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A sampling of U.S. Department of Education discretionary grant files discovered that the federal agency failed in dozens of cases to follow its own oversight procedures, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office, or GAO. The GAO, which issues public studies on internal federal functions, recommended that the Education Department update its written rules for staff and provide more training to ensure that the proper oversight steps are taken in the future.

While more than 85 percent of the grants issued by the Education Department are released through a formula, the agency also awarded about $4 billion in discretionary grants in 2015. The GAO looked at a non-generalizable subset of those discretionary grants and found that the Education Department did not have the proper paperwork on hand in official files in 69 of the 75 cases reviewed. In some instances federal officials had failed to submit grant award notifications, in others they did not include post-award conference records including grantee performance reports.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who is the Chairman of the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, had requested that the GAO conduct the review in 2015. After the report was released on Thursday, Alexander released the following statement:

“When taxpayers spent $4 billion on competitive grants administered by the Obama Administration’s Education Department in 2015, they expected proper oversight—to ensure the money was spent as intended and the results were measured. Today’s report shows us the department didn’t deliver. I hope Secretary DeVos will use this report as an opportunity to make some serious improvements at the department.”

The most troubling finding in the report is that for $21 million worth of grants, or 12 percent of the pool of grant money the GAO had sampled, the reviewers were not even able to find paperwork describing what the grantees had achieved with the money given to them. In other words while paperwork was missing in nearly all of the awarded discretionary grants, in this subset of cases, the agency appeared to be particularly negligent in failing its oversight responsibilities to taxpayers.

Specifically, the GAO had examined and criticized documentation practices at the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, the Office of Postsecondary Education, and the Office of Innovation and Improvement, all three of which are branches of the Department of Education. The GAO expressed concern that the failure to file proper documentation was hindering the department’s ability to communicate internally and keep track of which grantees were in good standing across the agency’s bureaucracies.

In a letter included in the GAO report, Education Department officials pushed back on some of the GAO’s findings, while still accepting the substance of the reviewers’ recommendations. The department argued that while employees had failed to officially file the paperwork, the lapses were not a result of lax oversight. Instead, the letter said that the department did have the proper documentation on hand, they had simply neglected to include the paperwork in the EducationDepartment’s new filing system, in some cases.

“We believe that in every case, [the Education Department] had the documentation necessary to make continuation awards, as documents are in place within the program office even when not filed consistently in the official grant file,” reads the letter.

Nevertheless, the department did agree to use the GAO report to improve its internal functions. The agency said that it would add internal written protocols to review grant files, and it said it would provide staff with more training to ensure they stay in compliance.

Thursday’s GAO report is reflective of a larger set of struggles in education across all levels of government. Members of the business community have long complained that navigating the byzantine procurement process through which public K-12 and higher ed purchasing is conducted requires full-time staff. This week’s news, that oversight is being neglected at the highest levels of grant-making in government, is not likely to inculcate confidence in a system that many complain is already rigged in favor of incumbents.

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Personalized learning, or the use of technology to custom-deliver a tailored curriculum to each student based on their needs, has long been an area of emphasis and optimism for education policymakers and influencers.

Bill Gates voiced some of that optimism in an April 2016 speech at the ASU GSV summit, in which he stated that education technology had not yet met its full potential.

While Gates urged continued investment in ed-tech products and “deeper engagement” with teachers in product design and testing, he suggested that expensive web-based courseware was not yet a one-size-fits-all solution for the education system. When discussing the challenges of preparing students for the job market, Gates suggested that a better approach involves “a combination of great teachers using the technology in the right way.”

Today, the research arm of the federal Department of Education (DoED) released a report buttressing the marketing claims of one ed-tech product in particular, Odyssey by Compass Learning. Compass Learning was recently purchased by a Scottsdale, Arizona-based company called Edgenuity.

As a result of the acquisition, Odyssey Math itself is no longer on the market, but according to the company, many of the features of the old product have been folded into Edgenuity’s new math software product: “Pathblazer.”

The federal report, issued by the What Works Clearinghouse, a branch of the DoED’s Institute of Education Sciences, states that “Odyssey Math was found to have potentially positive effects on mathematics achievement for primary students.”

The studies the DoED used in its research synthesis are old, two of the three that fully met the full department standards were from the 2000’s, but the researchers still concluded that the product propelled students who used it up by an average of 12 percentile points compared to their peers.

Like other personalized learning ed-tech products, student-users of Pathblazer begin by taking a diagnostic test that measures areas of content mastery and topics where instruction is needed.

Based on a student’s diagnostic test performance, the software uses an algorithm to spit out a lesson plan tailored to the strengths and weaknesses of that individual student. With some products, including Pathblazer, teachers have the ability to intervene and rearrange the lesson plans based on their classroom objectives and student observations.

