In a press release, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, “A dedicated early learning office will institutionalize, elevate and coordinate federal support for high-quality early learning, while enhancing support for state efforts to build high-performing early education systems.”

Heading the office will be Jacqueline Jones, an official within the department since 2009. As an early education commissioner for New Jersey she helped oversee the successful Abbot pre-k program that enrolls a mix of low-income three- and four-year olds in full day preschool classes. A 2009 longitudinal study conducted by researchers at the University of Rutgers shows that participating students outpaced their peers on math and literacy measures by the second grade.

Here’s a summary of the findings from Rutgers:

In language, literacy and mathematics, effects through second grade were all about 0.20 (enough to move a child from the 50th percentile to the 57th percentile, moving a child up past 7 percent of the population) for one year of Abbott preK.  For language and math, the effects of two years of state-funded pre-K were about 0.40 (enough to move a child from the 50th to the 67th percentile).

The newly-created office will adopt a portfolio of recent and longstanding federal projects aimed at expanding early education programs. Those include the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge, a competitive grant launched last year for which 35 states and Puerto Rico applied, and the i3 Fund — grants that reward communities for partnering up with local non-profits, schools, and business networks to student address performance gaps and dropout rates.

In October, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) introduced the Early Learning Proficiency Act, which would better coordinate pre-k and kindergarten federal education spending.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan Duncan, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council Melody Barnes and Raj Date, Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFBP) told reporters today’s White House proposal is casting a wide net to help more debt holders.

A fact sheet provided to reporters indicates the White House expects college loan holders to save “hundreds” of dollars per month through this relief package. During the call, Duncan said a nurse earning $45,000 a year with $60,000 in loans can expect a $451 reduction in monthly payments.

A summary of the college payment relief programs:

· Starting in January of next year, allow individuals to consolidate their Federal Direct loans with subsidized loans. The White House says this move can tack off half a percentage point in the interest debtors pay. Barnes told reporters submitting payments to two different loan services increases the risk of default.

· Expanding the IBR program through a pay as you earn service that caps the discretionary income considered to 10 percent that will also go into effect January of next year. While the president had Congress approve a similar IBR measure that lowers the percentage of income considered, that rule won’t go into effect until 2014. White House numbers project the move will help 1.6 million student borrowers. Today’s proposal also excuses all unpaid debt after 20 years of successful minimum payments, rather than the 25 years originally legislated. Discretionary income is calculated by subtracting150 percent of the poverty line from a person’s adjusted gross income–that dollar figure at the end of one’s tax return.

· The CFBP, less than 100 days old an a product of last year’s big bank regulation law known as Dodd-Frank, is in the finishing stages of a simple Financial Aid Shopping Sheet, which would de-jargon the language on college award letter and scholarship documents. “The form would also make the total costs — and risks — of the student loans clear before they enroll by outlining their total estimated student loan debt, monthly loan payments after graduation and additional costs not covered by federal aid,” indicates a White House press release.

Tackling student debt is part of the administration’s larger effort to circumvent policy changes that need Congressional approval. “We simply can’t wait for Congressional Republicans to act,” said Duncan.

While Congress in 2009 approved a measure called Income Based Repayment, which went into effect last year, only 450,000 college loan holders have signed on out of the over 30 million Americans juggling higher education debt. That program caps the amount college debt holders pay on federally-backed loans to 15 percent of their discretionary income.

Perhaps coincidentally, College Board released a report today showing college tuition and fees rose this year by more than 8 percent from last year for public four- and two-year colleges. Still, more students are entering college, the report noted, as an additional 2.8 million students enrolled in school between 2007 and 2010.

Higher education has been under a microscope as job prospects are low for many and additional education is sought after. The swell of new students is forcing campuses to find new revenue streams to keep up with services, often resulting in seeking out students who pay higher tuition. The trend is most visible at public universities that have set their sights on out-of-state candidates who pay considerably more than local students — at times three times as much.

Taking into account a student’s ability to weather the financial burden of higher education is an increasingly ethical dilemma. Student default rates, as determined by the two-year cohort rate calculated by the U.S. Department of Education, is at a 12-year high, with 8.8 percent of graduates not paying their college loans for 270 days or more. Using a more comprehensive metric, a report issued (PDF) by the New America Foundation found that 15 percent of graduates defaulted, while 21 percent were delinquent on their payments.

