Peter Schrag
The waivers that eight large California school districts got this week from U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan are yet another measure of the power of the federal law they tried to escape from.
The law has been cumbersome and stupid enough to prompt them — and many states — to seek better ways to pursue the same, or better, goals. But the waivers are not the end of this odyssey; they’re barely the beginning.
The law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, was commendably designed to force local districts to pay as much attention to the education of poor, minority and immigrant kids as they paid to all other children.
To do that, it required schools receiving federal Title I funds to get all major subgroups of students to proficiency in math and English — all of them — by 2014, and imposed an increasingly severe set of sometimes mindless sanctions on schools not on track to that goal.
But since it allowed states to set their own standards, it was also an invitation to dumb down tests and curricula. It led in some states to cheating by teachers and administrators and to no end of public confusion when schools were rated excellent by state criteria and failing under the federal definitions.
It was therefore no wonder why nearly all states, and now the eight big California districts (grouped