WASHINGTON—State education departments across the country are struggling to strike a balance between a growing demand for leadership in reform and shrinking budgets.
A report released Wednesday in a bipartisan collaboration between the Center for American Progress and the American Enterprise Institute found state education agencies as a rule are too focused on compliance with federal and state regulations, rather than proactively advocating for improving schools.
“We were looking at things that some of the [high performing] states are doing,” said Daniel Lautzenheiser, one of the authors on the report. “Are they thinking creatively within the confines of state and federal rules?”
Educators and state officials in Vermont, which regularly ranks among the top states in measures such as graduation rates and assessment scores, said that they have already implemented some of the report’s recommendations—and others are just wishful thinking.
Among its key recommendations, the study suggested that states should grant education agencies added flexibility to offer more competitive salaries to lure innovative staff.
“I would love to have more authority to make things happen,” said Armando Vilaseca, Vermont’s commissioner of education. “It comes down to the state legislature and the state school boards to be willing to make those recommendations.”
Vermont’s Department of Education also gets high marks in the report for both transparency and collaborating with school districts, schools and teachers. Lautzenheiser said Vermont’s education office was one of only a handful of states that readily provided staffing and budget information.
While the report only briefly touched on the subject, state education chiefs at a related discussion held Wednesday at the Center for American Progress said that one of the most critical aspects of their jobs is working with the teachers and the teachers unions.
“No one knows what a district needs more than the people who live it every day,” said Lillian Lowery, Delaware’s secretary of education. Vermont’s teachers said the state office does better than most states at formally including teachers in decisions that affects schools and students.
“They’re not in our classroom; they’re not directly relevant to our educators,” said Darren Allen, of the Vermont National Education Association. “The most innovative thing they can do is get out of the way.”
The state received more than $8 million in federal funds for school improvement in 2010, and it falls to Vilaseca’s office to distribute those funds within the federal guidelines. He said that, while he has some leverage to get the money where it’s needed, “of course, more flexibility and more support from the federal government would be appreciated.”
“We want to be an agency that supports schools,” Vilaseca said. “We should really be more involved in those schools that are really struggling to meet our standards.”