Kati Haycock, president of The Education Trust, an educational advocacy organization, said state-level actors might be less galvanized to address achievement gaps without the federal government threatening intervention.
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With the stroke of a pen, President Obama leaves behind “No Child Left Behind” for the “Every Students Succeeds Act”.
ESSA shifts control away from the federal government and back to the states, and provides other means to measure schools besides just standardized tests.
The Every Student Succeeds Act requires schools to test 95% of students every year from the third through eighth grades, and again in high school.
“There is nothing more essential to living up to the ideals of this nation than to make sure every child is able to live up to their God-given potential”.
Read Sunday’s Wyoming Tribune Eagle to find out how the new law might affect Wyoming students.
Many education advocates, teachers, and administrators saw No Child Left Behind’s top-down approach, which stressed test scores above all else, as leaving failing schools – and students – in the lurch.
President Barack Obama has signed into law a major education law setting us public schools on a new course of accountability. “We have reversed the trend toward a national school board, repealed the federal Common Core mandate, and enacted what the Wall Street Journal called ‘the largest devolution of federal control to states in a quarter century'”.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said ESSA “offers the flexibility to find the best local solutions while also ensuring that students are making progress”.
The new law says that students are not judged by their standardized testing scores but by their overall performance in school.
Kerr said “We put so much time and energy”. One of the ways that No Child Left Behind failed, in my view, was that it set very high expectations but didn’t actually give the local school districts the tools to get to those expectations.
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Full implementation of the new law will occur in 2017.
