SARC BITE 14 | JUNE 26, 2003

NCLB wants your SARCs printed and distributed

The members of Congress who shaped No Child Left Behind (NCLB), including California's George Miller (D-Martinez), were strong advocates of the public's right to know how its schools are doing. As a result, they built into NCLB a clarion call for "dissemination" of school accountability report cards

Section 1111(h) could be called NCLB's own Freedom of Information Act. It specifies not only the key facts about schools and districts that must be included in annual reports. But it goes further to require that these reports be distributed to every school in the district and to all parents of students attending school. Here is Subsection 2(e) from Section 1111(h), chapter and verse.

(E) PUBLIC DISSEMINATION. The local educational agency shall, not later than the beginning of the 2002-2003 school year, unless the local educational agency has received a 1-year extension pursuant to subparagraph (A), publicly disseminate the information described in this paragraph to all schools in the school district served by the local educational agency and to all parents of students attending those schools in an understandable and uniform format and, to the extent practicable, provided in a language that the parents can understand, and make the information widely available through public means, such as posting on the Internet, distribution to the media, and distribution through public agencies, except that if a local educational agency issues a report card for all students, the local educational agency may include the information under this section as part of such report.

Read this section of the federal NCLB act in full.

While federal lawmakers are explicit about public dissemination, California law is ambiguous. In one part of the Education Code it calls for districts to ensure that parents receive a copy of the report card, yet policy guidelines issued by the California Department of Education (CDE), tell districts to simply post accountability reports to their website. But since federal law trumps state, it is federal law that prevails.

Heres how we interpret this part of NCLB. We have combed through the legislation to provide an explanation of key action items below:

"...publicly disseminate..." To disseminate means to distribute the reports to the widest group by the most universal means possible In other words, to widely publish them, print them, get them out to the reading public.

"... to all schools..." Most teachers have never seen their own schools accountability report. A 1999 study by KSA-Plus Communications found that only 51 percent of teachers surveyed had seen their schools report. Read the research as reported in Education Week.

A more recent Fall 2002 study of five districts in Southern California, conducted by Randy Ross at the Los Angeles education reform group, the Los Angeles Alliance, revealed that roughly half of teachers surveyed in five districts had seen their own school's annual reports. Read the research brief. (PDF format)

"... to all parents ..." This refers specifically to all parents with children in school. The only universal method we have for distributing anything is to print it on paper, and either mail it home or send it home with students. The 1999 study cited above by KSA-Plus Communications revealed that only 39 percent of parents had ever seen any school's annual accountability report.

"... in an understandable and uniform format ..." If you've seen other states' annual accountability reports, you probably know that many, in fact, read like the technical appendix to a statistics textbook. Tables of data filled with numbers do not comprise an understandable report. And if it is not understandable, it is not in line with federal law. This part of NCLB also makes it clear that Congress does not find it acceptable for schools to put out their own freewheeling interpretations of an accountability report. Districts are responsible for providing a common design and a uniform treatment of the data itself.

"... in a language that the parents can understand ..." This means that if a significant percentage (in California, it is 15 percent) of the parents of students enrolled in a school speak Spanish at home, then the annual report must be translated into Spanish. If that language is Vietnamese, then the reports must be translated into Vietnamese. Districts in our state have been coping with the challenge of serving immigrant families for years. So this is only news insofar as it extends the federal mandate for accountability reporting to include translation services. Note the qualifying phrase that precedes this directive: "... to the extent practicable..." You should be able to provide face-to-face translations, or over-the-phone translations for some language-minority parents.

"... make the information widely available through public means ..." Congress has directed district and state education leadership to put these documents into the public realm. This means you must distribute them to local libraries, city hall, the chamber of commerce and real estate associations. The state of Indiana requires local newspapers to publish school accountability report cards for every school in their circulation area. Federal law goes almost as far to direct districts to post their annual reports on the Internet, and to distribute them to media and public agencies (libraries, recreation centers, city hall, etc.).

For more information on NCLB and the CDE's accountability laws, check out the links below:

REFERENCE

The CDE's summary of all the California laws on accountability reporting.

The full legal language of Senate Bill 1632 (now Education Code statute).

The NCLB legislation that pertains to accountability reporting.

The KSA-Plus Communications research on accountability.

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