[A] new federal education law was overwhelmingly approved by the House of Representatives last week and is now on the way to the U.S. Senate. It could be on President Barack Obama’s desk awaiting his expected signature as early as the end of this week.
The Every Student Succeeds Act, once known as the No Child Left Behind law and for decades before that as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, is a routine reauthorization of the federal education law that would typically be approved by Congress every five years.
The controversial education law has been stalled in Congress since 2007.
The compromise Every Student proposal was recently supported by key players in Congress.
Vermont Congressman Peter Welch says it’s about time. Welch says the one-size-fits-all No Child Left Behind policy “was doing more harm than good.”
“NCLB had been a real problem for our teachers and our schools,” Welch said.
The House-passed bill must be reauthorized in four years instead of five so that a new president and new Congress can adjust it if needed.
Federal accountability standards for student progress has been the biggest sticking point. Congress has been struggling to balance the need for accountability with ensuring that poor and minority students are protected and will get the kind of education they deserve.
The federal government only provides about 7 percent of state education budgets, and since the funding law was passed in 1965 the money has been largely used to support impoverished students. The federal government also helps with special education costs.
Many felt that No Child Left Behind was an overreach of federal power because of the Department of Education’s limited financial and constitutional role in education.
No more high stakes testing
In the past, Vermont has had to deal with 73 percent of schools donning a failing label under unforgiving and unrealistic expectations that all students be 100 percent proficient in reading and mathematics.
Under Every Student, states are expected to maintain challenging academic standards – or grade level expectations of what a student should know and be able to do – that are aligned with entrance requirements to the state’s college system as well as job readiness. The Common Core standards adopted by Vermont and 43 other states already do this.
While yearly tests for grades 3 through 8 and a one-time high school test remain, the punishments for schools with poor performance have been eliminated. States still must parse data by subgroups and report the information to the federal government, but the much-maligned Adequate Yearly Progress expectations and consequences have been eliminated. States are even allowed to limit the time students spend taking annual tests.
Vermont will also have discretion in how it chooses to deal with chronically underperforming schools.
States can now create their own testing opt-out laws as long as 95 percent of schools/students take the tests. Unlike under NCLB where schools with lower than 95 percent participation rates were automatically labelled failing, local districts and states can decide what to do when a school doesn’t make it. States are expected to consider low participation on the tests as part of their accountability system.
More interestingly, there is money for a pilot program that would allow school districts to use local assessments in place of annual tests as long as they were preapproved by the state and found to be rigorous. This includes competency-based and performance-based assessments that allow students to show they have mastered the coursework.
There is also additional flexibility to use Computer Adaptive Tests that change as the student answers each question to provide a more accurate idea of what the child understands and can do. CAT also provide immediate feedback to the classroom teacher to allow for adjustments in teaching each child. These new testing options coordinate well with Vermont’s efforts to develop personalized learning plans for every student in grades 7 to 12 as part of Act 77.
In the new law, states are required to step in and help schools that have test scores in the lowest 5 percent, where achievement gaps are yawning and in high schools that graduate fewer than 67 percent of students on time. In Vermont, only one high school falls into this category and that is Winooski – 59 percent of students graduated during the 2013-2014 school year.
The bulk of federal dollars are rolled up in Title 1 monies that go to schools teaching the most impoverished students – $14 billion – which is an increase, according to Welch. He said he isn’t sure how the additional funding will help Vermont yet.
There were various efforts made to make Title 1 money portable which many worried would interrupt the flow of dollars to the poorest schools and hamper their ability to level the playing field. There was also an attempt to change the formula which would have benefited rural states such as Vermont but it didn’t make it into the final bill.
Teachers can focus on teaching
“The No. 1 thing helpful to teachers is that this bill will get rid of NCLB and end the test and punishment culture we have seen in our schools for last 14 years,” said Mary Kusler, director of government relations for the National Education Association.
Washington will not play any part in teacher evaluations. States will not have to use student outcomes to assess teachers’ work. The requirement for “highly qualified teachers” as previously defined in law is also gone.
Pay for performance and teacher quality improvement measures remain but they are voluntary and merely suggested in a few grant programs.
There are also funds in Title II for peer-led, evidence based professional development for teachers. The same title also promotes professional growth, multiple career paths and mentoring while still teaching in the classroom. There is also room for differential pay and other recruitment tools to help retain teachers in high need areas.
“When we look at Vermont where there are so many small rural schools and the state doesn’t fit the large urban school model that federal lawmakers had in mind when they wrote these laws in the past. This bill has the flexibility to allow Vermont educators, students, parents, communities to create the educational opportunity for children in the state of Vermont without having to meet a one-size-fits-all mandate from Washington, D.C.,” said Kusler.
Ultimately, Uncle Sam’s boot has been lifted from the neck of each state’s education system. This has caused some education experts in Washington to fear that schooling for minority and impoverished students will suffer. But Vermont’s education policies have been on the progressive end, and for that reason, NCLB’s prescriptive nature was causing some problems – most of which the state obtained waivers for.
The new law should be a better fit for Vermont, according to Welch.
Attempts to reach Rebecca Holcombe, the secretary of the Agency of Education, last week were unsuccessful.
“We were really in advance of what is going on in other parts of the country. This law – the new law – frankly adopts the approach Vermont largely had been taking,” said Welch.
For the rest of the country, he says, Every Student Succeeds Act will bring relief from the tyranny of the test.
