State leaders and policymakers are working hard to figure out how to bolster the capacity of state education agencies to meet the unprecedented demands they face to drive improvements in K-12 performance and productivity.
In a report released Friday by the Center for American Progress, Patrick Murphy argues that SEAs could better meet those demands if federal regulations didn’t tie their hands by limiting how federal resources can be deployed by states. Murphy shows that federal programs offer an important source of financial support to cash-strapped SEAs but come with strings that drive SEAs to operate within programmatic silos. While federal regulators want to ensure resources are used according to legislative intent (e.g., to benefit children in poverty), the restrictions on use of funds reinforce a culture of compliance monitoring and make it difficult for SEAs to use funds toward cross-program strategic goals like school improvement. The end result is federal contributions to SEAs provide almost no support for districts and schools to improve student outcomes. Murphy goes on to offer a range of recommendations targeted toward federal regulators to give SEAs the flexibility they need to be more strategic and effective agencies.
While the report describes the many, sometimes unnecessary, ways in which regulation can discourage new modes of organizing SEAs, we are not convinced that the absence of these restrictions is either necessary or sufficient to build SEA capacity. In the report, Murphy recounts the experience of Louisiana’s Stephen Osborn, who took on the job of overseeing most federal programs administered by the SEA. In his effort to streamline the agency’s work, Osborn encountered much resistance to organizing the work differently or providing more flexibility to districts. Yet these roadblocks did not have their origins with federal regulators. As Osborn describes, “In every single conversation, there was this mythical big bad [federal] actor that wouldn’t let us do the thing…I eventually found out that it was almost all a misinterpretation.”
If the roadblocks imposed by federal programs have their origins in SEAs, the place to start in fixing them rests with chiefs. As we wrote in a recent report (which Murphy co-authored), SEAs committed to challenging a deeply engrained culture of compliance overcame tight resources, limited authority, and programmatic silos to build agency capacity.
In Washington State, a deputy took the initiative to present all of the resources associated with districts’ school improvement plans in one place—reinforcing that although those resources came from different programs, their strategic purpose was the same. In Colorado, state administrators worked to leverage federal Title I funds to bolster SEA capacity to support district improvement, by shifting staff time while managing federal compliance requirements. In Louisiana, as Stephen Osborn’s account suggests, the SEA transformed itself from a “no, because” to a “yes, if” organization, all without federal reforms.
Of course the Feds should take a hard look at how the rules and regulations they put on the use of funds make chiefs’ jobs more difficult and sometimes conflict with the goal of improving outcomes for all students. But the efforts of entrepreneurial states suggest that SEAs do not need these changes to do their work differently and should seize the flexibility they already have today.
