Why Every Student Will NOT Succeed With the New Education Law
Last week, after a seven-year delay, Congress overwhelmingly voted, and the president signed, to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, dubbed No Child Left Behind in 2002, and now called the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). This new law fixes some problems but creates others, especially for children who struggle the most.
The new law ends the NCLB requirement that states look almost exclusively at test scores to determine whether and how to reward or sanction schools, and also ends the Race To The Top requirement that states use tests that are linked to the Common Core State Standards in order to evaluate and reward or punish not only students and schools, but also teachers. This is good news, because the research clearly shows how an obsession with raising test scores leads to “teaching to the test,” narrowing and dumbing-down what we teach, especially for struggling students who are in most need of a richer and more rigorous curriculum. Assessment experts have long argued that using test scores for such decision making lacks validity and reliability, and we should stop doing so.
But we are not, and the bad news is that this new law still presumes that testing is the magic bullet. Students will continue to be tested annually in grades 3-8 and at least once in high school, and those test scores must figure prominently in how states evaluate school performance. Advocates of the new law celebrate the shifting of authority from the feds to the states to determine what the tests will consist of, how those scores will factor into the evaluations, and what rewards or sanctions will follow. But without a sound framework to guide this work, there is no evidence that the states will come up with strategies better than before.
We should remember that this law initially passed in 1965, in the height of the Civil Rights Movement, as a way to leverage federal funding in order to push states to better serve those students and communities who were being failed by our schools. This is one reason why many of the national civil rights groups have expressed deep concerns about ESSA and the weakening of the federal government in its ability to advocate for the students who struggle the most.
There are additional provisions that will shrink the capacity of public schools to educate all children.
First, vast amounts of funding will divert from neighborhood public schools to private, religious, and charter schools. States will be required to set aside funding to support students in private and religious schools, while the federal government will spend hundreds of millions annually to support charter school expansion. Thomas Jefferson put
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