President Obama announced the long-anticipated waiver policy for No Child Left Behind on Friday. If you’re not an education policy wonk/geek: The No Child Left Behind law requires that all schools demonstrate that 100% of their students are meeting state standards by 2014, or else the schools will be considered to be failing. Besides the label, there are various consequences that can come from this label, including loss of funds or a requirement for administrative and staff shakeups. So no one wants to be labeled as failing. States have been setting targets each year for how many students should be meeting the standards. As we get closer to 2014, those targets are rising quickly. For example, in Pennsylvania this year, a high school must have about 80% of its 11th graders score “Proficient†or “Advanced†on our state standardized test, the PSSA. Next year, the target goes to roughly 90%. The year after that, it’s 100%. Very few schools are hitting that 90%-100% range, so education officials in states all over the country have been crying out that the targets need to be revised.
The standard way to do that would be for Congress to revise the law. NCLB is not actually a brand-new law that was signed in 2002. It’s a renewal of the Elemental and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (and a package of amendments to other laws), which established a lot of the policies through which the federal government provides funding to states and school districts. The ESEA needs to be reauthorized every five years, and that reauthorization is an opportunity for Congress to make significant changes in education if it sees fit to do so. The ESEA came up for renewal in 2007, but Congress has not been able to pass a new version of the law. So the initial targets are still in place.
The law does give the Secretary of Education the authority to issue waivers to states from the law’s requirements. It does not say on what basis those waivers should be given. So the Obama Administration, especially Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, has been saying for months that if Congress did not pass a revision of the law, the Department of Education would start issuing waivers to states that met certain criteria. Republicans in Congress, and plenty of people of every ideological persuasion outside of Congress, have claimed that this is an overreach – the president should not be able to tell states that they don’t have to follow a federal law because they’re doing something that he likes better. Obama has not been deterred, and on Friday he announced that states could begin applying for the waivers.
I have to say that I do not have the principled objection to this executive action that others in the education community do. If Congress didn’t want these waivers to be given, they could have left the waiver power out of the 2002 legislation. If Congress wanted to set the terms under which the law would be revised, they have had almost five years to do so. It’s the role of the executive branch to figure out the best way to implement the laws passed by Congress, and that often requires the executive branch to determine certain rules, regulations, and requirements. If we as voters don’t like the way that a president uses that power, it’s our job to vote him (or someday her) out of office.
But while I think that the Obama Administration is right to take some action on the question of NCLB requirements, I am leery of the specific requirements that it is setting for states to get the waivers. I do not know what details are being given to education officials, and all that I have to go by are the president’s speech on Friday and the fact sheet issued by the White House. They emphasize that in order to get the waivers, states must show that they are developing “college and career ready standards and assessments,†systems of “differentiated recognition, accountability and support†and new methods of “evaluating and supporting teacher and principal effectiveness.†In that sea of buzzwords, there’s a lot of potential for bad ideas.
I have been crabby about the ways that education standards and objectives are phrased for a long time, but rather than get into detail, let’s jut note that “citizenship-ready†isn’t in there anywhere. You can get a degree or work at a job without having the skills and the understanding to be a good citizen. But too often we don’t write our standards in ways that point to what we need to build our communities.
The recognition, accountability and support measures are incredibly vague, but I assume that the districts and states that are going to have to write these policies know what the administration has in mind. From the fact sheet, it looks like the system is supposed to take students’ income level into account somehow, which could be a good thing depending on how it’s implemented.
And then we get to evaluating teacher effectiveness. The headline controversy there, as it should be, is going to be on the use of standardized test scores to determine who the good teachers are. Based on what the Obama Administration has done with the Race to the Top program, I am not hugely optimistic on that score. I also worry about whether we have enough consensus on the definition of “good teaching†to make such evaluations possible. In my more optimistic moments, I think that good teaching is something that can be recognized by people who take the time to observe a teacher and group of students over a sustained period of time, And then my pessimism wonders how we are going to find the time to do that when so many schools are stretched to their limits because of budget cuts and other factors.
The devil is in the details, and we don’t have many of those yet. I fear that we are at the beginning of another well-intentioned misstep in education policy, but I dearly hope that I am wrong.