Compensatory Education

The Chapter 1 program, the backbone of federal elementary and secondary education efforts, gave states about $6.1 billion in fiscal year 1992 to deliver supplemental educational services to educationally disadvantaged students. These services were intended to help students attain grade-level proficiency and increase their achievement in basic and more advanced skills. The Chapter 1 comparability provision is a key program component. It seeks to ensure that school districts (1) continue to provide basic services to poor schools with large concentrations of Chapter 1-eligible children and (2) use Chapter 1 funds only to supplement those basic services funded by nonfederal sources. The provision says that basic services must be comparable in poor and non-poor schools. This report assesses school district compliance with current comparability requirements and provides information on alternative ways to measure comparability.

GAO found that: (1) educators and Education officials disagreed as to how to best measure Chapter 1 comparability and how broadened criteria would affect school districts; (2) Chapter 1 districts generally complied with student-teacher ratio requirements and Chapter 1 districts had equal or greater numbers of instructional staff per student than non-Chapter 1 schools; (3) both federal and state agencies monitored compliance with the federal comparability provisions; (4) Chapter 1 schools were often inadequate in terms of teacher quality, supplies, equipment, and other expenditures; (5) Chapter 1 comparability provisions positively affected the equitable distribution of state and local resources among within-district schools; (6) additional Chapter 1 comparability requirements may not ensure greater quality or equal distribution of resources, may reduce school resource distribution flexibility, and increase administrative costs; and (7) changes to Chapter 1 comparability requirements need to be addressed in the greater national education debate on national standards and take into consideration the relationships among standards, school resources, and measuring school capacity.