six priorities.
1. Work collaboratively with other states to adopt a common set of high-quality standards internationally benchmarked that ensure college and career readiness. (This stipulation was generally understood to mean that states must embrace the emerging Common Core State Standards.)
2. Join a consortium of states to administer rigorous assessments based on the internationally benchmarked standards.
3. Make student growth (or value-added testing) a factor in teacher and principal evaluations, including decisions regarding retention or removal of tenured and untenured teachers.
4. Make student growth a factor in a plan to provide additional compensation (merit pay) for effective teachers and principals.
5. Identify persistently low-performing schools (the bottom 5 percent in the state) and develop plans to either close or reconstitute them.
6. Provide alternative routes to certification for both teachers and principals.
RTTT offered federal funding to cash-starved states struggling to deal with the most dramatic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. However, to receive the funds, states had to compete with one another to demonstrate their willingness to embrace RTTT requirements. Education policies states had been reluctant to enact and Congress had been unwilling to mandate soon became implemented through multibillion-dollar carrots coming precisely at a time when school systems most needed federal funds. Two-thirds of the states changed their laws on teacher evaluation, half the states declared student test scores would be included in teacher evaluations, and eighteen weakened tenure protections (Goldstein, 2014). While NCLB might punish schools, RTTT provided the tools to punish individual teachers and principals. Finally, it was time to assess these reform efforts and ask, “How are they working?”
While NCLB might punish schools, RTTT provided the tools to punish individual teachers and principals.
Assessment of Reform Efforts
Educators are familiar with the reform strategies that have swept over them since the passage of NCLB—launching test-based accountability that ensured every public school would eventually be designated as failing, increasing the availability of vouchers so students could abandon public schools, taking steps to make it easier to fire educators and replace them with people with no education background, insisting on teacher evaluations based on standardized test scores, reconstituting schools, closing schools, and providing merit pay. All this was done to promote the goals of ensuring U.S. schools would become the highest-performing schools in the world and improving poor and minority students’ achievement.
After many years of experience with these punitive strategies, it is fair to ask, “How has that worked for us?” In Rick’s book In Praise of American Educators: And How They Can Become Even Better (DuFour, 2015), he makes the case that these reforms failed. He is not alone in arriving at this conclusion. The National Center for Education and the Economy concludes, “There is no evidence that it (the reform agenda) is contributing anything to improved student performance, much less the improved performance of the very low-income and minority students for which it was in the first instance created” (Tucker, 2014, p. 2).
Similarly, the National Education Policy Center writes, “A sober and honest look at the effects of the No Child Left Behind Act reveals a broad consensus among researchers that this system is at best ineffective and at worst counter-productive” (Welner & Mathis, 2015, p. 7).
Not a single state came anywhere near the NCLB goals, and none of the highest-performing nations in the world were using any of the reform strategies imposed on U. S. public schools.
The number of U.S. students scoring below proficient on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam has remained flat since the early 2000s (Sparks, 2016), and other indicators of student achievement were rising faster in the decade before NCLB than the decade after its passage (FairTest, 2015). Not a single state came anywhere near the NCLB goals, and none of the highest-performing nations in the world were using any of the reform strategies imposed on U.S. public schools. The efforts of the federal government to make student achievement in the United States the highest in the world have clearly failed.
Since the founding of public schools, there has been a history of fierce independence. While many European nations settled on national curricula, the colonies were as independent about education as they were about governance. Despite calls for education reform from leaders such as Thomas Dewey in the late 19th century and A Nation at Risk in the late 20th century, education remained firmly within the control of local and state governments. The 21st century ushered in sixteen years of a dramatic increase in the influence of the national government on education policy, first with No Child Left Behind and then with Race to the Top. While there was a bipartisan support for the legislation, and a nearly universal pursuit of the dollars attached to it, the price of federal control ultimately exceeded its value. Thus, in December 2015, a bipartisan majority of Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, signed by President Obama, while Republican senators and members of congress stood behind him. This legislation appeared to turn the tide of federal control of education and a range of matters, from testing to curriculum to teacher evaluation, back to the states. In the next chapter, we consider the implications of this important law.
CHAPTER 2
The Passage of ESSA
By the time NCLB came up for reauthorization in 2007, Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who could agree on little else, were united in their dislike of the law. More and more schools were deemed failing. Conservatives were concerned about federal overreach in a matter they felt should be reserved for the states. Liberals were concerned that the NCLB provision that endorsed and funded the creation of more charter schools, many of which are run by private companies, and the inevitability of every school failing represented an attempt to abandon public education and privatize schooling. They also objected to the fact that the law was never fully funded. But despite common distaste for the law, politicians on the right and left could not agree on a plan for amending it.
As mentioned in chapter 1, the Obama administration tied approval of state petitions for waivers from NCLB sanctions to plans that reflected its agenda for education reform. This tactic only magnified the opposition of those against any attempt of the federal government to influence K–12 education.
Even though the idea of Common Core State Standards and national assessments originated with U.S. governors and chief state school administrators, conservatives disapproved of the U.S. Department of Education’s efforts to tie those initiatives to state waivers. The department’s insistence that teacher evaluation, retention, and compensation be tied to a single test that purported to demonstrate a teacher’s impact on a student’s learning was attacked by teacher unions and denounced by almost all education assessment experts.
Yet, year after year, Congress was unable to come up with an alternative to NCLB and RTTT. Democrats wanted to remove test results as the way to evaluate teacher effectiveness and guarantees that the law would protect racial minorities and children of poverty, the targets of the original ESEA in 1965. Republicans wanted states and local districts to be free to establish their own education policies with little or no federal intervention or influence (Huetteman & Rich, 2015).
Finally, in 2015, the two parties were able to agree on a compromise bill with overwhelming bipartisan support—85 to 12 in the Senate and 359 to 64 in the House of Representatives—which later became ESSA.
Democrats were pleased that states would still require
