As national politicians on both sides of the aisle crow about ending the controversial No Child Left Behind Act, education officials in Vermont have been more reserved in their praise of the Every Student Succeeds Act that President Barack Obama signed into law Thursday.
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Schopp says the new law won’t go into effect until the 2017-2018 school year, so over the next one year transition period, educators, parents, tribal leaders and others from around the state will meet to discuss what South Dakota’s own accountability system should look like.
The vote in the U.S. Senate Wednesday was 85 to 12.
Steve Hopkins, the Superintendent for the Natrona County School District said “One thing I know about education is, we have about 13,000 students in our district today, we can’t treat them all the same. The ESSA aligns with the premise of Louisiana Believes trusting those closest to the students to make the best decisions for them.”, White says.
“Congress has finally done its job to pass a bipartisan bill that fixes No Child Left Behind”, Bennet said.
The new act, called the Every Student Succeeds Act, removes the federal government as a backseat driver, and hands control of school accountability to individual states. The new act allows states to tailor their assessment systems to each school district.
It is also recognized as a remedy to the “one-size-fits-all” educational approach of the past administration, which according to Obama, despite having the right goals, often “fell short in practice”. While ESSA keeps in place the basic testing requirements of No Child Left Behind, it strips away numerous high stakes that had been attached to student scores. The president signed the bipartisan measure Thursday morning, effectively returning to states the authority to decide how to use students’ test scores in assessing the performance of teachers and schools.
Cook-Robinson said the new legislation puts the federal government in a role of supporting and strengthening education, and gives control back to states.
“I am very honored to participate in this historic moment and applaud Congress for this significant course correction, acknowledging that a decade’s worth of test-and-punish education policies have been a failure”, Montgomery said in a statement.
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Equally important is new language, tucked into the law, about a program known as Title 1.
