Congress Frees Public Schools From Federal Test & Punish – Where’s the Catch?
Let’s say you were kidnapped and kept in a small basement room where you were routinely beaten and starved.
Then after years of this treatment, your captors brought in a massage table and offered you a filet mignon after your spa treatment.
You’d be more than a little bit confused.
That’s the position of parents, students and teachers today.
After almost two decades of punishing public schools and their students for low test scores, Congress suddenly decides to step back and leave it to the states!?
Until now the federal government had mandated increasing high stakes standardized tests and forcing schools that don’t meet a certain threshold to be stripped of their school boards, turned into charters or simply closed. Until now, the federal government coerced states to enact every fly-by-night corporate education reform from Common Core to Teach for America to evaluating teachers based on student test scores.
First, in 2015 lawmakers passed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), a reauthorization of federal K-12 education policy that (depending on how you interpret it) limited federal power over public schools. However, the Obama administration offered guidelines that put much of that federal power back in place.
Now both the House and Senate have voted to repeal those Obama administration guidelines in favor of… well… some other interpretation.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee), chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Congress Frees Public Schools From Federal Test & Punish – Where’s the Catch? | gadflyonthewallblog:
