The House-Senate conference committee overwhelmingly (39-1) endorsed an overhaul of the No Child Left Behind, which was the latest (and worst) revision of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The new ESEA, which still must be approved by both houses of Congress, is called the Every Student Succeeds Act.
The ESSA limits the federal role, a direct rebuke to Arne Duncan’s belief that he was the national superintendent of schools. The law retains a large chunk of George W. Bush’s legacy, including annual testing, a practice not found in any high-performing nation. The law no longer requires teacher evaluation by test scores.
The Republicans wanted to restore state and local control, while the Democrats ironically defended Bush’s accountability emphasis. The outcome is a compromise.
Most everyone seems to have forgotten that the original purpose of ESEA was equity for the neediest students, meaning federal dollars to high-poverty schools. Don’t you long for the day when laws were given descriptive titles, rather than aspirational ones? “Every Student Succeeds” is the flip side of “No Child Left Behind.” What was wrong with “the Elementary and Secondary Education Act”?
I don’t want to sound cynical, but I’m prepared to wager any sum that 7 years, 10 years, or 15 years from now, no one will say that every student is now succeeding. So long as nearly a quarter of our nation’s children live in poverty, “success” will remain elusive. So long as experienced teachers are underpaid and disrespected, so long as the anti-teacher lobby files lawsuits to strip teachers of their rights, “success”will escape our grasp. So long as jobs continue to be outsourced and eliminated by technology, we must continue to worry about whether and how young people will be motivated to “succeed.”
But for the moment, let’s celebrate the demise of a terrible law that saw punishment as the federal strategy for school reform. Let’s celebrate that no future Secretary of Education will have the power to impose his or her flawed ideas on every public school and teacher in the nation. Let’s thank Senator Lamar Alexander and Senator Patty Murray for finally ending a failed and punitive law.
I AM cynical. Not only the horrific attacks on public schools but that is only a portion of the ignorant, political gamesmanship that makes the nation AND the world a VERY scary place for my children and grandchildren.
I am holding my breath. I am rather cynical of Every Student Succeeds, because too many laws lablelled from Congress ends up to mean exactly 180 degrees the opposite.This is marketing talk.
Yes, and look who is applauding this:
http://news.yahoo.com/inacol-applauds-u-congress-esea-conference-committee-vote-222200425.html
While I agree that NCLB was a horrible, punitive law, I do not see the new version in that much of a different light. Special needs students are still set up to fail because testing MUST be at grade level, not developmental level. So, a 5th grader who reads at a first grade level must take the 5th grade assessment. This means that a child who already struggles with learning will be more convinced that he is “stupid” and a “failure”. IEP goals must now be aligned with the standards. Gone are the days of meeting a special needs child where he is and the goal is growth. Therefore, IMHO, this new law is just as abusive in its own way.
Click to access guidance-on-fape-11-17-2015.pdf
You give an educational policy maker a law, he’ll punish you and your students today.
If you give an educational policy maker data, then he can fish for new ways to punish you and your students in the future.
MonicaNY … don’t you “love it”… we are always told to “meet the kids where they are at” and to “differentiate” and must continually document how we are doing this and YET WHEN IT COMES TO THESE ABSURD TESTS… all students must be tested at grade level and be given a cookie cutter test! They hypocrisy defies logic!
“Every Pol Accedes Act”
Every pol accedes
To special interest bucks
An action that impedes
The good for rest of us
While we won’t miss NCLB, this reauthorization has destroyed public education and the civil rights of every school age child and it sickens me.
I think the practical effect of this will be vast stretches of the country will now have a very conservative version of the same ed reform “movement” policies we’ve had for 15 years, because Democrats have so little power or influence at the state level.
It really marginalizes “liberal” ed reformers in most of the country and they become all but irrelevant as far as what most public school students will experience on the ground. I can predict what happens to those 5% of schools that will be designated as “failing” in my state- they’ll be replaced with school contractors.
I’m glad my youngest is in 7th grade and close to done. I don’t look forward to public schools becoming a bundle of commercial services we all can purchase with our $5000 voucher. I think we’ll deeply regret that. It’s not even a good deal compared to what we have now. In 20 years when public schools are gone President Obama and Congressional Democrats will have played a huge role in making that happen. It could not have happened without them. It really rankles because so few of them even use public schools. They’re giving away something they never valued, which is just way too easy.