Many ed-tech proponents do not view sophisticated customizable-learning courseware, on its own, as a panacea to the challenge of educating students.

“Quality education is much more broad than just ed-tech” said Thomas Arnett, a senior research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute, a nonprofit research organization with education technology expertise.

Instead, “blended learning” proponents, like Arnett, argue for synthesizing ed-tech approaches within a wider framework that includes specific teaching practices, a focused school culture, and a carefully crafted curriculum.

If all the pieces are in place, the vision is to empower teachers with the training and software support to deliver rigorous coursework to each of their students that is at the “cusp” of their level of academic understanding.

Rather than teach to the middle of the class, personalized learning software, in theory, would allow teachers to group students by proficiency level and rotate in-person instruction with online learning to ensure that the needs of their lowest, average, and highest achieving cohorts are each being addressed. Proponents also point to easier data collection and quicker feedback as benefits of the technology.

According to ed-tech watchers, personalized learning initiatives have gotten into trouble when teachers are not properly trained in how to use the products, when the products themselves purport to be adaptable but are actually little more than digital worksheets, and when schools and students lack the technical infrastructure to take advantage of the shift in curriculum-delivery.

Rather than rush into purchasing the latest product, school leaders should start by taking the time to think out a wide-angle plan for how to achieve desired student outcomes, said Arnett in an interview.

The news released today regarding Odyssey Math is a positive sign for those who believe in the promise of education technology to reshape instruction and curriculum delivery.

Arnett, who had not reviewed the DoED report, cautioned that it is often difficult to know how generalizable study findings in this area are, particularly given how hard it is to isolate an ed-tech product’s impact from all the other inputs that affect learning.

Nonetheless, he said it is “very encouraging” that studies meeting federal standards on such widely used software have yielded positive results for students.

 

FCC Actions

At least one challenge that traditionally stood in the way of personalized learning—school infrastructure struggles—is rapidly being surpassed.

The Federal Communications Commission’s E-Rate program, which subsidizes broadband connections to schools and libraries, is credited with having had a major impact on promoting school connectivity in recent years.

In 2016, 88 percent of schools had the Internet infrastructure to support digital learning, up from 30 percent in 2013, according to an Education Superhighway report.

Strong personalized learning programs often also require at-home student access of learning materials.

While the FCC’s Lifeline program was recently expanded to subsidize at-home connections, a 2015 Pew study found that 5 million households with school-aged students lacked high-speed Internet.

Students from these households are said to have fallen into “the homework gap” because unlike some of their peers, they have to stay on campus after-hours or find free public WiFi to complete their at-home studies.

New Republican leadership at the FCC could herald changes to the FCC’s E-Rate and Lifeline programs.

 

A New Education Secretary

The future direction of personalized learning is also likely to be impacted by the decisions taken by newly confirmed U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.

DeVos, who was confirmed Tuesday after Vice President Mike Pence broke a tie vote in the Senate, spoke favorably of online learning programs, including “cyber-charter” schools, as part of her school choice agenda during her confirmation hearing.

In a written response to Senate education committee questions, DeVos wrote: “High quality virtual charter schools provide valuable options to families, particularly those who live in rural areas where brick-and-mortar schools might not have the capacity to provide the range of courses or other educational experiences for students.”

While DeVos came under fire for overstating the graduation rates of some cyber-charters, and despite the sector facing its share of controversy, many of the online programs continue to grow rapidly as a full-time alternative or part-time supplement to traditional public schooling.

The stock value of K12 Inc, a major online learning company, rallied Tuesday afternoon upon news of DeVos’s confirmation.

InsideSources has coverage of reaction to DeVos’s confirmation and of the extent of her new powers at the helm of the DoED.

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GOP strategists may initially throttle back on big education reform initiatives in the wake of a tough confirmation fight, according to a former George H.W. Bush education department official.

The debate surrounding the Trump administration’s nomination of Republican school choice activist Betsy DeVos to lead the education department has gone mainstream, despite the secretary of education’s limited powers under new education law.

Barring a surprise, the full Senate is expected to confirm Ms. DeVos at midday Tuesday by a 50-50 vote—Vice President Mike Pence would break the expected tie. If the vote plays out as anticipated, DeVos would be the first education secretary to receive no votes from across the aisle.

Christopher Cross was the Assistant Secretary for Educational Research and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education from 1989 to 1991.

Cross has spent decades working on education policy in Washington before and since his appointment, and he said he has rarely, if ever, seen such partisan polarization in a fight over the direction of education policy.

Even the bitterly contested creation of the Department of Education during the Carter administration, which first squeaked through the House on a 210 to 206 vote, saw numerous members of both parties voting on either side.

While there are policy issues enmeshed in the debate over DeVos’s confirmation, much of the fight has turned to attacks on her personality and prior experience, said Cross, in an interview with InsideSources.

He said that Trump’s nominee has had the misfortune of being “caught up in general election fallout,” adding that the confirmation fight is “not just about DeVos.”

Nor would Ms. Devos be the first education secretary without deep roots to the traditional public school system, from either party, said Cross.

Shirley Hufstedler, the first U.S. Secretary of Education under President Jimmy Carter was tapped from the bench; she had been a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals.

Bill Bennett, the staunchly conservative education department leader under President Ronald Reagan had more of an academic background than a school administrative one, said Cross, and Lauro Cavazos, Bennett’s successor, was a Ph.D. in physiology with no major experience in K-12 policy-making.

Bennett, Hufstedler and Cavazos were each confirmed by broad bipartisan coalitions.

It will be important to watch who gets nominated for sub-cabinet positions over the coming weeks, said Cross, who feels the new administration needs “to appoint people with strong credentials” for those roles.

Should Trump and DeVos put together a highly qualified team of experienced education policy hands, Cross expects the controversy over DeVos “will fade, and fade relatively quickly.”

Nonetheless, Republican strategists in the new administration may consciously choose to allow some time to elapse before pushing major education reform.

Despite a recent House subcommittee hearing on “The Power of School Choice” and a pair of GOP bills aimed at rolling back Obama administration ESSA rules, Cross said he does not expect “an ‘in your face’” attempt by Republican leadership in the coming weeks to enact sweeping campaign promises, such as President Trump’s proposal to find $20 billion for school choice grants.

While a major school choice bill may get out of the House, the Senate committee that oversees education is expected to be busy in the coming months with the large task of amending or replacing the Affordable Care Act.

Michael Hansen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, agrees with Cross that the confirmation fight is “larger than just Betsy DeVos.”

Hansen also expressed the caveat, however, that DeVos’s signature issue—school choice and related voucher programs—is somewhat more controversial than the issues typically championed by prospective education secretaries.

Unlike Cross, who sees the possibility for tensions to cool in the coming months, Hansen said that education policy “is shaping up to be a space where there are a lot of partisan divides.” He said the issue “is probably going to be political for a while.”

Continue to check back with InsideSources for evolving coverage of federal, state, and local level education stories. We recently broke the news that Ms. DeVos has promised to release her tax returns and forego tax benefits offered to cabinet appointees.

Correction: In an earlier version of this article a reporter had written that the 1979 House vote to create the Department of Education passed 216 to 210. The first House vote in favor of creating the Department was actually 210 to 206. After conferencing with the Senate, the House approved the final version of the bill by a margin of 215 to 201.  

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“Betsy DeVos would single-handedly decimate our public education system if she were confirmed,” read a widely circulated tweet issued by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY.

Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., fired back in his comments on Tuesday morning during an executive session of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee that saw the DeVos nomination referred to the Senate floor on a 12-11 party-line vote.

In his discussions over the DeVos nomination with teachers in his state, Scott said he came to realize that “we were not having the right conversation.” The assertion that DeVos would have the power to fundamentally alter the American public school system is “patently false,” he said.

So the question lingers, should DeVos be the next education secretary, how much power over the nation’s school systems would she actually have? Even if she wanted to, could she “single-handedly decimate” traditional public schooling as Schumer and her other opponents have suggested?

The short answer: “if she wants to have a major impact, she has to have [new] legislation,” said Jack Jennings, who spent 27 years from 1967 to 1994 as a lead staffer and then general counsel for the education branch of the House committee that oversees education and labor.

Without legislation or major increases in appropriations, DeVos would be left with wielding a softer type of power.

“The main influence the secretary has is in setting the agenda,” said Jennings in an interview with InsideSources. Her priorities could end up influencing national, state, and local education policy debates over her entire tenure, he said.

Since leaving his perch on the Hill, Jennings founded the influential and non-partisan Center on Education Policy, and authored a book, Presidents, Congress, and the Public Schools.

While Jennings spent decades working for Democrats on the Hill and has returned to progressive advocacy since leaving the Center on Education Policy in 2012, he is well respected in education policy circles for his lengthy experience at the heart of education policy debates. In an adversarial profile of Jennings, the right-leaning group Education Next referred to him as “a one-time king of Capitol Hill education policy.”

Jennings has been around for long enough to see the “waxing and waning” of the federal government’s role in local education policy. And, under the recently passed Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the powers assigned to the Department of Education (DoED) are at an ebb.

Stalled progress under the ambitious federal interventions of the Bush and Obama administrations led to a backlash and a major devolution of department powers. Sen. Lamar Alexander, the chairman of HELP, has repeatedly vowed to defend these legislative interdictions.

Therefore, for signature No Child Left Behind issues such as testing, accountability, teacher evaluations, and school turnaround, Congress has “closed the barn door” on direct federal mandates, said Jennings.

 

$20 Billion to Support Choice

DeVos and the new administration, however, appears uninterested in re-litigating the fights that precipitated ESSA. DeVos has voiced support for the devolutionary principles behind ESSA.

Instead, the bulk of the new administration’s impact on local schools is likely to depend on whether President Trump is successful in getting congressional support for a proposed $20 billion block grant to promote school choice, including charters and vouchers.

“Reprioritizing” existing federal funds, from the education department’s $70 billion-plus budget, as Trump advocated during the campaign, would be difficult for the administration to accomplish unilaterally. Under ESSA, there are statutory restrictions on how many of the department’s grant programs allocate funding.

The education committees in Congress also have other big-ticket items on their plates, including the reauthorization of legislation that regulates higher education, career and technical training funds, and child nutrition.

There is some support for advancing the choice proposal, however. In a closed panel with the National School Boards Association on Monday, the chairwoman of the House Education and Workforce committee, Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., expressed her commitment to expanding school choice for parents, though its too early to divine what the particulars of such legislation would look like.

If Foxx is successful in getting a bill to the Senate, then the key question would be whether Democrats rally to filibuster or block the legislation.

Traditionally, school choice proposals have made for strange bedfellows. According to Jennings, some Democratic black lawmakers from inner cities have historically reflected their constituents’ support for increasing school choice, while white suburban Republican voters satisfied with their traditional public school offerings have previously bucked their party on choice initiatives.

It remains to be seen, however, how the current climate of stridently partisan national focus on education policy colors legislative efforts moving forward.

 

Ed Department by the Numbers

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning education policy think tank run by former DoED employee Michael Petrilli, concurred with Jennings that most of the education secretary’s power comes from agenda setting—most of which would likely revolve around school choice under DeVos.

“But the Department, at the end of the day, is largely responsible for the successful administration of large-scale grant programs,” read the statement. “Much of the actual power—and responsibility, particularly under ESSA—is left up to the states.”

The education secretary oversees a department staff of over 4,000 employees, the fewest of any cabinet level appointee, and tens-of billions in aid and federal grants to support primary, secondary, and post-secondary education systems. The DoED also has a healthy budget for research.

Notably, Head Start, the federal government’s largest pre-K program, is not run by the DoED, but is overseen by Health and Human Services instead.

The biggest K-12 programs include (in 2015 appropriations) over $14 billion in ESEA Title I grants that are targeted to students who come from low-income families. And over $12.5 billion in IDEA grants aimed at supplementing the cost of providing personalized disability services to all students who need them.

For higher education, the department oversees the disbursement of $28 billion in Pell Grants, which serve as the basis of financial aid packages for disadvantaged students pursuing higher education.

The DoED also oversees a massive student-loan program, which has over $1 trillion outstanding on the books. Under Obama administration reforms, the DoED is the lender, rather than any intermediate private bank or financial institution.

Some on the left, including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren questioned DeVos’s fitness to run such a large loan program, given her lack of experience in finance. Neither of Obama’s education secretaries had major financial experience prior to assuming their roles either.

From a policy perspective, the education secretary oversees the office for civil rights, which is tasked with forbidding discrimination in institutions that take federal money—in other words, the vast majority of American K-12 and higher education schools.

Deciding how aggressively to protect civil rights protections, therefore, is one area where a Sec. DeVos and the Trump administration would have considerable unilateral influence, if confirmed.

 

Unprecedented Rancor

Historically, the nomination and confirmation of an education secretary is typically a low-key and routine affair. Not so under the new Trump administration.

Since the creation of the Department of Education under President Carter, the most closely contested confirmation vote was in 2016 during the elevation of Sec. John King Jr., Obama’s second Education Secretary.

A Republican Senate that was by then openly critical of the outgoing administration, in an election year, smoothly confirmed King by a vote of 49-40.

As the landscape in the Senate stands now, DeVos, has yet to receive a single endorsement from across the aisle in the Senate.

If confirmed, DeVos’s legacy will be determined in large part by what she accomplishes from a position whose authority has been severely curtailed.

The long and controversial tenure of Sec. Arne Duncan, who served for many years in the Obama administration and oversaw huge amounts of federal stimulus funds, “was the time when the U.S. Secretary of Education had the most power and money” since the department was established, said Jennings.

Duncan eventually “reaped what he sewed,” he said, which included a major grassroots backlash against federal involvement in education.

Unless Trump and his eventual education secretary can pass legislation to alter the status quo, it appears unlikely that systematic educational reform, including a mandate to expand choice for public school parents, will originate directly from Washington.

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