Louisiana’s NCLB Waiver, Complete with Promised CCSS and PARCC
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was not reauthorized in 2007. Nor was it reauthorized in 2008. Nor has it been reauthorized in 2014.
NCLB, with its nonsense “100 percent proficiency in reading and math by 2014,” has been lingering on legislative life support, even as 2014 is surely coming to an end.
But the beauty of NCLB for test-driven reform lay in its “waivers.”
States had to petition USDOE for permission to be released from the idiotic “100 percent proficiency” goal noted above.
In February 2012, Louisiana State Superintendent John White submitted this NCLB waiver application to USDOE. In May 2012, the waiver was approved.
(For other Louisiana NCLB docs, click here.)
As part of Louisiana’s NCLB waiver deal, White assures USDOE that Louisiana will forge ahead with both the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) assessments.
My favorite part is the guarantee of “overwhelming support from the public and from educators” in July 2010, when the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) adopted CCSS.
He doesn’t mention that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and former State Superintendent Paul Pastorek signed the CCSS MOU in May 2009 and that they could not garner support for CCSS from the majority of school districts (only 26 out of 69 wanted CCSS in 2010).
In 2012, as part of a deal to remove Louisiana from life-support “100 percent Louisiana’s NCLB Waiver, Complete with Promised CCSS and PARCC | deutsch29: