hundred different organizations issued proposals for reforming our schools.
In 1989, President George H. W. Bush attempted to gently interject a federal voice into the education reform discussion when he convened U.S. governors for a summit on education to establish national goals for education. To achieve the ambitious goals established at the summit (including that U.S. students would rank first in the world in mathematics and science achievement by the year 2000), President Bush and the governors called for “decentralization of authority and decision-making responsibility to the school site, so that educators are empowered to determine the means for achieving the goals and to be held accountable for accomplishing them” (“‘A Jeffersonian Compact’: The Statement by the President and Governors,” 1989). The federal government might set the goals, but the question of how to achieve them was left to the states and their local districts. This summit led to the Goals 2000: Educate America Act that President Bill Clinton signed in 1994 (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 1994).
The federal government might set the goals, but the question of how to achieve them was left to the states and their local districts.
By the year 2000, however, the United States had not come close to achieving any of its education goals. Leaving education in the hands of fifty states and more than fifteen thousand local school districts was not yet providing students with a world-class education.
Perhaps one of the reasons for the failure of the Goals 2000: Educate America Act was that few states had a process for monitoring student learning or holding schools accountable for that learning (Civic Impulse, n.d.b). Many states relied on nationally normed tests that placed students along a continuum of achievement rather than a criterion-referenced test designed to determine which students had met a designated proficiency level.
As of 2002, only nine states required all students in grades 3–8 to take a criterion-referenced test in English language arts, and only seven did so in mathematics (Aldeman, 2015). Most states looked at student performance as a whole rather than disaggregating data by particular groups of students, and only twenty-two states disaggregated high school graduation rates (Aldeman, 2015). At the beginning of the 21st century, if someone accused a school that its students were not learning, in most instances the charges would be dismissed for a lack of evidence. In response to this chaotic situation, the U.S. government stepped in.
No Child Left Behind Act
Within three days of assuming office in 2001, President George W. Bush called for the adoption of NCLB as his first legislative initiative. By December of that year, the law passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in both the Senate and House of Representatives—87 to 10 and 381 to 41, respectively (Civic Impulse, n.d.a). Its broad themes of additional funding for education, academic standards, accountability, civil rights, and school choice found widespread support in the early days of 2002.
NCLB signaled a major turning point in the effort to reform U.S. education by dramatically increasing the authority of the federal government in matters that had largely been left to the states. The Commission on No Child Left Behind (2007) described it as impacting education “more than any other federal education law in history” and a “bold step to accelerate progress in education and fulfill our promise to our nation’s children” (p. 11).
NCLB aimed to replace this laissez-faire approach to education by establishing accountability with a capital A. While the French expression laissez-faire often describes free trade or other economic policies that allow individuals or nation-states to do as they wish, it described education well in the years before NCLB, when there was no national consensus on what students should know and be able to do. Only a few states, including Missouri (the Show-Me Standards) and Florida (the Sunshine State Standards), had established academic content standards and state tests, and the prevailing view was for local control, meaning each school district—indeed, each school and classroom—was left on its own to decide what an acceptable level of student performance should be.
NCLB mandated annual assessments in reading and mathematics in grades 3–8 and once in high school. Schools were required to report results separately by race, ethnicity, and other key demographic groups. They also were required to demonstrate adequate yearly progress and faced interventions and increasingly severe sanctions if they failed to do so.
If a school failed to make adequate yearly progress two years in a row, students in that school were allowed to transfer to another school in the district that was meeting standards, and the state would hold back 10 percent of the school’s Title I money. Failure for a third year meant the school had to provide free tutoring services to students. Continued failure could lead to state interventions, such as closing the school, turning it into a charter school, taking control of the school, or using another turnaround strategy.
A school’s inability to meet the standard of any one of these thirty-eight factors meant the entire school was failing.
The Goals 2000 initiative established thirty-eight different factors to determine whether or not a school was failing under NCLB. A school’s inability to meet the standard of any one of these thirty-eight factors meant the entire school was failing. By the year 2014, the inability of a single student to demonstrate proficiency on the mandated state test meant the school would be designated as failing. If educators did not improve student achievement, they would be subjected to increasingly punitive sanctions for failure to do so (U.S. Department of Education, 2003).
However, NCLB left the questions of which academic standards to adopt, which annual assessments to use, and what constituted proficiency on those assessments to each state to decide. So how did states respond? In too many cases, they lowered standards, adopted easier assessments, and set low benchmarks for proficiency in an effort to ensure their schools would look good to residents and avoid NCLB sanctions. Critics of the law described this phenomenon as an educational race to the bottom.
Within five years of the passage of NCLB, Michael Petrilli, a member of the Bush administration charged with overseeing this law, concluded that even though initially he had been a “true believer,” he had “reluctantly come to the conclusion that NCLB as enacted is fundamentally flawed and probably beyond repair” (Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2007). He lamented the fact that asking all states to reach universal proficiency by 2014 but allowing them to define proficiency as they saw fit had, inevitably, created a race to the bottom. He writes, “I can’t pretend any longer that the law is ‘working,’ or that a tweak and a tuck would make it work” (Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2007).
In 2009, the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) proposed a plan to address the NCLB problems of lowered expectations—the Common Core State Standards.
Common Core State Standards
If states could agree to a set of national standards in mathematics and English language arts and on the assessments to monitor student achievement of those standards, they could promote greater academic rigor and a more accurate comparison of student achievement between states. Thus, the Common Core State Standards initiative was born, an initiative initially supported by forty-five states (NGA & CCSSO, 2010b).
Meanwhile, however, the stipulations of NCLB remained in effect, and each year as more and more schools failed to demonstrate adequate yearly progress, states petitioned the U.S. Department of Education under President Barack Obama’s administration for waivers to avoid sanctions and allow them to pursue other avenues of school improvement. President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan used this opportunity to provide waivers only if states agreed to implement the Obama administration’s education priorities, collectively known as RTTT.
According to the U.S. Department of Education (2009),
