The Times They are a-Changin'
That month saw the launch of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, a national campaign with the mission of calling attention to the many impediments posed by poverty to student's achievement and school success. It also marked the emphatic establishment of an opposing camp, which rejected the proposition that poverty-related impediments drove achievement gaps, and that saw bad teaching and weak accountability as the root problem. Indeed, "no excuses" was the banner under which they began to fly.
In the years that followed, the no excuses camp notched notable victories, and its policy priorities were widely adopted at the federal and state levels. While US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was the only notable signatory to both the BBA and opposing education reform platforms, it quickly became clear that he leaned toward the latter. His signature federal policy initiative, Race to the Top, required states to tie teacher evaluations to students' test scores on standardized tests and to categorize and issue consequences for schools based on those scores. And when he could not persuade Congress to reauthorize the long-overdue Elementary and Secondary Education Act, he offered states waivers to the then-requirements under No Child Left Behind on the condition that they enact similar policies. At the state level, affiliates of national groups like Students First, led by no-excuses champion Michelle Rhee, pushed similar policies.
At the same time, opposition to these policies began to grow. Proponents of BBA, who understood that these policies did not, in fact, address the root causes of problems in schools serving disadvantaged students, were joined by others who saw the damage the policies were doing in their schools and communities. The Times They are a-Changin':