Chiara… love the phrase (albeit a tragic insight), “they are giving away something they never valued” when you refer to public schools and politicians. Maybe they should have their freedom taken away (aka jail time to pay for all the destruction of lives of our nation’s children). Maybe then they will learn the meaning of “VALUE”!
I don’t see how this is going to affect my kids’ lives at all. So I’m not sure what to celebrate.
I agree. I am afraid the portability aspect of the law will further direct funds to charter schools instead of sending it to the poorest students for whom it is intended.
Plus, in New York State, there’s rumblings of something in effect of APPR being scrapped for a couple years. Please read this:
http://www.newsday.com/opinion/columnists/lane-filler/union-poised-to-win-new-york-s-fight-over-teacher-evaluations-1.11139488
Kick the can down the road a few years, the apparatus stays in place. The tests stay in place, the curriculum gets more tightly aligned, and as teachers retire, you have that many fewer teachers with any memory of a different way to teach.
FLERP!: IMHO, you have succinctly stated in a compelling way how the leaders of the self-styled “education reform” movement are trying to create a new normal.
How important is it to them to engage in a massive re-education campaign in order to create an acceptance of their parallel, but very different, education systems, one for THEIR OWN CHILDREN and the other[s] for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN? And to make, as far as humanly possible, their vision the only one available?
“I didn’t know I was a slave until I found out I couldn’t do the things I wanted.”
In rheephorm practice, they want to head off the formation of anyone like a Frederick Douglass so the questions and subsequent resistance won’t even appear.
Thank you for a few words that said so very much.
😎
I just think that’s how this will play out. But I don’t see the process I described as part of an ed reform master plan. Putting the APPR on hold is just a defensive reaction to political pressure. Surely neither Cuomo nor the Regents had “suspend the implementation of the APPR” in the original playbook.
I am just a sample of one person, but I have recently grown very dark about the elementary school my son attends, and my daughter attended before him. We (my wife and I) used to love the school. But it’s not the same place anymore. When my daughter started there, there were many more veteran teachers. Back then, I was like many parents are with their first child: worried, critical, stupid. But I would come out of parent teacher conferences feeling good. I was confident that the vets understood child development. They weren’t defensive. Most important, I saw that they really knew my daughter, and *liked* her. I would come out of parent-teacher conferences wanting to be a better parent.
The last few years are different. I go to parent-teacher conferences and get insulted to my face by 20-somethings who are somehow unaware of how close I am to strangling them. They don’t seem to know much about children and they don’t seem to particularly care for them. They’re defensive and seem concerned mainly with maintaining order. They don’t let children go to the bathroom. They give homework assignments that are complete gibberish and are usually plagiarized wholesale from other teachers’ web sites. They will tell parents with multiple college degrees, whose parents and sometimes grandparents were college-educated, that they need to be concerned about their child’s progress toward college-readiness. They swallow it all whole and spit it back up and that’s the job.
But hey, that’s just me.
I’ve heard the rumblings but had not seen anything substantive. This will get the heavy hearts club through the next election and buy them (and Hilary) some time before they double down on APPR after the election.
Did Democrats even bother to argue for anything outside testing mandates? They announced early on that the only thing they planned on fighting for was standardized testing. Since it was blatantly obvious from the outset that they were getting testing, are they claiming that as a “win”? I hope not. Testing was always going to be in there. The hearings were political cover. I felt bad that they wasted the time of the teachers who traveled all that way to testify, frankly.
Exactly right, Chiara, in this post here and in the one just above. This is no improvement, this bogus Every Student Succeeds. It frees conservative states and “liberal” ones like NY whose Gov. Cuomo is owned by the billionaires on Wall St., to mutilate public education through testing and privatization. We have always needed the Feds as an agent to step in when local racists abused authority in the schools. But, K-12 was taken off the table by renegade union leaders Randi and Lily who forced Hillary down our throats without any policy commitments from H on how to stop this ugly private war on public schools. Once Randi and Lily threw K-12 and its 4 mil teachers and 5o mil students under the bus, Hillary and Dems had no reason to debate and address it. This is the spectacular service Randi and Lily performed for H and the Dems at the expense of their union members and our public schools.
Ira… I GET SO ENRAGED when the union leaders rush to support candidates supposedly on teachers’ behalf … it disgusts me because there is absolutely no REAL decision-making from teachers on the support of candidates and the self-serving actions of union leadership are quite transparent.
