Copyright 1999 Federal Document Clearing House, Inc.
Federal Document Clearing House Congressional Testimony
April 15, 1999
SECTION: CAPITOL HILL HEARING TESTIMONY
LENGTH: 2467 words
HEADLINE:
TESTIMONY April 15, 1999 DR, PAULA C. BUTTERFIELD HOUSE
APPROPRIATIONS LABOR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, AND EDUCATION
LABOR,HEALTH,HUMAN SERVICES AND EDUCATION
BODY:
Statement of DR. PAULA C. BUTTERFIELD Chair., AASA Committee on Federal
Policy & Legislation And Superintendent Bozeman Public Schools Bozeman,
Montana on behalf of THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS given to
The Subcommittee on Labor, Health & Human Services, Education, and Related
Agencies The Honorable John Edward Porter., Chairman Committee on Appropriations
United States House of Representatives WASHINGTON, D.C. April 15,1999 10:00 A.M.
Mr. Chairman and members of the Subcommittee, my name is Paula Butterfield, and
I am the Superintendent of Bozeman Public Schools in Bozeman, Montana. I am here
as a representative of the American Association of School Administrators, for
which I Chair the Committee on Federal Policy and Legislation. AASA consists of
more than 14,000 local superintendents and school executives, all of whom share
a keen interest in ensuring the best possible education for the young people in
this nation. My school district in Bozeman consists of 5,100 students and 650
employees. Those numbers may sound small, but it is actually one of the larger
school districts in Montana. According to the 1997 Digest of Education
Statistics, it is in the top 12% of all school districts based on student
enrollment nationally. Images in the media often present schools as tremendous,
oversized urban districts as the norm, yet only 216 districts in the country
enroll more than 25,000 students. With over 5,200 districts enrolling fewer than
600 students, it is truly small school districts that educate most of our
children. I preface my testimony with these figures to let you know that the
district I represent is a typical one. Here in the D.C. metro area you are
surrounded by the largest of school districts, but those are not representative
of most of the nation. I ask that when you consider appropriations this year and
consider our requests, you think not just of the large districts, but of the
smaller, less visible districts as well. My colleagues and I at AASA have a
short simple message regarding federal funds. First, make it your highest
priority to put new money in schools where poor children are concentrated. Make
the funding of IDEA your second highest priority. And third, fund a new program
specifically for districts that are too small and too rural to be sufficiently
served by current federal formulas. Title I I begin with the most intractable
problem facing public education today: concentrated poverty. Only by targeting
pockets of impoverished students will we ever be able to make significant
improvements in student achievement levels. Students coming from a poor
background often begin school behind their classmates, and understandably score
lower on assessment tests. Falling behind, they often do not fit in, or they act
out. To make matters worse, the low scores and behavioral problems lead parents
and the larger community to lose confidence in public schools. Without the help
of parents and community, the poor students, who started just a little bit
behind, have little chance of keeping up with their peers. All of these factors
compound to impede the educational process. Empirically, when 50% or more of the
children in a school is below the poverty threshold, the entire school suffers.
That means that everyone, regardless of family income, is brought down. If we
expect any significant gains in student achievement levels, we must target
concentrated poverty. According to the recent GAO study titled School Finance:
State and Federal Efforts to Target Poor Students, states do not provide
sufficient assistance to adequately meet the needs of the poor. The GAO study
found that for every dollar spent, the states target only 62 cents toward
mitigating the effects of poverty on learning. States, for apparent political
reasons, choose to spread funds over the entire school-age population instead of
targeting those with the greatest needs or facing the greatest disadvantages. In
contrast, thanks to Title 1, the federal government targets $4.73 for every
other dollar spent on K-12 education. The federal government and Title I are the
last best hope for poor children. In schools where Title I funding has been
removed, there are no support services that fall between general ed. and special
ed. Thus we see a significantly increase in the number of student referrals to
special education in those high poverty schools. Our first priority is to ensure
an equal opportunity for all youngsters; especially those who come from families
locked in poverty. Whether in urban areas, such as Washington, D.C., or in more
rural parts of the country, such as Montana, poverty should never be an obstacle
to the hope and promise offered by an education. Not only does Title I help
educationally disadvantaged students, it keeps many of them from falling so far
behind that they need special education. There is a complex interaction between
the two programs that should not be overlooked. In my district, when Title I
funds were taken away from one school, Special Education referrals tripled.
Considering that special education costs about 2.5 times the district's average
per pupil expenditure, it came as no surprise that removing the supplemental
money from Title I resulted in massive new costs to the district. Montana, like
most states, does not provide additional help for those students, so teachers
and principals who want extra assistance for struggling children were forced to
turn to special education as their alternative. By supplementing state and local
funds, the Title I program is able to significantly bolster achievement among
disadvantaged youths and target those most in need. But, there is still a long
way to go. The program only reaches 55% of the eligible students. That means
there are 9 million more eligible children, all handicapped by the inequities of
poverty, yet unassisted and struggling through school without special help. Even
among those students who do receive Title I assistance, many receive only math
OR reading help, when both are clearly needed. There simply is not enough money
in Title I to go around. This scarcity of Title I resources seems even more
tragic in light of the most recent studies released by the Department of
Education. Two reports, The NAEP 1998 Reading Report Card and The Final Report
of the National Assessment of Title I, both offer a very promising outlook for
American education, but more importantly, they both acknowledged the role of
Title I in recent successes. Over the past several years superintendents faced
with limited funds and new data on the importance of early childhood development
have chosen to target Title I resources at the earliest grade levels. The
nine-point gain in NAEP Reading scores is only the first visible sign that we
made the right choice. In the NAEP Report Card, the only improvement at the
fourth-grade level was among low performing students. These are the same
students most likely to be a part of Title I. The National Assessment of Title I
revealed equally hopeful data, documenting progress in the percentage of Title I
students who pass their state and local proficiency tests. Eighty percent of the
states that reported proficiency scores in mathematics saw improvement, as did
83% of those reporting reading scores. Knowing what we now do about the positive
link between Title I and student achievement, why is the President proposing to
cut Title I basic and concentration grants? We should instead embrace the
program and infuse it with I billion new dollars. The Congressional Research
Service estimates that the full funding of Title I would require at least $7
billion more dollars, and it could cost as much as $24 billion. While we do not
expect increases of those proportions in the short term, a one billion dollar
increase in Title I would allow us to reach an additional one million children
and provide them with the reading and math assistance they desperately need.
Given the recent successes, it seems much more appropriate to increase funding
for Title I than it does to invest in new and untested programs that do little
to target the most needy children. AASA recommends that Congress commit to
increasing Title I funding at $1 billion per year until every child is served.
The increase may seem expensive, but it would provide many children attending
schools with concentrated poverty their only opportunity for an equal education.
IDEA Our second major concern about this year's education funding again regards
a special needs group: students with disabilities. The Federal
Government has been promising for 24 years to alleviate the financial strain
imposed by IDEA by providing 40% of the necessary funding. On average, it costs
$7,021 more to educate a special education student than it does to teach a
student in general enrollment. In Bozeman, we have charted the historical
pattern of special education funding provided by local, state and federal
governments. What these charts and graphs show so dramatically is that the
fastest growing part of our local budget is special education. The local
contributions to have skyrocketed while the state and federal lines are
basically flat. This has contributed to the need to close a very popular and
successful elementary school in order to cut budgets that do not have the power
of a federal mandate; mandates that are for the most part unfunded. The result
is a growing resentment in our community as well as many communities across
America when parents see class sizes increasing in regular education classes and
precious few extra resources for our most gifted and talented students. The
Federal government pays for 11% of the overall cost to educate our special needs
children, or about $702. School districts that have to pick up the remaining $35
billion dollar tab identify IDEA as the single largest constraint on their
budgets. Superintendents are forced to do everything from abandoning
extracurricular programs to robbing from general education funds. IDEA has
become such a financial strain that the share of public school budgets devoted
to "regular" education declined from 80 percent in 1967 to 58.6 percent in 1996.
In the past, federal dollars earmarked for special education have not allowed
reductions in local spending because of the requirements for maintenance of
effort. Put simply, the overwhelming costs of IDEA are restricting educational
possibilities and hurting all students. What is wrong with this picture? Federal
dollars need to be used to reverse the trend of escalating local effort. Another
area of concern in low income areas and rural communities is the difficulty in
hiring qualified service providers. Special education teachers are hard to find
due to the high rate of burnout amongst such teachers because of difficult
student populations and excessive paperwork demands. School psychologists and
speech language clinicians are especially hard to recruit in rural areas. In
fact, there is a bill before our Montana legislature, which would allow rural
districts to hire "speech aides" instead of licensed clinicians, severely
affecting the quality of service, but leaving districts with no other choice for
provision of services. We will continue to ask for a $1 billion increase each
year until the federal commitment to IDEA is realized. Not only will one billion
dollars bring Congress closer to its original promise; it will allow school
districts more flexibility in how they spend their education dollars. Small,
Rural Schools Education Initiative Finally, as our last request, we urge you to
fund a greatly improved program for small rural schools under Title X - Programs
of National Significance, Part J of the ESEA. Rural, small
school districts need extra assistance to provide the opportunities that
suburban students take for granted. The recent NAEP reading results showed that
rural schools and urban schools lagged behind suburban reading scores. Because
these small rural districts frequently have less than 600 students, formula
programs like Class-Size Reduction, Eisenhower Professional Development, Title
VI, Safe and Drug.Free Schools and a few others produce so few dollars that
little can be accomplished. These programs were simply not designed to work for
school districts with less than 600 students. A few hundred dollars in four or
five separate accounts is impractical; limitations on the commingling of funds
are so stringent that little can be accomplished. We would like to see one
program, with one set of rules and one source of funding, distribute $230
million dollars to these small, rural districts. AASA urges you to rethink the
current rural program in ESEA's Title X, and provide students
in rural, small schools with an equal educational opportunity. My message today
on Title I, on IDEA, and the Small, Rural Schools Education initiative is this:
Congress should not fund any employment programs or poor professional practices
with federal education dollars. Last year, this committee took a bold step and
funded the whole school reform provision of Title I of ESEA.
The Obey-Porter bill attached real accountability measures to federal funds. It
did so with the presumption that teachers and principals should jointly plan
instructional and organizational strategies, choosing among programs that have a
firm basis in research and practice. We think that Congress should inject that
thinking into all of Title I, IDEA, and the new small, rural schools program. We
understand that we are asking for a lot of money, but we firmly believe our
priorities account for the needs of the American educational system and the
reliability of the programs being funded. As such, we are confident that an
investment of $2.23 billion dollars in the programs mentioned today would live
up to a reasonable level of accountability. Do not simply give us the funds;
hold us accountable, and we will show you success. We have a lot of cattle
ranches outside of Bozeman and throughout Montana. Both ranchers and politicians
know that the bull is important, but it isn't everything. When ranchers take
their cattle to market they want them to be the very best so that they get top
dollar. They don't prepare the cattle by just taking them to the scales and
measuring and weighing them. A wise rancher will feed his cattle fine-quality
grains in order to fatten the cattle so they bring top dollar. That's what makes
Montana beef such high quality. Now, I'm not suggesting that we fatten up our
kids, but unless we beef up the funding for Title 1, IDEA and Rinds for small
and rural school districts we are not giving millions of American children the
education they need to be top scholars and compete in the world marketplace.
LOAD-DATE: April 21, 1999 
