Rick Miller, left, executive director of the California Office to Reform Education, confers with Michael Fullan in Sacramento earlier this year. Fullan, a Canadian author on education reform, is the architect of the collaboration-focused model of school reform, on which CORE has based its NCLB waiver application. Photo by John Fensterwald.

Rick Miller, left, executive director of the California Office to Reform Education, confers with Michael Fullan in Sacramento earlier this year. Fullan, a Canadian author on education reform, is the architect of the collaboration-focused model of schoolhouse reform, on which CORE has based its NCLB waiver application. Photo by John Fensterwald.

Representatives of 9 California districts did not head home from Washington on Friday, after two and a half days of intense discussions with federal officials, with the waiver from the No Kid Left Backside law that they had been hoping for.

But Rick Miller, executive director of the nonprofit district collaborative that is submitting the waiver application, called the talks "productive" and said the districts are "1 iteration away" from finishing a document for a final up or down decision by  Secretarial assistant of Pedagogy Arne Duncan. Duncan did not participate in the discussions terminal calendar week, Miller said.

Fresno Unified Superintendent Michael Hanson characterized the condition of the waiver as "closer but not washed."

"If there was not a take chances of approving," he said, high-ranking Department of Teaching administrators "would not have wasted their time or our time."

Hanson and Miller were joined in Washington past Superintendents John Deasy of Los Angeles Unified, Richard Carranza of San Francisco Unified, Christopher Steinhauser of Long Beach Unified and acting Superintendent Gary Yee of Oakland Unified, along with other administrators with the California Part to Reform Education, or CORE, the umbrella organization the districts have created.

Thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia already have received waivers from some of the penalties of NCLB, along with flexibility to apply some Title I coin funded for low-income children. A half-dozen other states have applications under review. The ix CORE districts, serving about 1 million of the state's 6.ii million K-12 students, would exist the showtime districts to receive a waiver. Department of Education officials, cautious about setting the precedent of bypassing country authorities – the California Department of Education in this example – have moved slowly and carefully.

Time is critical, withal.

Miller had said July xv was the deadline for a waiver. If the districts don't receive a waiver, they must renew contracts with providers of tutoring and other services required of schools that haven't met NCLB's academic targets. But Miller said Sunday that the drib-dead date is early on August, when the first of the Core districts' school trustees meet to vote on the contracts. Waiting that long is not platonic, merely the waiver is worth the effort, he said. A postponement won't throw implementation off greatly, since the beginning year of the three-year waiver period will largely involve planning – including the accountability criteria and the designs of teacher evaluations. Districts have already been working together on implementing the Common Core standards, i of the requirements for a waiver, Miller said.

The CORE districts are proposing a singled-out arroyo to academic accountability and school improvement – one based on peer review and collaboration amongst districts' teachers and administrators. This contrasts with having a country Department of Education in the traditional role of enforcer and compliance monitor. Core would use some of the $100 million in freed-upwards Title I dollars to support the process.

Information technology's taken hours of talks and weeks of rewrites for federal officials to become comfortable with Cadre'southward framework, which is modeled after work among districts in Ontario, Canada. "This has not been tried on the scale we are proposing," said Miller. The back and forth with the feds has "improved our thinking and made our application clearer."

Local unions footstep upwardly opposition

Approval of a district waiver would be controversial. Other state superintendents, who meet a commune waiver as undermining their oversight office, don't like it. And teachers unions in the ix districts, aroused that they were not consulted in writing the waiver application, have come up out in opposition.

During the by week, they pressed ahead. The presidents of local unions wrote their superintendents calling on them to withdraw the waiver application or at to the lowest degree delay information technology for a year. In those letters and in a letter terminal month to Gov. Jerry Brown, urging him to oppose the waiver, the unions introduced a new argument. They said that approval of a waiver "would divert funding and momentum from the implementation of the Local Control Funding Formula," the K-12 finance reform that Brown proposed and the Legislature passed at the end of June.

The "sweeping foundational changes implemented with the LCFF will have a back seat to the headline-grabbing approval of this consortium application," the letter to Brown said.

The waiver would create a "parallel universe" that would conflict with the goal of LCFF to marshal financial priorities and academic outcomes and undermine LCFF's goal of involving parents, teachers and administrators in the creation of a local district plan.

Brown has not responded publicly to the waiver application, and Evan Westrup, Chocolate-brown'southward press secretarial assistant, declined last week to annotate on the letter. The State Board of Education endorsed the waiver in a vote earlier this yr, before the passage of LCFF.

Hanson said that the waiver, which volition mute the negative impact of NCLB, is compatible with the new funding reforms. Both serve the aforementioned goal: directing more resources toward underserved students.

Miller said the CORE application and the LCFF are "perfectly aligned." The accountability metrics that the Legislature created with the formula and Cadre's range of academic and not-academic measures are similar enough that CORE districts volition apply the local accountability program required by LCFF also to satisfy the federal reporting requirements.

"I frankly do not run across what they are talking about," Miller said, referring to the union presidents'  letter.

To get more reports like this 1, click here to sign up for EdSource's no-price daily electronic mail on latest developments in education.