Every Student Succeeds Act
A new national education law—the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)—will be signed into law by President Obama this week, setting a new course for our schools.
It’s sobering to think—painful, actually—that a U.S. high school student graduating in the spring of 2016 would have spent his or her entire k-12 school career under No Child Left Behind. Ending this woeful, 14-year chapter in U.S. education history has been a long time coming, but we finally got there. The NCLB era has officially come to a close!
First, a big thank you goes out to our elected representatives in Congress for getting the job done, but let’s be clear:Ending NCLB would never have happened without the inspiring and herculean efforts of educators across the country. As the real experts, they knew before anyone else that NCLB and its corrupting, excessive testing culture of blame and punish was a disaster for our students. Parents jumped on board, but politicians—holding on too tightly to misconceived notions of “accountability”—were slow to come around. But the evidence that NCLB was broken was overwhelming and getting rid of it became practically the only thing Republicans, Democrats, and Independents agreed on.
So everyone knew the law wasn’t working, but what would take its place? Or would Congress keep kicking the can down the road? This past year, educators were relentless in lobbying and persuading their representatives to actually take action and create a new and better ESEA. And guess what? They listened.
Is the Every Student Succeeds Act perfect? No; no law ever is. But it represents a historic step, not only because it closes the NCLB era, but because it also kickstarts the original ESEA’s commitment to providing more opportunity for all students.
Throughout this long reauthorization process, educators focused on three priorities: 1) including student and school supports in state accountability; 2) reducing the amount of standardized testing in schools and decoupling high-Every Student Succeeds Act - Lily's Blackboard:
