By Natalie Carter Holmes

The study, released last week, was requested by Sens. James Jeffords, chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions; Edward Kennedy, the ranking minority member of the committee; and Christopher Dodd, ranking minority member of the Subcommittee on Children and Families.

Responding to the report, U.S. Assistant Education Secretary Michael Cohen said in a letter said that requiring states "to hold Title I schools accountable for increases both in overall student achievement and in the achievement of the lowest-performing students…is what the administration has proposed for the 1999 reauthorization of ESEA." That legislation is stalled in Congress.

The GAO report notes that while "some states had collected extensive and detailed information on educational outcomes...most had substantially less information on educational outcomes and on disadvantaged students in general."

The majority of states had established criteria to determine whether schools and/or districts were performing satisfactorily, the report said, but these criteria "were sometimes confusing or vague" and, with the exception of one state—Texas— "were based solely on the performance of the student population as a whole, without reference to the achievement of specific subgroups of children," such as low-income or limited-English-proficient students. Thus, the report concluded, "states are not yet in a position to ensure accountability for the educational outcomes of disadvantaged students, the children that remain central to the mission of the Title I program."

Under the 1994 law governing Title I, states are required, by the 2000-01 school year, to report assessment results which are disaggregated by six specific categories: gender, racial and ethnic group, English proficiency status, disability status, migrant status and economic status. While only a third of states have collected the required data in all six categories, a majority had assessment data disaggregated by racial/ethnic group, poverty, limited-English proficiency, disability and gender in the fall of 1999. However, GAO’s findings cast doubt on whether all or even most states will meet next year’s deadline for collecting information in all categories, the report said.

Besides publicly reporting these data, states are to use the information gathered from schools and districts to determine whether they are performing adequately and to take action if they are not. The report argues that data on at least some, but not necessarily all, subgroups of students should be used to assess whether schools and districts are meeting the requirement for adequate yearly progress in their Title I programs.

"Although the law does not require disaggregated data for yearly progress assessments, lack of these data makes it difficult for states to hold districts accountable for the achievement of disadvantaged students, and to discern whether achievement gaps between disadvantaged and non–disadvantaged students are closing," said the report, "Title I Program: Stronger Accountability Needed for Performance of Disadvantaged Students."

Besides reviewing data on the 50 states, GAO researchers conducted site visits with state officials in five states—North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Texas—and visited districts and interviewed school district officials in 13 districts within those states.

They found that school district staff use assessment and other outcome data to focus attention and effort on improving student achievement, including identifying and addressing weaknesses in instruction. But district officials said the data must be detailed and timely in order to be useful in improving instruction, whereas "the information reported by states was sometimes limited or late." Only 12 states provided assessment data broken down by teacher, 23 by objective and 11 by individual test item, the GAO report said.

In the same way that Texas is now in the forefront of using disaggregated scores on statewide tests to measure school and district effectiveness, many districts are out in front of their states in gathering data on specific subgroups of students in order to improve their performance, according to AASA Director of Public Policy Bruce Hunter.

"I’m thinking of Alexandria. School districts started disaggregating data long before the state of Virginia was thinking about it," Hunter said. "That’s as it should be. School districts felt that diversity in their student populations long before states did," he said.

Carley Ochoa, former federal program director in Riverside, Calif., and past president of the National Association of Federal Education Program Administrators, gave a nod to GAO’s report as well, as long as scores on a single test are not used as the sole measure of district, school or teacher effectiveness.

"I definitely think that the data should be disaggregated. A lot of districts are not doing that or they do it reluctantly. Unless you disaggregate the data to see how poor kids are doing, you’re destroying the real reason behind Title I." At the same time, Ochoa said, "Adequate progress has to be differentiated. You don’t want a different goal, but it’s going to take longer and it’s going to take more resources" for some children to reach a higher benchmark of achievement.

Low-performing schools have been in the spotlight this spring. Margaret LaMontagne, spokeswoman for  Texas Gov. George W. Bush's presidential campaign, said disaggregating test scores has been a central tenet of that state’s educational improvement efforts and would likely play a significant role in the would-be president's national plan for education. Bush decried illiteracy among students attending Title I schools in proposing a $5 billion nationwide reading initiative earlier this year.

Meanwhile, President Clinton in May signed an Executive Order directing the U.S. Department of Education to compile and publish key data on low-performing schools and help states fix them. He pointed to resources provided for extended learning, teacher training and  expanded technology, as well as literacy initiatives, as critical factors in Kentucky's 10 years of progress in raising student achievement in low-performing schools.