Joined by lawmakers, students and teachers in a White House auditorium, Obama praised the George W. Bush-era No Child Left Behind for having the right goals. It will take some of the pressure off underperforming schools by giving states the option to consider performance measures beyond test results.
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The new law also no longer requires 100 percent of students to pass all standardized tests, which is a practice that Freeman believes is unrealistic.
That law, Alexander and others said, transformed the U.S. Department of Education into “a national school board”, providing waivers to more than 80,000 schools in 42 states seeking to escape the law, forcing governors to request “mother, may I?” to institute plans to evaluate teachers or assist low-performing schools. These include a unanimously-approved amendment written by Cochran and Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) to all authorize the use of federal funds to improve and modernize school libraries. The new policy, named the Every Student Succeeds Act, is a new direction for federal education policy, which has been defined for the past 13 years by the controversial NCLB. The law does ensure states are setting high standards to prepare students for college and a career.
He said the No Child Left Behind Act failed to consider the specific needs of each community and only relied on standardized tests that did not produce the results they expected to see.
The President explained that Every Student Succeeds lays the foundation to expand access to “high-quality pre-schools”.
The program known as No Child Left Behind is being left behind and replaced by another program that aims at shifting power over to local districts and the state.
“With numerous challenges facing the country, it’s time to build on this success”. Al Franken also spent months working on the measure. He called the bipartisan bill a Christmas miracle.
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A reauthorization of the 50-year-old Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the ESSA has been lauded as an end to the test-and-punish regime ushered in by NCLB and as a landmark rollback in federal involvement in public education. The original bill actually expired in 2007.
