No Child Left Behind is gone, replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act.
No Child Left Behind is gone, replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act. President Obama signed ESSA last month and it’s quite different from NCLB. Perhaps the most striking thing about ESSA was the process; the law was drafted in a bipartisan way from the beginning. It’s a balance between returning some powers to the states and the federal government keeping some oversight. Here are the highlights.
Less testing (hopefully)
ESSA still requires accountability testing, but has brought the requirements down somewhat. Students will still be tested in grades 3-8 and once in high school in math and reading. Data still has to be captured for each school as well as various subgroups. Although it’s still early, there is also language that says states and districts can opt to use a national test, like the ACT or SAT, as their high school state accountability test.
While that is only a slight change, the biggest departure when it comes to accountability is that states have almost complete control over setting their own goals, coming up with accountability systems for schools and districts, and what happens if a school or district is underperforming. The law leaves teacher evaluation completely up to the states.
Required intervention
That being said, the Department of Education still has oversight in certain areas, particularly when schools or subgroups are struggling.
The new law requires states to intervene in certain situations:
- The bottom 5 percent of all schools
- High schools in which the graduation rate is 67 percent or less
- Subgroups, such as English language learners or minorities, that are struggling
However, the states have a wide berth in what that intervention looks like. As long as it is research-based and peer-reviewed, the federal government will approve it.
What about the Common Core?
The law only states that individual states need to adopt “challenging standards”. There is no other definition given, except it is noted that the current Common Core State Standards qualify. In fact, the Department of Education is expressly prohibited from forcing or even encouraging states to choose a particular set of standards.
Funding
Overall, the new law takes existing money from various pots and consolidates it into fewer pots, but sometimes with broader goals. For example, anything having to do with school improvement now falls under Title I. New money, from old sources, will be going to physical education, Advanced Placement, counseling, and investments in education technology.