Controversy over Federal NCLB Waivers Creates Opening for Pressure Against Test-and-Punish
The shifting of public opinion sometimes happens while we aren’t paying attention, and then it becomes clear that something has changed. Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education, recently bowed to growing pressure against his policies when he told states they can delay for another year the requirement that they evaluate teachers based on students’ test results.
A couple of weeks ago Motoko Rich in the NY Times presented the history of the use of students’ scores for evaluating teachers: “Over the past four years, close to 40 states have adopted laws that tie teacher evaluations in part to the performance of their students on standardized tests… These laws were adopted in response to conditions set by the Education Department in the waivers it granted from the No Child Left Behind law, which governs what states must do to receive federal education dollars. The test-based teacher evaluations were also included as conditions of Race to the Top grants that have been given to states by the Obama administration.”
But recently controversy in several states about whether the U.S. Department of Education will renew or revoke the waivers from ill-conceived mechanisms of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) have drawn media attention to NCLB’s misguided policies, along with problems in what the waivers required states to do, and inconsistencies in the way Arne Duncan’s Department of Education is managing the waiver renewal process.
First came the extraordinary early August letter sent to all parents in Vermont by the state’s Secretary of Education, Rebecca Holcombe. Vermont is one of a handful of states that never applied for a waiver. That means NCLB is still operating in Vermont, and Holcombe sent the letter required by the law to all parents whose children attend schools considered “failing” by NCLB’s Adequate Yearly Progress mechanism. The problem is that, because NCLB required Controversy over Federal NCLB Waivers Creates Opening for Pressure Against Test-and-Punish | janresseger: