White House backtracks on changes to No Child Left Behind
States will not have to meet October 2015 deadline to show low-income students are not taught by bad teachers
The Department of Education has abandoned a three-month-old plan that would have forced schools exempt from the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act to prove by October 2015 that their poor and minority students are not disproportionately taught by the lowest-performing teachers.
In a letter Thursday, Assistant Secretary of Education Deborah Delisle told state schools chiefs that the Department of Education decided to amend the waiver extension process for any state seeking an exemption from the law, rolling back the requirements aimed to ensure equal access to the best teachers.
States will still be required to evaluate the effectiveness of each school based on results from standardized test scores, rewarding high-scoring schools and penalizing schools that do not meet the mark — but without a firm timeline set, which critics say enables schools to ignore NCLB’s requirements.
The change reverses a deadline set by the department just three months ago.
Delisle said the decision to drop the deadline comes after “input from a variety of stakeholders,” but doesn’t specify what the input was or who the stakeholders were.
Education advocates, however, say the Obama administration is effectively turning its back on a