State policymakers face a school accountability dilemma this year.
Do they prefer Maine have flexibility over how it spends federal school improvement funds and sets low-performing schools on the path to improvement? Or, do they prefer — at the expense of such flexibility — to keep student achievement on standardized tests from factoring into teachers’ job performance evaluations?
Essentially, those are the choices facing Maine lawmakers this winter. The amount of latitude Maine has to spend, about $48 million in federal funds, is what is on the line.
This largely is a dizzying, bureaucratic nightmare that seems far removed from the classroom. But the debate holds significance when it comes to how the state helps low-performing schools turn around and how schools help their teachers and principals continue to improve their craft.
At the heart of it all is the 13-year-old No Child Left Behind Act signed into law by former President George W. Bush. Today, the law is nearly universally opposed, but Congress has failed to come up with a replacement, even though the law was originally due to be rewritten in 2007.
Since 2013, the federal government has allowed Maine and most other states a pass on meeting many of No Child Left Behind’s requirements, namely a provision most regard as unrealistic that set up all schools for failure — that 100 percent of students score proficient or better on standardized state math and English exams by 2014. Maine schools, as a consequence, also are excused from the rules that apply when they don’t meet the performance thresholds: specific steps they must take, such as allowing students to attend other schools, offering them tutoring or even reworking school staffing and governance, to turn around performance. And the state gets a pass on the tight restrictions governing how it can spend school improvement funds for low-income schools.
There’s widespread agreement the No Child Left Behind rules were unworkable and that its prescriptions for turning around low-performing schools weren’t effective, especially when the law required largely the same interventions for every under-performing school, no matter how badly it missed the mark.
Maine is one of 43 states with a waiver on the books that allows it a pass on the 100 percent proficiency requirement and associated restrictions and consequences. But Maine is at risk of becoming the third state to lose its waiver.
In exchange for securing the waiver, Maine and other states had to show the federal government they adopted rigorous academic expectations for their students. Maine checked off that box by adopting the Common Core standards for math and English.
States also had to show they were committed to using students’ academic performance as a factor in teachers’ and principals’ job performance evaluations. In the feds’ eyes, though, Maine hasn’t quite checked off that box, and that’s putting its No Child Left Behind waiver at risk.
Maine’s waiver expires later this year, and its application to renew it is due March 31. In December, federal education officials warned Maine that they wouldn’t renew the state’s waiver unless it made changes to its teacher and principal performance evaluation rules.
Maine lawmakers unanimously passed a bill in 2012, when Republicans controlled the Legislature, to set up performance evaluation systems that took student achievement data into account — but no requirements to base salaries on such data. But by the time the rules were fleshed out a year later, lawmakers in a Democratically controlled Legislature — at the insistence of the Maine Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union — watered down the rules, allowing individual school districts to avoid using standardized test data in evaluations if they opted to design their own evaluation systems. This is the provision federal officials flagged for putting Maine’s waiver at risk.
This winter, Gov. Paul LePage’s Department of Education is proposing legislation to fix the problem in time for the state to meet the March waiver renewal deadline. The bill simply would make it state law that teacher and principal performance evaluations take students’ growth on standardized tests into account as one measure of job performance.
This is a simple fix Maine lawmakers should pass, lest they risk returning to the days of No Child Left Behind, in which schools were needlessly stigmatized as failing and in which they made changes that didn’t guarantee improvement.
Maine should do what it needs to do to renew its waiver, then focus on the more consequential work of ensuring teachers and principals across the state have access to top-quality job evaluations and professional development, provided regionally, that allow them to continue to improve their craft.
