States have long complained that the federal No Child Left Behind [NCLB] education law was too “top-down” and rigid for them to meet its strict criteria. Last week, President Barack Obama provided modest relief, announcing he would allow states to seek waivers from the law’s most stringent provisions. But while a host of educators and lawmakers from both parties hailed the proposals, the president also made it clear those waivers would come at a price.
“This does not mean that states will be able to lower their standards or escape accountability,” the president said in his presentation at the White House last Friday. “If states want more flexibility, they’re going to have to set higher standards, more honest standards that prove they’re serious about meeting them.”
The impetus for the change was growing concern among states over an NCLB requirement that all U.S. fourth-graders be proficient in math and reading by January 2014, a deadline the vast majority of states are poised to miss. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 80 percent of the nation’s 100,000 public schools are unlikely to meet those standards in the prescribed timeframe, putting them in danger of being deemed “failing.” Schools with that designation would face severe sanctions, including closure, wholesale staff firings or mandatory conversion to a charter program.
That concern was only one of many state lawmakers and education officials have had with the law since its inception in 2002. While many endorse the law’s mandate for making school’s accountable for ensuring that all students — particularly in low income areas — are given the best education possible, even its supporters have blanched over its heavy emphasis on using test scores as the chief evaluation tool. Critics contend that this requirement forces teachers to “teach to the test” instead of engaging students in broad learning efforts. The critics contend that the overall impact of NCLB has lowered educational standards.
States are particularly disturbed by the law’s overarching federal role in setting education standards.
“Any kind of ‘top-down’ directive is hard for states to accept,” says former California Assemblyman Roger Niello, a Republican who termed out in 2010. “It’s tough for policies devised at 40,000 feet to apply logically to what’s happening at ground level.”
States have also routinely chafed at what they see as insufficient federal funding to pay for the results the law mandates. In February 2010, a National Conference of State Legislatures report, “Education at a Crossroads: A New Direction for Federal and State Education Policy,” accused federal education leaders of “overemphasizing compliance with federal process requirements and underemphasizing results,” resulting in a federal influence that had become “grossly disproportionate to its contribution to the K-12 endeavor.”
Initially authorized for only five years, NCLB has been waiting on Congressional reauthorization since 2007. Many critics of the law and even some of its supporters hoped that states would be given a freer hand. Although a bipartisan Congressional committee has theoretically mulled such a makeover, it has failed to produce a solution. With both parties maneuvering for advantage in a gridlocked Congress, few expect an update of NCLB to come before the 2012 presidential election. This lack of progress prompted President Obama to indicate in August that he was prepared on his own to allow states more flexibility.
Obama, however, failed to provide details of what this new flexibility would entail. In an August 23rd letter to the president, California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson urged him to quickly reveal the specifics, saying, “Now four years overdue for Congressional reauthorization, flexibility from the flawed NCLB policy is urgent and necessary. Relief is needed immediately before more schools suffer for another school year under inappropriate labels and ineffective interventions.”
Exactly one month later, the president announced the changes to NCLB, which he defended conceptually while acknowledging that it had failed to live up to its promise. “The goals behind No Child Left Behind were admirable … but experience has taught us that in its implementation, [it] had some serious flaws that are hurting our children,” the president said in a speech from the White House. “Congress has not been able to fix these flaws so far … So I will.”
That fix offers states waivers that return to them control over their accountability and improvement standards. But the president and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan also laid out three specific criteria states must meet to get this freedom, including adopting rigorous standards that ensure students are “college- and career-ready” when leaving high school. States must also develop strategies for improving the lowest-performing schools, with those in the bottom 5 percent still facing the same potential repercussions as under the current NCLB law. School districts would also have to develop strategies for improving another 10 percent of low-performing schools. Finally, states must create tough basic standards for evaluating teachers and principals. Those standards must include some kind of gauge of student progress, and must also offer teachers and administrators feedback to help them improve.
Duncan, who last month called NCLB “an impediment that’s getting in the way as a disincentive for the great work states are doing,” said waivers would alleviate many of the negative issues NCLB’s critics have with the law. Reviews elsewhere were more mixed.
National Education Association president Dennis Van Roekel came down firmly in support of the measure, calling it a “welcome step forward” that would benefit local communities.
“Educators want commonsense measures of student progress, freedom to implement local ideas, respect for their judgment and the right to be a part of critical decisions,” Van Roekel said in a statement. “This plan delivers.”
National PTA President, Betsy Landers echoed Roekel, saying the proposal “promotes true partnership and collaborative decision-making in education reform; encouraging states and districts to engage with all stakeholders, including parents, in developing state plans and turning around failing schools.”
Others were equally adamant in their disappointment. In a statement, California Teachers Association president Dean E. Vogel, an NEA affiliate with 325,000 members, panned the waiver proposal, which he said merely “swaps one federal, top-down mandate for another.” Vogel also accused the plan of holding “states and local schools hostage to the same unproven reforms of the Race to the Top competition,” President Obama’s own signature education reform effort.
Partisan politics also came into play, as some Congressional Republicans labeled the new program a power grab. Rep. John Kline (R-Minnesota), Chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, which is working on its own NCLB overhaul, accused the president of “exercising an authority and power he doesn’t have.” Kline also said it was “very feasible” that his committee will have its long-awaited proposal ready later this year.
California’s Torlakson also expressed displeasure with the plan, issuing a statement that it could potentially cost the Golden State — which federal education officials estimate has over 4,500 potentially failing schools — billions of dollars to implement. Those costs would include developing an infrastructure for conducting formal teacher evaluations, which the state currently does not do. States could also potentially be on the hook for paying for upgrading underperforming schools, an almost impossible challenge given the state’s lingering economic woes.
In an interview, Torlakson spokesperson Paul Hefner said his office is still pouring over the waiver requirements to see how they will ultimately impact the state.
“The jury is definitely still out on how this will work,” he said. “There is a long list of [potential costs], depending on how much is required for a waiver.”
According to the Center on Education Policy, at least a dozen states have already sought to make changes to their accountability programs (see Bird’s eye view). Shortly after the president’s announcement, at least three others — Oregon, Connecticut and New Mexico — indicated they will do so as soon as possible. It is expected that most other states will eventually follow suit.
But while many observers might see the waivers as a panacea for their problems with NCLB, Amy Wilkins, Vice President for Government Affairs at Education Trust, a Washington D.C. education advocacy group, cautions that states will actually now be under even greater pressure to improve their school systems.
“States have been saying for almost a decade now that ‘if it weren’t for this part or that part of NCLB, we could do a lot better job,'” Wilkins said in an interview. “‘We could serve our students better, we could get higher levels of achievement and we could turn these schools around much better and much faster.’ In a way, these waivers take up that challenge. The federal government is saying, ‘Okay, if you think you can do it better, here’s your chance.'”
“It’s stand and deliver time for states,” Wilkins adds. “If they really do know best, it’s time for them to show it.”
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