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.
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“The achievement gaps racial and ethnic have been slowly closing over the years”.
A rewrite of President George W. Bush’s signature education policy is poised to win final passage in Congress this week after winning preliminary approval in the Senate on Tuesday.
Now that old, and many say, broken, law is on its way out. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said that the Every Student Succeeds Act is “the most significant step towards local control in 25 years”.
The legislation passed the House easily last week and the Senate is expected to formally pass the legislation Wednesday.
He and others fear that the Every Child Succeeds Act will fail to live up to its name, as did No Child Left Behind.
NCLB has become an nearly universally unpopular law, but it remains to be seen whether the new version represents a new and improved model. Instead of addressing this problem through legislation or administrative action, Duncan used the problem as leverage to force states to accept input policies he, along with the Obama Administration and centrist Democrat reformers, favored.
In a recent press statement, the Department of Education offered an apology, of sorts, for the “unnecessary testing” that is “consuming too much instructional time and creating undue stress for educators and students.” Sen.
Others are more hopeful that many states will stay the course or come up with new innovations to address achievement gaps – recognizing the impact those can have on their future workforce and economic health.
States would still be required to conduct annual tests and report results by race and income, and they would still be required to intervene in failing schools. It set up regional “centers of excellence” to provide assistance to schools that were struggling.
In many states, especially those in the South, the new law means little. “Parents, teachers, and state and local school leaders support this bill because they know it will restore local control and help get Washington out of our classrooms”. Schools failing to meet NCLB objectives were subject to various forms of turnaround strategies. Reauthorization was last done under No Child Left Behind, which imposed sanctions on schools whose students did not score as proficient on reading and math assessments. It did not create vouchers (a pet Alexander project), but it allowed states to experiment with alternate funding systems that might look like public-school choice.
Still, the numbers show many students are missing out on college simply because they are not playing the odds. On the other hand, though, we’ve raised a generation of students for whom days and days and days of standardized testing is normal, and testing is a two billion-dollar industry. As I’ve written elsewhere, if students did not pass they could be held back or prevented from graduating. Even as these groups improve – and they have over the years – their scores are still lower than their majority peers, and the fact that they make up a greater percentage of our students keeps overall scores kind of flat. State-based education reform groups will need to continue pushing for accountability at the local level.
CT has 550,954 students in 1,169 schools.
“States have been asking for a while now for more flexibility to own their state accountability plans, so we’ll be monitoring how this plays out, and calling out states that aren’t doing better by English learners” says Brenda Calderon, an education policy analyst at the National Council of La Raza.
“This ends the federal dark cloud of test-and-punish mandates”, she said. “We need to have the right conversations to implement those changes well”. But there are examples, again, of communities that are getting it right – Tulsa, Oklahoma, is a city that I like to point to because every child is in quality early childhood education, every school is a full-service school and their best high school is fully integrated – 50 percent African-American, 50 percent white.
Joined on a conference call by the president of the state’s largest teachers union, Sens. “Under these circumstances, that school can’t succeed, and the alternative is to invest resources that will attract a diverse population of students, but you can only do that with a high quality education”.
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While high, it’s an improvement from 2008, when 80% listed only one school.
