Why many high-stakes testing foes see ‘modest’ progress in No Child Left Behind rewrite
Now that U.S. lawmakers have unveiled final draft legislation rewriting the No Child Left Behind education law and are expected to vote on it soon, the question is how much will really change for public schools if it becomes law. The bill, titled the Every Student Succeeds Act, calls for a substantial shift of authority over education policy from the federal Education Department to states and districts, and explicitly limits the role the U.S. education secretary can play in local education decisions. As my colleague Emma Brown wrote here, it “attempts to thread the needle between conservatives who want to shrink the federal government’s footprint in education and civil rights advocates who worry that some states, left to their own devices, will obfuscate or ignore the poor performance of schools serving low-income and minority students.”
Here is an analysis of how the legislation, should it become the new education law of the land, will change testing policy. It was written by Monty Neill, executive director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, known as FairTest, a nonprofit organization that works to end the misuses of standardized testing and to ensure that evaluation of students, educators and schools is valid and educationally sound. Neill comes down on the side of those who think the new legislation is an improvement over the old law, but that more work would need to be done to create a more sensible accountability system for public schools.
By Monty Neill
Years overdue, Congress looks like it is about to vote on replacing the test-and-punish mandates of No Child Left Behind with a comprehensive overhaul of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The rewrite will also end the even more punitive requirements of NCLB waivers granted by the U.S. Department of Education.
From an assessment reform perspective, FairTest is convinced that the “Every Student Succeeds Act” (ESSA) now before the House and Senate, though far from perfect, improves on current testing policy. The bill significantly reduces federal accountability mandates and opens the door for states to overhaul their own assessment systems.
Failure to pass this bill in 2015 means NCLB and waivers will continue to wreak havoc for at least another several years.
The primary improvement would be in “accountability.” The unrealistic “Adequate Yearly Progress” annual test score gain requirement would be gone, as would be all the federally mandated punitive sanctions imposed on schools and teachers. States will be free to end much of the damage to educational quality and equity they built into their systems to comply with NCLB and waivers. Waivers to NCLB would end as of Aug. 1, 2016. (Other Why many high-stakes testing foes see ‘modest’ progress in No Child Left Behind rewrite - The Washington Post:
