CURMUDGUCATION: ESSA Will Not Solve Anything

CURMUDGUCATION: ESSA Will Not Solve Anything:

ESSA Will Not Solve Anything

It's not that I don't appreciate the good parts or hate the bad parts. I'm not delighted to see social impact bonds tossed into the mix, nor am I pleased to see the doors opened here and there for performance based education. I take a bit of pleasure in seeing the ways in which the bill makes extra effort to spank the secretary of education (who has been weirdly trying to save face by repeatedly saying, "Oh yeah, this is what we wanted all along"), and I'm quite happy with the various piecesparts that defang the Big Standardized Test. It is a mixed bag, a shift of inches in mostly the right direction kind of. I think Jeff Bryant said it best with, "Go Ahead, Pass Every Student Succeeds Act, But Don't Celebrate It."

Because here's the problem. The ESSA won't actually solve a thing.

Yes, state leaders may very well say, "Thank God! Let's scrap the Common Core and replace them with real standards that we develop ourselves, and let's work up our own Big Standardized Test and let's design a way to evaluate teachers and public schools that uses authentic markers of excellence and not a bunch of BS Test baloney and let's even allow parents to opt out of testing and if the feds don't like it, they can try to sort it out in a courtroom. Screw 'em."

Or.

Or state leaders may say, "You know, all this stuff that we had to do under the Obama-Duncan-Bush-Page administrations is just fine with us, and it took a lot of time and money to get it all up and running, and some nice lobbyists tell us that it's all working great, so we're actually not going to change a single solitary thing."

Some state leaders might say, "We have a vision for truly excellent public schools in our state. Now that tests can be decoupled from the high stakes, we will embrace systems for evaluating our students, teachers and schools that support and reveal their many forms of excellence, building up a state system of education of which we are justly and deeply proud."

But state leaders might also say, "We actually share the vision of Arne Duncan and of Bill Gates and of our very most excellent good charter-operating friends over with the giant piles of money. We are pretty sure that our public schools suck with the suckage of a thousand black holes, and we look CURMUDGUCATION: ESSA Will Not Solve Anything: