What Did Arne Duncan Just Do to Washington State?
Last Thursday, the U.S. Department of Education revoked Washington state’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waiver. What does this mean and does it matter?
In 2011, just before he created waivers from the most onerous consequences of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), federal Education Secretary Arne Duncan dismissed NCLB in one short piece of Congressional testimony: “We should get out of the business of labeling schools as failures and create a new law that is fair and flexible, and focused on the schools and students most at risk.” The National Research Council agrees: “Test-based incentive programs… have not increased student achievement enough to bring the United States close to the levels of the highest achieving countries.” It is now a truth universally acknowledged that NCLB didn’t get our schools to the goals we were holding them accountable for.
The law is still with us, however, because Congress cannot agree even on how to talk about a long-overdue reauthorization, and Arne Duncan’s waivers are merely a flimsy patch on a very bad problem. More important, the law’s philosophy is very much still with us because mandatory standardized tests, standards-based curriculum, punishments for schools whose students are low-scoring, and incorporation of students’ test scores in the evaluation of teachers are embedded into the requirements set by Duncan’s Department of Education for states to apply for a waiver. The education policies of President Barack Obama’s administration closely resemble the policies of President George W. Bush’s administration. Applying for Duncan’s waivers (along with other competitive programs like Race to the Top) has forced states to embed federal test-and-punish accountability into state by state legislation, synchronizing federal and state laws to impose test-based accountability for schools.
To think a little more deeply about the meaning of our society’s infatuation with test-and-punish accountability, it is fascinating to go back to some of the reams of criticism in the ten years between the time President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act in January of 2002 and the development of the waivers the Department of Education began What Did Arne Duncan Just Do to Washington State? | janresseger:
