Duncan's Legacy Undercut as ESEA Rewrite Advances
At several points during the past year, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who is stepping down Dec. 31 after nearly seven years in office, has said his biggest regret in the job is the amount of time he spent lobbying Congress early in his tenure to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
“This law’s been broken for seven to eight years,” Duncan said last month, at a forum hosted by The Wall Street Journal as a bill to overhaul the law was finally approaching the finish line. “Folks are trying to work now in a bipartisan way.”
That bipartisan process, though, has produced legislation—the Every Student Succeeds Act—that marks a big departure from what Duncan has championed, in particular from major elements of the Obama administration’s approach to K-12 accountability.
Case in point: The bill—which the House of Representatives passed on Tuesday by a 359-64 vote—would restrict or outright prohibit attempts by the secretary to dictate or influence states’ decisions about their content standards, assessments, and teacher-evaluation requirements.
Those are three areas where Duncan has been especially active, most controversially by waiving provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act, the current version of the ESEA, in return for states’ adoption of certain policy measures. Such conditional waivers originating from the education secretary would be barred by the Every Student Succeeds Act.
Two other high-profile initiatives that began on Duncan’s watch—the Race to the Top education redesign effort and a supercharged School Improvement Grant program—also failed to make the final version of the ESEA reauthorization bill.
But the legislation doesn’t represent a total washout for Duncan and his supporters: His legacy appears to fare better on less-contested policies not directly linked to accountability, such as early education.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan prepares to testify before a House Education and the Workforce Committee hearing in March, 2011.
—Tom Williams/Roll Call/AP-File
Much of the discussion about Duncan’s long-term impact, as one of the longest-serving and most influential U.S. education secretaries, may ultimately focus on the extent to which states maintain the course they agreed to in exchange for the federal money and legal flexibility Duncan has put on the table since 2009.
“I think the well has been so poisoned by his name and by a lot of these programs that they had to go away. They just had to,” said Maria Ferguson, the executive director of the Center on Education Policy, which studies federal education programs. “The big message with this bill is that states have more power.”
Who’s Accountable for What
The durability of Duncan’s influence on approaches to accountability is put to the test in various parts of the Every Student Succeeds Act, and the outlook is somewhat dim.
For example, the legislation would require states to intervene in some fashion in schools ranked in the bottom 5 percent on academic performance. That’s a vestige of the No Child Left Behind Act waivers Duncan granted. And the School Improvement Grants the federal Department of Education distributed were designed to bolster turnaround efforts in that bottom 5 percent.
But unlike with the waivers, the Every Student Succeeds Act wouldn’t allow the secretary to dictate exactly how states intervene in those schools.
There’s a similar dynamic in the reauthorization bill’s approach to accountability in general, both for schools and for teachers. And the improvement grants would be gone—instead, the share of states’ Title I aid they could use for school turnarounds would rise from 4 percent to 7 percent.
As for student assessments, annual tests in reading and math in grades 3-8 and once in high schools would remain, a holdover from both No Child Left Behind and the Obama administration’s list of priorities.
Under the bill, states would also have to intervene in some fashion in schools with relatively low graduation rates and large achievement gaps. And states would still have to submit accountability plans to the federal department for approval, starting for the 2017-18 school year.
But the next secretary’s authority over those plans wouldn’t have nearly the breadth and depth that Duncan exercised over waivers. States could set their own academic goals for schools. Specific elements of accountability under the waivers, such as permission for states to use “super-subgroups” that combine various student demographics for school and district ratings, will also fade away.
Different Vision
Arguably the two most prominent fights over Duncan’s policies are dealt with decisively in the Every Student Succeeds Act—and not in his favor.
The federal Education Department would have no ability to influence states’ adoption of standards, such as requiring a sign-off from their institutions of higher education, as Duncan has done. That provision comes after years of political backlash to the Common Core State Standards, an opposition that Duncan, however unintentionally, helped stoke. The bill would require, however, states to adopt "challenging" academic standards that align with entrance requirements for credit-bearing coursework in states' higher education systems.
That’s one of several ways in which the Every Student Succeeds Act differs markedly from the vision for ESEA reauthorization the Obama administration released in 2010 in “A Blueprint for Reform.”
And unlike the NCLB waivers, which have triggered protracted fights between states and Duncan’s Education Department, the reauthorization plan would not allow Washington to require anything (including the much-debated use of test scores) in states’ teacher-evaluation plans.
“You see an attempt not just to [reject] some of the specific policies that the Obama administration pursued through executive actions, but to rein in the ability of future secretaries to engage in similar actions going forward,” said Martin West, an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who also advised Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the chairman of the Senate education committee, on reauthorizing Duncan's Legacy Undercut as ESEA Rewrite Advances - Education Week:
