Jeff Bryant has written the best analysis of the Every Students Succeeds Act that I have seen to date. It is fraught with problems and perils, but it ends the failed NCLB and RTTT. It is the first legislation to reduce the role of the federal government dramatically, because of the harmful top-down mandates from Arne Duncan. Duncan personally made the federal Department of Education repugnant to a bipartisan majority in Congress. As Jeff notes, ESSA sailed through the House yesterday by a vote of 359 to 64. With the support of Senator Lamar Alexander (R) and Senator Patti Murray (D), it is likely to move quickly through the Senate as well. President Obama has signaled that he will sign it. After 15 years of torture by D.C., the game now changes and shifts to the states.

 

Jeff Bryant writes:

 

 

 

When you have a piece of legislation that is disliked by the super-conservative Heritage Action Fund, on the one hand, and left-leaning civil rights organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP, on the other, the knee-jerk tendency is to conclude, “Hooray, we’ve ‘met in the middle’ and satisfied all but the outliers.”

 

However, education policy has been deeply harmed by this sort of shallow bipartisanship, as lawmakers and policy types have tended to regard the easy way forward as an assurance everyone involved in crafting a bill has performed the necessary due diligence. After all, bipartisan blinders gave us the flawed No Child Left Behind enacted under the administration of George W. Bush in the first place (not to mention the Iraq War)….

 

And a significant improvement in ESSA… is the elimination of federal government requirements to use standardized test scores to evaluate teachers, a favored requirement of NCLB waivers pushed by the Obama administration….

 

What everyone seems to agree is that ESSA will, as the Washington Post summarized, “significantly shift authority over the nation’s 100,000 public schools from the federal government to states and local school districts.”

 

Regardless of how you feel about the bill, you have to pause to reflect on why we face a policy moment where avoiding the influence of the federal government on pubic education is a priority.

 

First, it’s a sign of dysfunction, rather than a triumph of bipartisanship, to see officials in Washington, DC celebrating legislation that significantly curtails the influence of officials in Washington, DC.

 

Second, the federal government’s influence on education has historically been positive. Requiring states to provide for public education began with pressure from the federal government with the enactment of the Land Ordinance of 1785, before the Constitution was established. When millions of soldiers returned from World War II, it was the federal government that enacted the GI Bill that made it possible for those men and women to attend college and create a workforce that powered the most successful economy the world has ever seen. True, access to free and high-quality education has always been, and continues to be, anything but universal, with all sorts of populations – including non-white, low-income families, immigrant children with limited English capability, and students with physical, mental, and emotional exceptions – routinely discriminated against. However, that ugly reality about our system has been disrupted most frequently and successfully when the federal government has taken action to demand states and school districts provide greater inclusion.

 

So sure, getting rid of the impossible demands of NCLB and unworkable waivers that legislation spawned is more so than not a really good thing. But it’s important to acknowledge why this moment has come about.

 

Should ESSA eventually become law, as most predict it will, the main reasons will be not because it was conceived from scratch by the best possible thinking but mostly because it is a response to seven years of failed leadership by the Obama administration and its outgoing Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

 

Even the most generous analyses of Duncan’s signature program, Race to the Top, conclude, so far, the effort has been more of a triumph of process rather than product. Sure, RTTT made states do lots of stuff, but, as reported by Education Week, even USDoE’s latest assessment of the program failed to show any clearly positive outcomes while acknowledging obvious “unintended consequences.”

 

School Improvement Grants, another of this administration’s programs, have equally unimpressive results so far. For the $7 billion spent on this effort, according to Politico, “The program has failed to produce the dramatic results the administration had hoped to achieve. About two thirds of SIG schools nationwide made modest or no gains — not much different from similarly bad schools that got no money at all. About a third of the schools actually got worse…..

 

 

According to the Los Angeles Times, upon hearing news of the House vote to pass ESSA, Duncan issued a statement of support, saying “Nearly a year ago, I gave a speech setting the frame for what I believe is essential in the nation’s preeminent education law … The bill that the House passed today reflects more of that vision than nearly any observer expected.”

 

Nice try.