A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

I. Overview of Waiver Requests and Waivers Granted

Since the reauthorization of ESEA in 1994, the Department has received 630 requests for waivers from state educational agencies (SEAs) and local educational agencies (LEAs) in 49 states as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Department has granted a total of 335 waivers since the implementation of federal waiver authority. SEAs have been granted 82 waivers; the remaining 253 waivers have been granted to LEAs, representing just over 2 percent of school districts in the nation. All waivers to date have been granted under the waiver authority in the ESEA, with the exception of one waiver related to the Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Act which was granted under the Goals 2000 waiver authority in 1995 ^{[ 3 ]}.

Figure 1 shows the total number of waivers granted during each year since 1995. Since the last report to Congress the Department has granted 128 waivers. During 1998 (through September 30) the Department granted 99 waivers. The majority of waivers granted to date relate to the schoolwide or targeting provisions in Title I of the ESEA. (See Figure 4.) Under the ESEA waiver authority, waivers may be granted to for up to three years. Thus, thirty-seven of the waivers granted during 1998 were extensions of waivers originally granted during the 1995-96 school year. In 1997 and 1998, 35 waivers were also granted to extend the deadline for a number of states to complete the development of content and student performance standards.

Although waiver requests have been received from almost every state, the number of waivers requested and granted is relatively small. The use of waivers by school districts appears to depend heavily on LEAs' awareness of availability of waivers and the degree to which SEAs encourage their districts to apply. Some states and their school districts have submitted many more requests than others. For example, LEAs in Pennsylvania submitted almost a quarter (24.6%) of the total waiver requests received by the Department. Hawaii, for example, has been granted a total of 28 waivers on behalf of schools that have undergone the comprehensive planning necessary to implement schoolwide programs, but were below the minimum poverty threshold for implementing schoolwide programs.

As of September 30, 1998, the Department had decided 617 waiver requests (at the time of this report, 13 waivers are pending with the Department's Waiver Action Board). Overall, the Department has approved 54 percent and disapproved 8 percent of all waivers requested. Thirty-one percent were withdrawn largely because districts learned that they had sufficient latitude under existing law to proceed without a waiver. Seven percent were returned (Figure 2). A waiver request might be returned, for example, if the request was outside the scope of the Secretary's authority, or an applicant did not fully address the waiver criteria. Figure 3 reports on waiver decisions made from January 1, 1998 through September 30, 1998. In 1998, the Department approved 79 percent of waivers requested, disapproving just 4 percent and returning 10 percent of waiver requests.

Figure 4 shows how the nature of waivers requested has varied over time. Waivers granted in 1994-95 during the first year after reauthorization, for instance, focused heavily on Title I targeting requirements (89%). Many of these were granted as one-year transition waivers in order to accommodate adjustments to new requirements in the law. Since then, the number of targeting waivers has declined sharply (36% in 1998) although waivers of targeting requirements, along with waivers of the minimum poverty threshold for a schoolwide program designation (34% in 1998), remain the most frequently requested types of waivers.

Since the last report to Congress, approximately one-quarter of the waivers granted have extended the deadline set by Title I for states to establish content standards and performance standards. One-quarter of the waivers granted in 1998 waivers also focus on the standards deadline, more than half of which are extensions of waivers originally granted in 1997. As noted earlier, a large fraction of the total waivers that were granted in 1998 (39%) were extensions of previously granted waivers.

Each of the following four subsections discusses the categories of waivers granted and includes examples that highlight how waivers are supporting the goals and efforts of state educational agencies, school districts, and schools. Appendix B provides a state-by-state list of all waivers granted since the last report to Congress on October 1, 1997.

Footnotes:

^{[ 3 ]} Waivers granted by states under the Education Flexibility Partnership Demonstration Program (Ed-Flex) are reported separately in the Goals 2000 annual report to Congress. [ Return to text ]

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