Tough-Minded Federal Accountability Is Dead: What Will the States Do Now?
The age of federally driven school accountability is now dead. Only traces of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind legislation, the Obama administration's signature education program Race to the Top and the waivers from No Child Left Behind that came with it are left. In their place is the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), a new bipartisan agreement to roll back what everyone, in time, came to perceive as an overbearing and counterproductive role for the federal government in education.
In this blog I will share my interpretation of the events that led to the passage of No Child Left Behind and its progeny, the great shrinking of the federal role we have just seen and the nature of the challenge ahead. In several blogs that follow, I will put forward the outlines of a plan for states that wish to take advantage of their new freedom to build a state education system that is competitive with the best education systems in the world.
The new federal education law largely restores the status quo ante, the world before No Child Left Behind. The nation has spent 15 years going down a blind alley, while more and more countries' education systems have been successfully redesigned to outperform ours, some by very wide margins.
At the time No Child Left Behind was passed, the federal role in education had been largely focused for 35 years on improving the education of the nation's disadvantaged children. As the years went by, there was strong bipartisan support for this program. Early on in that history, the public and policy makers expressed a lot of confidence in the nation's educators, and saw the problem largely in terms of lack of resources for disadvantaged students. They were inclined to trust professional educators' judgment as to how best to use the increased funds.
But, over the years, that confidence eroded. It started with A Nation at Risk, the Reagan administration report that portrayed the nation's schools as having fallen a long way from some standard they had formerly met. That charge was false. But, by 2000, the year No Child Left Behind was passed, the cost of educating an average student in the nation's schools had more than doubled in the preceding 20 years after accounting for inflation, an enormous increase. But the performance of the nation's high school students had not changed at all. Where had all the money gone? The new President, George W. Bush, charged educators with embracing the "soft bigotry of low expectations," saying, in effect, that they had accepted the money but had never actually expected low-income, minority and handicapped students to perform much better. The Democrats agreed. Both parties were angry. The nation had lost confidence in its educators. Their solution was to hold them strictly accountable for the results of their work. The age of tough-minded accountability had begun with a vengeance.
The Bush administration tried to hold the schools accountable by imposing tough consequences for whole faculties if the schools did not meet expectations. The Bush administration's goal of having every student proficient by 2014 was a fantasy and everyone knew it. As the deadline approached, entire states were populated with schools deemed failing. No Child Left Behind had become politically untenable.
Enter the Obama administration, which used the impending implosion to replace the discredited Tough-Minded Federal Accountability Is Dead: What Will the States Do Now? - Top Performers - Education Week:
