President Barack Obama signed sweeping education reforms into law Thursday, giving states and local communities new authority to set standards for students and teachers and limiting the scope of benchmark testing.
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Obama says, “The goals of No Child Left Behind, the predecessor of this law, were the right ones”.
“This is a big step in the right direction, a true bipartisan effort”, Mr. Obama said at the rare bill-signing ceremony at the White House. The bill just passed the Senate, 85-12, a week after passing the House of Representatives, 359-64.
The federal government would see its influence in education policy substantially limited and would no longer be able to tell states and local districts how to judge the performance of schools and teachers.
The law leaves it up to the states to develop and design their own evaluation systems. He was a chief architect of the bill along with Democratic Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Reps.
Under ESSA, states will submit accountability plans to the U.S. Department of Education, focusing not only on state test proficiency and English language proficiency, but also allowing states to include other indicators of their choice. The Texas legislature will now have control over the level of accountability for schools and students if they perform poorly on standardized tests, or even pass those decisions on to individual districts. It comes after years of complaints from critics who argued No Child Left Behind spurred excessive testing in public schools and used unrealistic goals to label too many schools as failing.
Sheldahl adds, “It doesn’t really change how much we go about our business in Yuma”.
“Laws are only as good as their implementation”, he said. And this law requires states to invest in helping students and schools improve.
· Preserve annual assessments and reduce the often onerous burden of unnecessary and ineffective testing on students and teachers, making sure that standardized tests don’t crowd out teaching and learning, without sacrificing clear, annual information parents and educators need to make sure our children are learning.
The new bill, known as the Every Child Succeeds Act, will replace No Child Left Behind, the last iteration of ESEA that expired in 2007.
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The U.S. Senate yesterday morning overwhelmingly passed The Every Student Succeeds Act – the successor to the 14-year old No Child Left Behind Act- and sent it on to the president for his signature.
