Schools are out for the summer, but the U.S. Senate has a major assignment this week following its return from recess.
That’s debating and passing a replacement for the 13-year-old, nearly universally derided No Child Left Behind Act signed into law by former President George W. Bush. Congress is about eight years behind on this assignment, but the Senate this year has made the most progress yet toward completing it. In April, a key Senate committee approved a replacement for the law in a unanimous 22-0 vote.
The replacement, Every Child Achieves Act, keeps much of the status quo in place while striking a balance in addressing Republican and Democratic concerns on education.
The result would be a significantly smaller role for the federal government in determining which schools are high- and low-performing and what struggling schools should do to turn around. States would have much more latitude to determine which schools are succeeding or struggling, and local school districts would decide how to turn their own struggling schools around. The sweeping law could result in less of an emphasis on high-stakes tests. There also is a chance it could result in fewer tests for some students.
Amid the many questions about what the Every Child Achieves Act could lead to, there’s at least one certainty: Each state would have to be a good-faith partner invested in academic success, rigorous expectations for students and holding schools to account. States shouldn’t escape their responsibility by setting the bar low enough for all schools to clear, but there’s little in the proposed law to keep them from doing that.
Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee, and Patty Murray, D-Washington, assembled this legislation earlier this year as standardized testing concerns loomed large and parents opted their students out of annual testing in large numbers.
The senators’ bill does away with the unrealistic Adequate Yearly Progress measure introduced by No Child Left Behind, under which schools would have to reach an impossible 100 percent proficiency by 2014, but keeps the law’s requirements for standardized testing in math and English every year in grades three through eight and once in high school.
In a nod to concerns about excessive testing, the proposal would allow schools to break it up and give portions throughout the year so it’s not all crammed into one short, stressful period. Policymakers hope that will allow school districts to eliminate other nonstandardized tests teachers rely on throughout the year to judge student progress.
There also is a provision to allow states to develop and try out new types of tests, which could become shorter and more useful to teachers as technology improves, in individual school districts before deploying them statewide. That’s a concept championed by Maine Sen. Angus King.
What the law changes most with regard to standardized tests is how states use the results. The Every Child Achieves Act would have states — with virtually no input from the federal government — design their own systems for holding schools accountable and identifying high and low performers. Those systems could be based 100 percent on test results or on a whole host of state-defined performance measures.
The schools identified as low-performing would be eligible for federal grants to help them improve, though they wouldn’t have to choose from a federally prescribed slate of turnaround strategies. There would be few federal requirements surrounding the entire process.
The restrained federal role in education policy is a priority for Republicans in Congress. In the Every Child Achieves Act, they’ve inserted provisions that would bar the federal government from requiring or encouraging any specific set of academic standards — such as the Common Core, which the federal government has never required nor specifically encouraged — or even requiring that those standards be rigorous.
There’s widespread agreement the No Child Left Behind rules were unworkable and that its prescriptions for turning around low-performing schools were ineffective. A replacement is long overdue, and Congress is closer than ever to having that replacement — though many steps remain before the job is done.
The Every Child Achieves Act is the best bet for moving beyond No Child Left Behind. Its less prescriptive nature could allow states and local schools to experiment and discover the most effective ways to improve education. But that will require a commitment from states to be good-faith partners invested in high expectations and student success instead of the reassuring appearance of high marks on easy tests.
