Presidents Obama is expected to sign the measure into law before the end of the year.
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Additionally, while Every Student Succeeds will maintain an emphasis on annual assessments, it plans to do away with some of the mandatory testing that was seen as onerous and excessive by many educators and parents under NCLB.
The board received a report on the current status Priority Schools at its meeting.
Many states, including Alabama, had sought and received waivers from the U.S. Department of Education regarding many NCLB requirements as state and federal officials recognized that the law’s goals of proficiency would not be met. Try as they might, teachers and schools just couldn’t get all students proficient in math and reading in the timeframe NCLB authors sought.
“I don’t understand the euphoria that’s going on in Washington”, said William Mathis, a member of the State Board of Education who is chairman of its education quality review subcommittee.
Full implementation of the new law will occur in 2017. Teachers had said using test scores alone ignored many factors and was an unfair way to measure their effectiveness.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jillian Balow is anticipating a brighter future for K-12 education in Wyoming, thanks to the passage of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.
The Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaces the No Child Left Behind education law, passed the Senate on Wednesday. That data will still have to be reported publicly and parsed for income level, race, disability and English-language learning. It will allow states to decide how to test students.
Obama signed the bipartisan rewrite of No Child Left Behind at the White House on Thursday.
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Under NCLB, schools with low performance scores could be forced to hold students back, fire teachers, or restructure entirely, which would reportedly create an atmosphere of “fear and worry” in some classrooms.
