Putting Lipstick on the Platform Pig
Even though ESSA continues annual testing with a mandated 95 percent participation rate requirement, thus killing any opt out option by parents, and even though ESSA guarantees huge new grants for more "no excuses" corporate charter schools that will replace the bottom 5 percent of low-scoring schools each year, and even though ESSA further weakens teacher education programs, and even though ESSA legitimizes "states rights" education policy, thus providing free rein for states, with ALEC's help, to devise any draconian accountability systems without federal oversight, even with all this, AFT, NEA, and NPE declared ESSA a grand success for children, parents, and teachers. "Better than I could have imagined," Ravitch croaked in 2015.
Now that ESEA is federal law, Weingarten and other Clintonites want to pretend that all the requirements in ESSA that they sold to teachers and parents last year do not exist. In fact, as reported below by Ed Week, which continues the meme that the Clinton platform is a departure from Obama ed policies, the platform Schools Matter: Putting Lipstick on the Platform Pig: