical services to the regular curriculum program, but whether the tactics improve student performance is as yet unclear.