Why celebrate more testing? Why celebrate more of the same? I will never applaud neoliberals like Patty Murphy and their sell out to Wall Street. I am beyond disgusted and beyond hope.
“What was wrong with the “Elementary and Secondary Education Act?”
That’s an easy one: it wasn’t sufficiently Orwellian.
After posting my observation above
I just found the following. Not necessarily pertinent to the gist of the NCLB discussion but intriguing nonetheless.
School textbooks in Texas have come under heavy criticism in recent years, most notably for teaching that slavery was a “side issue” to the Civil War, downplaying evolution while adding “creationism” to science textbooks and referring to African slaves brought to America as “immigrant workers.”
After public outcry, the Texas State Board of Education considered allowing a group of university professors to do an academic review of the textbooks. Yesterday the Board of Education rejected the proposal, voting 8-7 with all Republicans on the board voting against the proposal. From Board vice chairman Thomas Ratliff, R-Mount Pleasant:
Will educators still join with parents to oppose standardized testing if it is not used to evaluate them? Hope so.
Some of us will — I will. Most of us are parents too, and as teachers, we see the damage that worshipping the standardized testing gods does to children in schools every day — we don’t want that for our children. Neither does Obama, or Duncan, or the other “ed reformers” — they put all their own kids in private schools.
“No Pol Left Behind”
No Pol Left Behind
Not Hillary nor Bernie
The voting you will find
Is testing till the gurney
This is the big debate that needs to happen from the halls of congress all the way down to school boards. We used to fund schools to create equity of opportunity. Now we are obsessed with equal outcomes. That means test scores and standardization. Even some well meaning people on the local level spew this garbage.
“But for the moment, let’s celebrate the demise of a terrible law that saw punishment as the federal strategy for school reform.”
I don’t often disagree with Diane but in this case I do. States like Colorado and districts like Denver who already have implemented the awful mandates of nclb and rttt – test and punish – will see little difference from this new iteration. And this new legislation will allow DINOs like colorados Senator Bennet to run around claiming he has fought for less testing when the reality is the only place that has happened in this state is at the high school level where huge numbers of students already opted out. And the 50% teacher evaluations based on test scores are still in place, so I do not think much will change in states like ours where the “reform” agenda is already in state statute. I think this new law is a case of way too little.
Agree
“I do not think much will change in states like ours where the “reform” agenda is already in state statute.”
State statutes do not vanish. The legacy infection is deep. ALEC and Republicans win ground.
Call your U.S. Congress reps. & senators NOW! The “Pay for Success” provision MUST be stricken from ESEA. It will mean a death knell to special education, & gen. ed. classrooms filled with underserved students, causing the ultimate educational disruption (although, of course, reformers call it “creative” disruption).
If you don’t know what this is, go to Fred Klonsky’s Blog & read the many recent postings
of Bev Johns, a true Education Hero & internationally recognized sp.ed. expert.
Seems like they are trying to find back door ways of eliminating special education instead of fully funding it.
retiredbutmissthekids, you are right. The “pay for success’ Social Impact Bond is the latest innovation in financial products that lets investors play with our public school taxes. Congress is making them a legal finance method for Pre-K.
Investors get paid twice. First for financing Pre-K and second if there is a reduction in the numbers of SPED students when they enter elementary school. All financial incentives are to not provide SPED services so billionaires can get taxpayer funded bonuses.
It’s a recipe for corruption.
Alwayslearning, What Duncan has done to SPED is shameful. He & his political teammates love to champion kids with disabilities as long as the kids & families get their much needed supports from charity or volunteers. But when it comes time to pay for what kids need, they want them to go away.
The Federal DoEd, charged with guaranteeing a fair & equitable education for SPED kid, has been undermining IDEA for several years. By rewriting the “regs” (e.g. regulations) Duncan has made it harder for kids with IEPs to receive assessment and instruction at their instructional levels or get needed accomodations & services.
TN DoEd’s latest mandate is exemplary of lawyerly parsing that breaks the law but Duncan will never enforce:
I learned from my students that the TN Dept of education added new language to their Parental Rights, Revocation of Consent info. In essence, the state will not permit school systems to file mediation or due process if a parent wants to remove their child from SPED & related services outside of the IEP team decision. A SPED superviser in the schools told the teachers- if a parent walks in & hands you a written note saying take my child out of SPED, you stop serving them THAT DAY. This is a clear violation of the IEP contract but an easy way to start undermining the integrity of the IEP process. ALL IEP decisions are made at the school level, a concept anathema to corporate top-down control.
Granted, this rarely happens as most parents want more, rather than no services. However, my colleagues & I were disturbed that this reg takes away responsibility from schools to provide both FAPE and to act in a child’s best interest. As professionals, TN DoEd is saying we can break the IEP contract on a whim & will not be permitted to keep the the child’s in SPED services if we think they still need SPED.
IDEA clearly states that the child’s interests take priority:
http://www.wrightslaw.com/info/fape.sped.failed.htm#sthash.aB5Mo5dl.dpuf
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is the law that provides every child [emphasis CHILD] with an IEP the right to a free, appropriate public education. The purpose of the IDEA is “to ensure that all children with disabilities [emphasis CHILDREN] have available to them a free appropriate public education that emphasizes special education and related services designed to meet their unique [emphasis UNIQUE]needs and prepare them for further education, employment, and independent living…” 20 U.S.C. 1400(d) (Wrightslaw: Special Education Law, 2nd Edition, page 20).
Educators are ethically bound to act in a child’s best interest. Period. I hope parents start today challenging this nonsense. Further, this new ESEA rewrite will bring no relief to SPED and will make their lives in school worse . There is nothing about giving kids opportunities for success. The only opportunities in ESEA rewrite are for Wall St lobbyists & charter schools.
If The International Association for K-12 Online Learning makes a statement cheering this on, I’m sure this is confirmation that the Gates Foundation wrote this act. Phase 2 of his sociopathic need to perform social experiments through venture philanthropy, as he has stated, is through online learning. He’s been the biggest investor in online schools, but it’s about to get crazy with the amount of schools we’re going to see pop up in the next couple of years.
Yep. Posted a link about this above: http://news.yahoo.com/inacol-applauds-u-congress-esea-conference-committee-vote-222200425.html
Good point
Peter Greene, analyzer extraordinaire, snark commentator supreme, what say ye?
My understanding (in large part thanks to Mercedes Schneider for her in depth analysis) of the new ESEA is that it gives preferential treatment to charters and will increase their numbers at the expense of public schools. There will still be testing. It will actually give ALEC even more power to influence state laws. I’m really not seeing anything to celebrate here.
I agree that it is time to rework NCLB because it did not have the success rates that it was originally predicted too. I am curious to see if any future revisions or new acts include the increasing amount of charter schools in their requirements
The problem with “Every Student Succeeds” is that “success” is still defined by a particular class of society–good grades on tests gets you into a good college so you can get a good job and make a lot of money so you can buy a lot of “stuff.” So that gives the government the excuse to continue to pursue the “college and career standards” and their companion assessments. Is that EVERY person’s idea of success…I think not, but it’s the definition that many have been brainwashed into believing they must accept.
Local Control Accountability Funding in CA is NCLB with the implicit targeting of Public School teachers.
I watched the presentation to my school board regarding the limitless push for Professional Development (where teachers are subjected to for profit peddlers to align with new theories). The presenter said the need for years of PD will be needed because the push for 1:1 Tech Ed training will be necessary so students will be able to work from their own ‘tracked’ abilities.
The presentation went on to talk about how much choice and what amount of autonomy teacher should have regarding Curriculum, Instruction, Assessment and Grading.
Then the answers were populated
Curriculum: None
Instruction:All
Assessment:Some
Grading:None
One school board member asked who provided the answers. You see, the pretext of the presentation painted a picture where there were 120+ educators and stakeholders toiling for an hour to come to agreement on such things…but not for this. These answers were populated by one person…who I guess wrote the entire presentation and passed it off to the district staff. That person was Eric Twadell. http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/lake-county-news-sun/news/ct-educational-consulting-stevenson-met-20151023-story.html
School Climate – with goals of 95% parent satisfaction with children’s education, being collected by K12 Insight (dig deeper there and your find all the reformers and profiteers)
Professional Development that ensures students do NOT have their regular teachers in class regularly (adding to the angst kids have when they might depend on that teacher as the ONE who makes them feel like they matter) which then loops back to the School Climate agenda where kids are surveyed and asked about adults and if they feel any adult on campus makes them feel this way.
PD is leading the way to computers teaching our kids…so they can become more anti social and feel more depressed and need more counseling and Big Pharma drugs to cope with their growing isolation…
What a trap!