But despite the costs and risks of falling behind in payments, arguments college is still worth it abound.

Individuals possessing a college-equivalent degree can expect to earn 80 percent more than a person with a high school degree. In an earlier study from researchers at Georgetown University, a college degree holder can expect to make $1.4 million more than one witha high school degree. And owning a college degree goes a long way to having a job: while the unemployment rate in this country is 9.1 percent, only 4.3 percent of college degree holders are jobless.

Here are two education funding obligations states have to the federal government — even as the country moves beyond NCLB — and one way for states to increase its funding flexibility.

One obligation to have persistently earned the ire of education advocates is test funding, with repeated critiques coming down on “billions” spent on assessments and test preparation. Sure, billions are being allocated, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to overall education spending.

Before NCLB, most states already had some form of student assessment in place. The 2002 law mandated no fewer than nine grades be monitored for student proficiency and improvement — a six grade jump from what was required previously. The costs of implementing, issuing, grading, and analyzing those assessments makes up a soupcon of total education spending.

Bill Tucker, the managing director of Education Sector, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, calculated the ratio of standardized test spending to all the expenditures on students. In California, with $9,000 per pupil, $14 is directly spent on standardized testing. Rhode Island spends a total of $15,000 per pupil, with only $15 going to standardized testing. Washington spends slightly more, $47, to the roughly $10,000 pegged to each student.

The costs of testing are fairly stable and are not expected to change in the future. Data from one of the two consortia working to roll out the Common Core State Standards show the range in per-pupil test costs is $4.93 to $30.62.

The other costs associated with how much time a teacher must allocate to testing prep outside regular instruction are not always so easy to quantify. Doing so is often a trip down a rabbit hole of finding out what tests even gauge in the first place.

A 2008 paper for the National Research Council tried to make a more encompassing assessment on the costs of implementing not only testing, but also standards and accountability systems. It looked at three states to determine the additional dollars needed to proctor and administer the exams and found that these costs ranged from an additional $24 to $35 per student — hardly the close to $10,000 per pupil states often pay.

Tucker explained that the attempt to quantify everything that contributes to student testing can become limit. “‘Test prep’ is highly subjective and extremely variable across schools,” Tucker told TAI in a follow-up conversation. “Many would argue that good instruction prepares students for tests. Others obviously don’t. There are definitely opportunity costs in terms of teacher/student time, but if we eliminated testing, it’s not like we wouldn’t pay teachers for those days.”

A second cost incurred by states to adhere to federal standards is in needing to monitor outcomes. States are required to track information on how a student fares after graduating from high school, stemming from a bargain made with the Obama administration in 2009. The scope of the system includes looking at not just in-state higher education programs but all postsecondary institutions.

States took on the task because few had a choice — it was one of the requirements in accessing the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund (SFSF), the $40 billion in emergency education stimulus funds dolled out at the height of the recession. States got some money for starting the program, but now it has turned into a new additional expenditure.

As Anne Hyslop of Education Sector explains, states were happy to take the money then but not all had a finished product in time for the September 30th deadline. The Dept. of Ed ended up pushing the deadline to December of 2012. Hyslop also explained that many states were on their way to tracking the performances of high school graduates in higher education already.

The Obama administration has not signaled any coming change to the policy. When laying out the terms for receiving a waiver from NCLB requirements in late September, states were reminded they had to comply with developing a collegiate tracking system.

There is one benefit to having these new metrics, however: once fully developed, states can even use the data to better monitor individual school performances.”If a state wants to incorporate these measures into how they evaluate and hold high schools accountable for student performance, they can choose to do so in their application for an [NCLB] waiver,” Hyslop told TAI. “But there is no requirement for states to do so, and it was not encouraged in the waiver request.”

But there is one simple way for states to save a significant amount of money on education spending. States that pursue a quid pro quo arrangement with the Dept. of Ed. to opt out of NCLB can look forward to more spending flexibility.

Supplemental Education Services, a provision in the original 2002 NCLB legislation, requires states to put aside 20 percent of Title 1 school funding — the $14.5 billion federal aid pot given to schools with poor students — for tutoring and other extra student assistance if a school misses performance benchmarks at least three years in a row. As a result, less dollars were available for other school funding needs.

Jeremy Ayers, an education policy analyst for the Center for American Progress, explained that the new waivers give states a way to opt-out of that funding agreement. However, he explained, “Some states may still require districts to administer SES.”

At the heart of the problem with NCLB is its rigidity: The law does not take into account school progress in improving the academic performances of students. Instead, the nine-year-old legislation judges a school, and a state, for its ability hit annual benchmarks called Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).

“I don’t think when we started this, it was about catch n’ kill,” begins Bill Bosher, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who served as superintendent of public instruction for the state from 1994 to 1997. “The intent was to have feedback on the performance of young people against a set of knowledge and skills.”

And though the original purpose of the law was to compel states to find innovative ways to have children learn more, the results have been less than sweeping.  The U.S. Department of Education released this National Center for Education Statistics report (PDF) that calculates from 2005-2009, there were 39 instances of states upping or maintaining the intensity of state standardized exams, and 40 in which the rigor of those tests decreased. That’s not the race to the bottom Dept. of Education Secretary Arne Duncan portrayed NCLB to be, but the record hardly lends support to the idea the law was effective in having all states expect more from their students by issuing harder exams. Observing alterations that only occurred in 2007-09, 28 were deemed improvements and five appeared to have had a watering-down effect.

That ratio looks better, but still, for an administration that went on the offensive calling out educators who don’t meet expectations, it’s no surprise a revamping of the law has become President Obama’s priority. After all, the law states that by 2014, nearly all schools will have total proficiency; as of 2010, only 62 percent of schools have met their states’ benchmarks.

And then there’s the separate matter of what state tests even reveal. “I think the idea is that the standards aren’t increasing fast enough,” says Jennifer Cohen of the New American Foundation. “It is one thing to have a set of standards made in a vacuum -– they may be getting harder but there is nothing to suggest that they are at all attached to what students need to know to succeed in college and career.”

Some education policy writers even wonder whether NCLB is receiving unfair blame for causing disruptions to schools and staff. Alexander Russo, a former Senate staffer and author on education, recently wrote, “[t]he reality is that firings, removals, and shutdowns are neither common, or widespread…and to the extent that they are happening, it’s the Obama administration’s own SIG school turnaround program that’s the cause, not NCLB.”

SIG, or school improvement grants, are awards given to local education authorities to intervene at schools languishing in the bottom rung of performance measures.

Anne Hyslop, a policy analyst at Education Sector, says the numbers tell a different story to Russo’s. In the first round of grants issued through the SIG program in 2010, 843 schools received (PDF) up to $6 million over three years to support school improvement efforts. Schools could choose from one of four models. One of these models was to close the school, but only 17 of the 843 schools chose that option. A second option was to restart the school under charter management. However, Hyslop says this option was also an unpopular choice -– just four percent (34) of SIG schools were reopened as a charter school. So only 50 schools were closed or reopened as a charter school in the first round of SIG grants.

Aspects of the SIG model were incorporated into the quid pro quo arrangement for states to receive waivers. But by and large, schools should now expect a gentler ride. Looking at data from the first round of SIG awards, the remaining 793 schools chose either the turnaround option, where the principal and 50 percent of instructional staff were replaced, or the transformation option, which allowed for a less-disruptive and rigid set of reforms to improve the school. Not surprisingly, the transformation model was the most popular, with 615 of the 843 signing on.

Even for states that have most of their schools at or exceeding expectations on AYP, Hyslop says swallowing the executive prophylactic to opt out of No Child Left Behind has its advantages. “They will no longer be under pressure to reach 100 percent student proficiency by 2014,” Hyslop says. “Every school in waiver-winning states will benefit from that provision.”

The tougher standards wouldn’t be complete without a call for college- and career-curriculum best practices that would justify a state’s increased cocktail of assessments. But with nearly every state and the District of Columbia likely to seek waivers, there’s a risk the new flexibilities issued by the administration will over-learn the monolithic hazards of NCLB. Hyslop agrees, but sees potential.

“If we have 50 different school improvement systems, let’s at least have one system for measuring whether they work,” she wrote previously. “Duncan’s waiver plan gives the federal government a chance to test these systems and find the most effective version” to incorporate into future law.

And yet, among education veterans, some cynicism remains. Given how much the administration is in need of a political victory, Bosher, the former superintendent of Virginia schools, cautions other states: “be careful negotiating with desperate people.”

(For a full look at what the White House is asking from states in exchange for issuing waivers from the federal education law, read The American Independent’s breakdown, here.)

“Congress has not been able to fix these flaws so far.  I’ve urged Congress for a while now, let’s get a bipartisan effort, let’s fix this,” the president said during the indoor media event. ”Our kids only get one shot at a decent education.  They cannot afford to wait any longer.  So, given that Congress cannot act, I am acting.”

The president stood with U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan and various state government and education leaders. Underlying the bipartisan collaboration the administration has fostered on the state level, Gov. Bill Haslam (R-Tenn.) introduced Obama, stating he looks forward “to the federal government narrowing its role in education.”

Haslam added: “Education decisions are best made at the state and local level.”

Under the 2002 legislation, students are permitted to transfer to new schools if their current schools fail to meet state proficiency two years in a row. Even more costly, 20 percent of an under-performing school’s federal dollars are redirected to fund tutoring services for low-income students after three years of missing state standards. The build up of high-stakes testing that determine whether the state is meeting proficiency benchmarks — called Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) — was established by the federal law but allowed for states to craft the specifics.

Though the president’s remarks were light on the details — having his administration staff lay out the terms in a closed session with journalists Thursday — education policy analyst Ulrich Boser of Center for American Progress said the live event demonstrates his commitment to education policy.

“The president has the bully pulpit … in light of the impending United Nations vote on Palestinian statehood and a looming government shutdown,” Boser said, “this is significant from a policy and political perspective that he did speak about it.”

During a briefing to reporters Thursday, senior administration officials laid out the White House’s expectations before granting states the option to opt out of the punitive portions of NCLB, calling it the “flexibility package.”

Broadly, states would need to develop a set of instructional standards that are college- and career-ready. They asked to adopt School Improvement Grant provisions like turning around the bottom five percent of schools in terms of performance while having plans in place to improve schools with low graduation rates and subsets of the student body that are considerably behind their peers.

Kristen Amundson, head of communications at education think tank Education Sector based in Washington, D.C., said the emphasis on flexibility, and by extension, the dearth of expected quantifiable outputs, is intentional. “The department seems very sincere in laying out general parameters for improving systems without hard numbers. I would be surprised if they did,” she said.

In a press release, the president said, “[t]o help states, districts and schools that are ready to move forward with education reform, our administration will provide flexibility from the law in exchange for a real commitment to undertake change.”

He added: “The purpose is not to give states and districts a reprieve from accountability, but rather to unleash energy to improve our schools at the local level.”

Under the 2002 legislation, students are permitted to transfer to new schools if their current schools fail to meet state proficiency targets two years in a row. Even more costly, 20 percent of an under-performing school’s federal dollars is redirected to fund tutoring services for low-income students after three years of missing state standards. The build up of high-stakes testing that determine whether the state is meeting proficiency benchmarks — called Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) — was established by the federal law but allowed for states to craft the specifics.

During a briefing to reporters Thursday, senior administration officials laid out the White House’s expectations before granting states the option to opt out of the punitive portions of NCLB, calling it the “flexibility package.”

Broadly, states would need to develop a set of instructional standards that are college- and career-ready. In August, Duncan told reporters states adopting The Common Core State Standards Initiative, a college- and career-focused set of educational content for K-12 students already adopted voluntarily by 44 states, would be a move in the right direction. He said states should also adopt School Improvement Grant (SIG) provisions like turning around the bottom five percent of schools while having plans in place to improve schools with low graduation rates and subsets of the student body that are considerably behind their peers.

One administration official said Thursday the “flexibility package should reward achieving schools that serve low-income students.” Critics of NCLB maintained states were penalized because the law was limited in its overview: it judged states solely on whether they met performance goals without considering the rate of improvement.

States would also need to implement means-based teacher evaluation systems, a nod to the controversial ‘value-added’ metric that rates teachers based on student improvement on standardized tests.

“This is not a competition, we encourage all states to apply,” said another official who took part in the call-in. However, the official also added, ”those who don’t will have to live with current law.”

Kristen Amundson, head of communications at education think tank Education Sector based in Washington, D.C., said the emphasis on flexibility, and by extension, the dearth of expected quantifiable outputs is intentional. “The department seems very sincere in laying out general parameters for improving systems without hard numbers. I would be surprised if they did,” she said.

A fact sheet spells out in greater detail what measures states should adopt to win waivers. It is available, here (PDF).

Stressing the administration wants to be an ally of states on education policy, Duncan wrote in a statement, “[w]e want to get out of the way and give states and districts flexibility to develop locally-tailored solutions to their educational challenges while protecting children and holding schools accountable for better preparing young people for college and careers.”

Forty-five state education leaders helped draft the terms for the waivers. With ten exceptions, the secretary is permitted to make adjustments to NCLB as stated in the law, as laid out in this (PDF) suit Connecticut filed against the Department of Education in 2006.

But Bill Bosher, now a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who served as superintendent of public instruction for the state from 1994-1997, speculated the move towards giving states a reprieve is political. “The timing raises a question: has [the administration’s] philosophy about assessments changed? Probably not,” he said. “So a more pragmatic analysis would be, they’re going to compromise with states to try to redefine their focus, at end of the term, on the lowest performing schools.”

The White House had announced states would be able to opt out of NCLB — the current reiteration of the decades-old Early and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) — in August following the administration’s frustration with Congress’ inability to reauthorize ESEA despite the president’s urging to have a bill ready before the start of the 2011-2012 school year.

In June, Duncan told reporters over 80 percent of schools nationally would be deemed “failing” according to (AYP). While recent reports have not shown that high a percentage of schools falling behind, a many states are posting numbers that show more than half of the schools are not up to snuff.

Also in August, the secretary called NCLB “demoralizing” and “disincentivizing,” and excoriated Congress for keeping a “law on the books that impedes progress.”

By design, lawmakers were supposed to reauthorize the law back in 2007.

While the key monitoring tool was dropped for the 2009-2010 school year, the documents from LDOE also show a host of measures — on-site visits and mandatory internal investigations — were taken to monitor schools during the spring and summer high-stakes testing season for academic years 2007-2008, 2008-2009 and 2009-2010.

An erasure analysis — a once-arcane accountability device that has garnered increased public awareness following high-profile testing impropriety scandals in Pennsylvania,New Jersey and Georgia — is part of a portfolio of precautions undertaken by state education officials to prevent cheating on standardized tests. The process consists of examining electronic bubble sheets on which students record their answers for a high rate of wrong-to-right answer erasures. Typical explanations for why students change test answers include copying answers from other pupils, teacher intervention or as one newsletter released by the Louisiana School Board Association alleged, administrative and state-level meddling to change the answers.

Charles Hatfield, a former superintendent in charge of testing and accountability of what was the unified school district (Orleans Parish School Board) in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina struck, explained erasure analysis in greater detail. “They [the analysts] scan the bubble sheets following a mathematical algorithm,” he said, “meaning from a statistical point of view, it is highly unlikely that so many wrong-to-right erasures can occur.”

The motivations for test tampering are numerous, but many education experts point to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) as incentivizing testing corruption given the high-stakes nature of the national education policy. States are rated by how many of its schools clear cut-marks; schools that post poor results can lose funding or suffer staff layoffs, while in extreme cases of chronic underperformance, the school is handed to charter operators. In recent weeks, high-profile education officials like U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan and firebrand education historian and NCLB critic Diane Ravitch have called for the law to be expunged. The two camps disagree on a replacement.

In seeking an explanation for the one-year suspension of erasure analysis, LDOE spokesperson Rene Greer told TAI the economic downturn burrowed an unexpected $247.9 million budget deficit for 2009-2010 into the state coffers, leading to across-the-board cuts. LDOE absorbed $4.15 million in cuts as part of the department’s effort to “provide the maximum support for students and teachers, while maintaining the integrity of the testing program,” said Greer.

As a consequence, however, the cuts included the elimination of the erasure analysis as well as the development, printing and distribution of interpretive guides and other testing reports.  The decision not to have the vendor conduct the erasure analysis saved the department $58,459. According to The Notebook, Pennsylvania — where dozens of schools were flagged recently for wrong-to-right erasures that analysts calculate were very likely the result of testing improprieties– spent nearly double that for its 2009 erasure analysis, though the Keystone State’s population exceeds Louisiana’s, 12.7 million to 4.5 million.

Louisiana’s testing vendor is Data Recognition Corporation (DRC). Through another FOIA request, TAI learned the state entered a contract with the company to the tune of roughly $9 to $13 million a year, spanning a decade of services beginning in 2005. DRC received a no-bid contract extension in 2010 worth nearly $44.5 million. DRC prints, issues, writes, grades and analyzes Louisiana’s No Child Left Behind-compliant state tests. LEAP, iLeap, GEE (the high school exit exam) and several tests geared toward students with limited English proficiency and learning disabilities all fall under the purview of DRC.

“While the erasure analysis is a one tool the agency has used to ensure the integrity of Louisiana’s testing program, as the data indicate, historically this analysis has resulted in an inconsequential percentage of tests being voided statewide,” wrote Greer in an email to TAI. “Thus, the utilization of the erasure analysis alone does not validate nor diminish the reliability of the state’s testing program or accountability system.”

Indeed, for the 2010-2011 school year, 1,533,000 tests were administered statewide, with 214 of those voided for exceeding the number of wrong-to-right answer erasures. In the Recovery School District, the state-run set of campuses that were taken over following Katrina with many then placed under charter operators, 38 tests were voided out of 63,966 administered after an erasure analysis.

The chart below chronicles four academic years of erasure analysis voids, meaning scores for tests flagged are marked with a zero which can impact a school’s overall School Performance Score — the index used by Louisiana in compliance with No Child Left Behind school assessment rules.

LDOE also supplied TAI with testing violations reports beginning in 2007-2008 through 2009-2010.

For ’07-’08, 82 members of LDOE staff visited 238 test sites in 56 school districts during the spring testing season. The report from the Division of Standards, Assessments, and Accountability and Regional Service Centers concluded, “access to test documents was controlled and security procedures were followed.”

However, site visitors recorded springtime violations at 47 sites, 21 of which had “severe testing irregularities.” For heightened violations, the state orders the district to conduct an investigation, identify the cause of the transgressions and form a corrective plan of action to avoid repeat offenses, which is then submitted to the LDOE officials. Violations are represented by a per-incident basis, with the potential for many occurring in one school. At Laurel Elementary in New Orleans, for example, 13 violations were cited over irregularities concerning the answer sheets of six students taking the English Language Arts exam and seven students taking the math portion. Those scores were voided.

Scott Norton, Ph.D., assistant superintendent at LDOE’s office of student and school performance, said districts with significant violations receive follow-up inspections the next year, adding, “sometimes the on-site monitoring is unannounced.”

He elaborated: “The state has a policy in the assessment bulletin that districts have to follow. [These include] a chain of custody for the test documents and a secure locked location for where the testing material is held.”

For 2008-2009, LDOE staff made 257 test site visits in 66 districts, with additional visits to charter special schools. Eighty-three evaluators were sent out, and, according to the report summary, “[a]ny school with a record of prior test security problems was likely to be visited; the remaining visits were scheduled at random.”

The report noted that during the springtime monitoring sessions, 50 sites had minor testing irregularities, while 18 had more severe violations that required a corrective action plan. The Recovery School District, unpopular to teacher and labor groups as well as community activists for its swift school turnaround process and what they call misleading student performance data, had 26 springtime violations noted in ’08-’09. For 2007-2008, RSD was flagged for 27 of the total 137 violations recorded throughout the state. RSD schools are, according to the state, long-struggling schools.

RSD students in New Orleans, a city in which most of the district’s schools are concentrated, struggle with high rates of poverty and higher rates of suspensions, arrests, and draconian school enforcement policies.

Despite the budget cuts and no erasure policy, in 2009-2010, there was a surge in LDOE personnel conducting on-site testing evaluations: 157 LDOE employees were sent out to 378 sites, plus charter and special schools. 54 violations were recorded, of which 12 were significant. 27 occurred at RSD.

Greer told TAI, “Louisiana has the most notable and recognizable accountability processes in the country.”

Relying on 2009 Pennsylvania state data that was never published, The Notebooklearned that in some instances, the likelihood of wrong-to-right erasure marks on student bubble sheets happening in earnest was smaller than the equivalent of dividing one by the product of a trillion multiplied by a trillion. Some 60 Pennsylvania schools were nabbed for possible cheating through the erasure analysis.

New York Daily News reported in early August that the New York State Education Department stopped using erasure analysis in 2001, though is considering reinstating the oversight tool in light of cheating scandals in Atlanta and Philadelphia.

Calling the current set of laws “demoralizing” and “desensitizing,” Duncan excoriated Congress for keeping a “law on the books that impedes progress.” With federal legislators in recess, the likelihood is low lawmakers will reauthorize NCLB — something that was supposed to have happened in 2007.

“This should be bipartisan; it’s the right thing to do for the Congress,” Duncan said during a White House briefing. The secretary singled out the House for the slowdown in negotiations over how best to tweak the accountability measures of the national education law.

At a separate press event Monday, Duncan talked of a process that moves away from the punitive sting of NCLB, a law he accuses of distorting the good progress of schools with its one-size-fits-all approach to assessing K-12 performance.

Pushed for specifics by reporters, he said the current education policy framework is “scared to reward excellence.” Though the current waiver process would include no additional costs, Duncan stressed new approaches for incentivizing creative educators and upping the starting pay of teachers. In July, the secretary said he’d like to move teacher salaries to a minimum of $60,000 all the way up to $150,000.

Duncan said the current regulatory framework focuses too heavily on cut-scores, or levels of proficiency when it should rate progress. He pointed to Tennessee, a state that he says set a very low bar on student accountability and listed 91 percent of its pupils as being proficient in math. After the state upped its standards, that figure dropped to 34 percent. Punishing Tennessee just on the numbers is an example of the “federal law that’s an impediment … to the great works teachers are doing.” The secretary also indicated states that adopt The Common Core State Standards Initiative, a college- and career-focused curriculum that has been adopted voluntarily by 44 states according to Duncan, would be moving in the right direction.

States that refuse to adopt the reforms required to accept the waivers will continue to be judged by NLCB standards.

While Democrats in the House and Senate have come to support a waiver process that sidesteps Congress, some Republicans who are involved in education policy are nonplussed.

Joe Kasper, spokesperson for Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) wrote to TAI in an email:

The idea that waivers might be used to circumvent Congress doesn’t sit well, especially if the waivers are used to create an even heavier top-down approach than what’s already in place. And we need to understand the full intent behind the waivers. After this long without a reauthorization, it’s more important that we get things right than rush to put something together or risk doing more of the same when we know what works and what doesn’t.

In the White House briefing, Duncan said he hopes the executive order to move along with the waivers will compel Congress to write a new set of national education policies soon.

In June, U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters over 80 percent of schools nationally will be deemed “failing” according to the accountability metrics established by NCLB, signed by then-president George W. Bush and backed by a bipartisan Congress. So far, state Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) reports have not shown that high a percentage of schools falling behind, but a handful of states are posting numbers that show more than half of the schools are not up to snuff.

Previously, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle voiced concern that the White House moving by executive order, rather than allowing Congress to hash out a reauthorization of the law, preempts the job of the legislative branch. Some Democrats, however, have softened their stance. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chair of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, said in a press release:

“We continue to have productive bipartisan conversations in the Senate and I remain hopeful that we can move a reauthorization bill through the HELP Committee soon. That said, it is undeniable that this Congress faces real challenges reaching bipartisan, bicameral agreement on anything. Given the ill-advised and partisan bills that the House majority has chosen to move, I understand Secretary Duncan’s decision to proceed with a waiver package to provide some interim relief while Congress finishes its work.  In spite of the difficult environment here in Congress, I remain committed to working in a bipartisan fashion to pass a comprehensive bill that will provide all our students and schools with a better education system, rather than just those in a select few states.”

Justine Sessions, a spokesperson for Harkin, told The American Independent the upper body of Congress met ten times last year to reauthorize NCLB and has been in conversations for months to institute new tweaks to the law. A reauthorization of ESEAwas supposed to happen in 2007.

In a June interview NPR did with Duncan, the president’s education point-man tried to downplay the significance of his office moving ahead with waivers:

CONAN (Neil Conan of NPR’s Talk of the Nation): You have to work with both houses in Congress as well. There’s a Republican charge on the House side. Of course, the Democrat Tom Harkin charge on the Senate side. Neither have been particularly thrilled with the idea of these waivers.

DUNCAN: That’s OK. We’ll continue to work together. And, Neal, I think – you understood, I’m the least political guy you’re ever going to meet. I have no interest in politics. I simply want to give children a chance to get a great education, and I’ll work with everybody: Republicans, Democrats, doesn’t matter, House, Senate. I have great relationships with Chairman Klein (sic) in the House, great relationships with Chairman Harkin in the Senate.

Education Week reports some of the relief may take a while to go into effect:

This means states could, also this school year, reset the bar for what makes for acceptable growth on test scores. Schools and districts may not feel the effects of the regulatory relief, however, until the 2012-13 school year, when things like tutoring and school choice might be waived.

NCLB uses the Annual Yearly Progress measure to determine the success of a school. Under NCLB, by 2014, nearly every school in the country is expected to have 100 percent of its students proficient according to state-administered tests used to fulfill NCLB regulations.

The law has quickly become unpopular, particularly among teachers and sympathetic groups. At the heart of the grievances voiced by groups like Save Our Schools is the diluting of traditional forms of education in favor of a one-size-fits-all legislative makeover they contend has not improved student proficiency in core subjects, nor have they led to increased graduation rates.

Recently, that rebuke gained new credibility with a May report from the National Academies of Science that concluded [PDF] “[i]ncentives will often lead people to find ways to increase measured performance that do not also improve the desired outcomes. As a result, different performance measures—that are not being used in the incentive system—should be used when evaluating how the incentives are working.”

According to a press release, Duncan said, “You are doing some of the toughest, most controversial work in education in this country today, and I thank you for your courage.” Later, he added: “Don’t act softly and tinker on the margins … Instead, listen to your gut and make the tough decisions. That’s how you earn your communities’ trust.”

Though the U. Va. event took place at the Darden School of Business, Kris Amundson of the public policy group Education Sector told The American Independent that shouldn’t be viewed as business interests dictating education policy issues.

“This is a long-standing program,” Amundson begins, and the idea behind is that “running a school in a turnaround process that is low-achieving requires a unique skillset.”

The two-year program, which is currently collaborating with a group representing 24 schools and seven school districts from Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Colorado, helps teachers and principals manage personalities and frustrations that rise to the surface in a high-stress environment found in a turn-around school — usually low-performing with teacher layoffs and government scrutiny deflating morale among educators charged with improving the performances of struggling students.

“[The educators] need to be inspirational, and they need to be inspired enough and believe they can do this,“ Amundson said. “People go into teaching because they want to make things better for kids, and you need a bit of inspiration to stick with it.”  That’s where the services of Darden School of Business kick in, she adds.

Amundson offered an example of the type of leadership that’s inspirational: In Charlotte, a principal and her teachers balked at a district proposal to dedicate 15 to 20 minutes of instructional time daily to something they agreed was a “complete waste of time.” In protest, the principal defied the district edict, instructing her teachers to disregard the new rules and telling them, “I’ll take the hit” from the district office.

“That’s what a good turnaround principal will do,” Amundson said, “they ask ‘how can I knock down barriers,’ and they’re usually tough as nails.”

The business and education school collaboration at U. Va. partnered with WestEd, a non-profit technical research firm that the U.S. Dept. of Ed. picked to operate the Southwest Comprehensive Center, part of a federal network of Regional Comprehensive Centers that coordinate research projects toward improving teacher performance, accountability software, and state adaptation of federal education policies associated with the Early and Secondary Education Act.