The Every Student Succeeds Act shifts much–though not all–of the responsibity for testing and accountability to the states. States have more flexibility, if they choose to exercise it. Many states, lacking imagination or thoughtfulness, will continue to do what the Department of Education and NCLB forced them to do.
NY Chalkbeat here explains how ESSA will affect education in New York. You can translate this to your own state. The state can no longer say “the Feds made me do it.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Federal law does not now or never did require that NY students take all the Regents exams that are currently required, as the Chalkbeat article implies. All NCLB required and now ESSA is that high school students be tested once in ELA & math.
This is a good point. New York State has had a test heavy educational system, at least at the high school level, for many generations. These truly high stakes tests also have resulted in a test prep heavy culture in the education system of the state. Most NY educators themselves experienced the Regents exams when they were students, which reinforces this enculturation. Most states do not have this long tradition of high stakes exams.
http://www.p12.nysed.gov/assessment/hsgen/archive/rehistory.htm.
The increased testing of elementary and middle school children comes in major part from federal law and current educational practices like periodic universal screening assessments to support RtI. However, the high school Regents exam system is a New York state of mind as is the test prep culture that has grown up around it. I believe one of the reasons why elementary and middle schools adopted such a test prep approach to the annual testing introduced since NCLB was acceptance of what was already standard practice in high schools.
I am an Empire State native and started my career there. I had the good fortune to do my student teaching at Central Park East secondary and has exposure to alternative models, but it wasn’t until I moved to another state that I fully understood how distinct a test and test prep culture existed in New York. Tom Sobol’s encouragement of portfolio assessment twenty-five years ago was probably the last major state level attempt to reform the culture.
The connection of school and educator high stakes accountability in relation to the tests should be attributed to NCLB and the Duncan ESEA waivers. No doubt about that. ESSA loosens federal mandates in those areas, but I am concerned that New York’s traditions of high stakes Regents exams are part of a culture that is accepting of high stakes assessment and will be slow to change.
Stiles – strictly anecdotal, I know, but I did not experience my ’60’s upstate college-town Regents ed as high-stakes/ test-prep-heavy. Far from it. The curriculum was matched to the exams; studying the curriculum was studying for the exams. No special test-prep needed to learn the idiosyncrasies of Pearson’s computerized supposedly-Common-Core-aligned exams, for example. And if you were in a different curriculum (I remember a course called Chem Study), you took a different exam that was, like Regents’ exams were then, developed by a panel of teachers & field-tested before implementation (unlike PARCC & SBAC).
Another huge difference: there was an alternative curriculum, the non-Regents diploma, which would get you into less-selective colleges, the army, and was more than sufficient for getting a job after graduation, especially since it was buttressed with vocational courses. Since 2000, I gather one has a choice between Regents diploma and ‘disabled’ diploma.
NYS ed history is not test-& test-prep heavy, it only seems that way because of recent decades’ politicized policy and budget decisions. Which dumps everybody but those qualified as disabled into the bin labelled ‘college-and-career-ready’ as defined by the standardization crowd, with predictable results ratcheted up to the level of absurdity by state VAM policy.
But states have to get the fed’s approval, right? So what has changed? If feds don’t like what states are doing, and I have a hard time believing they’ll like anything much different than what is already happening, the feds will say no.
What am I missing?
I’m missing “it” as well.
What it in part means is that states can no longer place blame on the feds and say ‘federal rests” and “federal teacher evaluations” and “federal report cards”.
At the least those responsible are a little closer to the voters.
“The state can no longer say “the Feds made me do it.”
I agree. Which is good. Part of the problem is news outlets have cut back on statehouse reporting and they don’t pay local reporters enough to stay in the job a while and really understand all the players, so we could use more info on what goes on in our statehouses. It’s hard to find. If I want a witness list or transcript of what was said for pending legislation in Ohio I really have to hunt it down and it matters a lot. Ohio once held a hearing where 14 of the 15 “members of the public” they heard from were members of StudentsFirst. I don’t know if that’s representative, but if so they need to hear from people outside ed reform circles.
“How the ALEC stole the Public from Public Education.” A school board talk by Andy Goldstein. December 16, 2015.
I fail to see the advantage of placing more responsibility in the hands of the State of New Jersey.
It gives Chris Christie more opportunities to be and the public eye and look like a fool.
“in the”
The main improvement the ESSA provides is that we can fight this at the State level. It reduces the size of the Goliath David has to slay.
One step at a time . . .
Newark is a state run district.
Yeah. . well our state is as corrupt as the federal govern. so not an improvement and also essa does a nice job of supporting charters and alternate teaching certificates. . not a good thing for public education at all.
I’m in this fight to save public education and this doesn’t help.
Instead of celebrating the newest version of No Child Left Behind, now called Every Student Succeeds Act, (similarity duly noted)–as the leaders of both teachers’ unions so shamelessly do today — it is time for us to look at what really is there, and plan for the next stages in our fight. I am concerned that the shift in power to the states will make it incumbent on all of us both to work together within our states, and, especially, to work together with our people in the particularly horrendously-run states (“right to work,” charter-crazy, etc).
This admonition and this attempt to begin weed through the real act are not the whole picture, but a start. “For all the potential ESSA holds, it is up to all of us to make sure that its passage is one more step toward equity, fairness, and opportunity for our nation’s public school students and the communities in which they live. We must ensure that that those who are most impacted by these changes — students, parents, teachers — are central to the process. If we are able to do this, we can create the type of healthy living and learning communities where all students will have a fair and substantive opportunity to learn.”
http://schottfoundation.org/blog/2015/12/16/getting-essa-equity