In 2002, President George W. Bush and Congress set a goal: No Child Left Behind. The goal became a feel-good name for a sweeping education law, for which most agree a replacement is sorely needed.
In 2015, the goal the nation’s political leaders have for our students is shaping up to be the following: Every Student Succeeds.
More than seven years after the No Child Left Behind Act expired, Congress is close to completing a deal on a replacement for the comprehensive education law. The deal in the works, the Every Student Succeeds Act, is shaping up to be a clear improvement. One certainty, though, is that the new law’s success in boosting achievement will be firmly in the hands of individual states. The law would scale back the federal government’s education authority, so the law’s success will depend on states, with minimal federal assurances, showing they’re good-faith partners invested in rigorous expectations and students’ success — and not simply outward appearances of it.
No Child Left Behind is best known for ushering in an era of annual, mandatory standardized testing for students in grades three to eight and high school. Schools deemed failing had to choose from a federally prescribed list of turnaround strategies.
The Every Student Succeeds Act, which passed the House this week, scales back the federal government’s role in the whole accountability system. The annual testing requirements for math and English remain in place — so does a 95 percent test participation requirement. But states will have more latitude to determine which schools are failing and how to intervene in order to improve them.
Under No Child Left Behind, determining which schools were underperforming was almost entirely test-score driven; it had to do with whether a school made “adequate yearly progress” toward meeting a 100 percent proficiency goal by 2014 that proved unattainable. Under the education law’s replacement, more work would fall to policymakers in Augusta, who would have to design a system that rates school performance based on five indicators — not just test scores. Most of those indicators would be academic in nature — test performance and student growth, for example — but they also could include student engagement, access to advanced coursework, school climate and safety or other measures that could be difficult to quantify.
Based on that combined measure, states would then decide how to intervene in the lowest performing 5 percent of schools. There would be no federal prescriptions for intervention. For high schools, states would have to intervene in schools with graduation rates lower than 68 percent, a threshold that, fortunately, applied to no Maine public high school in 2014.
In a nod to Republican concerns about federal overreach in education, the law in the making would state explicitly that the U.S. Department of Education can never require a particular set of academic standards. To be sure, it never has.
There also are several measures favored by Democrats, such as an expanded Preschool Development Grant program, aimed at expanding access to public preschool and improving its quality.
Maine Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King championed a measure that made it into the final House-Senate compromise — 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.
Collins, who served on the conference committee that hashed out the House-Senate compromise, also authored an extension of the Rural Education Achievement Program, a special line of funding specifically for small, rural school districts.
The Every Student Succeeds Act, more than most other major pieces of legislation in Washington these days, has a good chance of success itself: It’s received wide-ranging, bipartisan support at nearly every stage.
It’s more likely than ever that No Child Left Behind will finally be replaced. What follows and whether that means an improvement for the nation’s students and public schools is largely in the hands of the individual states. It’ll be on them to show they’re invested in holding their students to rigorous standards and ensuring their success.
