Please contact your members of Congress and tell them not to allow the Department of Education to impose regulations that subvert the intentions of the Every Student Succeeds Act. FairTest has drafted the following letter and explanation. (See Valerie Strauss’s article on “The Answer Sheet” here.)
The U.S. Department of Education (DoE) has drafted regulations for implementing the accountability provisions of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The DOE proposals would continue test-and-punish practices imposed by the failed No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. The draft over-emphasizes standardized exam scores, mandates punitive interventions not required in law, and extends federal micro-management. The draft regulations would also require states to punish schools in which larger numbers of parents refuse to let their children be tested. When DoE makes decisions that should have been set locally in partnership with educators, parents, and students, it takes away local voices that ESSA tried to restore.
You can help push back against these dangerous proposals in two ways:
First, tell DoE it must drop harmful proposed regulations. You can simply cut and paste the Comment below into DoE’s website at https://www.regulations.gov/#!submitComment;D=ED-2016-OESE-0032-0001 or adapt it into your own words. (The text below is part of FairTest’s submission.) You could emphasize that the draft regulations steal the opportunity ESSA provides for states and districts to control accountability and thereby silences the voice of educators, parents, students and others.
Second, urge Congress to monitor the regulations. Many Members have expressed concern that DoE is trying to rewrite the new law, not draft appropriate regulations to implement it. Here’s a letter you can easily send to your Senators and Representative asking them to tell leaders of Congress’ education committees to block DoE’s proposals: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-department-must-drop-proposed-accountability-regulations.
Together, we can stop DoE’s efforts to extend NLCB policies that the American people and Congress have rejected.
FairTest
Note: DoE website has a character limit; if you add your own comments, you likely will need to cut some of the text below:
You can cut and paste this text into the DoE website:
I support the Comments submitted by FairTest on June 15 (Comment #). Here is a slightly edited version:
While the accountability provision in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) are superior to those in No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the Department of Education’s (DoE) draft regulations intensify ESSA’s worst aspects and will perpetuate many of NCLB’s most harmful practices. The draft regulations over-emphasize testing, mandate punishments not required in law, and continue federal micro-management. When DoE makes decisions that should be set at the state and local level in partnership with local educators, parents, and students, it takes away local voices that ESSA restores. All this will make it harder for states, districts and schools to recover from the educational damage caused by NLCB – the very damage that led Congress to fundamentally overhaul NCLB’s accountability structure and return authority to the states.
The DoE must remove or thoroughly revise five draft regulations:
DoE draft regulation 200.15 would require states to lower the ranking of any school that does not test 95% of its students or to identify it as needing “targeted support.” No such mandate exists in ESSA. This provision violates statutory language that ESSA does not override “a State or local law regarding the decision of a parent to not have the parent’s child participate in the academic assessments.” This regulation appears designed primarily to undermine resistance to the overuse and misuse of standardized exams.
Recommendation: DoE should simply restate ESSA language allowing the right to opt out as well as its requirements that states test 95% of students in identified grades and factor low participation rates into their accountability systems. Alternatively, DoE could write no regulation at all. In either case, states should decide how to implement this provision.
DoE draft regulation 200.18 transforms ESSA’s requirement for “meaningful differentiation” among schools into a mandate that states create “at least three distinct levels of school performance” for each indicator. ESSA requires states to identify their lowest performing five percent of schools as well as those in which “subgroups” of students are doing particularly poorly. Neither provision necessitates creation of three or more levels. This proposal serves no educationally useful purpose. Several states have indicated they oppose this provision because it obscures rather than enhances their ability to precisely identify problems and misleads the public. This draft regulation would pressure schools to focus on tests to avoid being placed in a lower level. Performance levels are also another way to attack schools in which large numbers of parents opt out, as discussed above.
DoE draft regulation 200.18 also mandates that states combine multiple indicators into a single “summative” score for each school. As Rep. John Kline, chair of the House Education Committee, pointed out, ESSA includes no such requirement. Summative scores are simplistically reductive and opaque. They encourage the flawed school grading schemes promoted by diehard NCLB defenders.
Recommendation: DoE should drop this draft regulation. It should allow states to decide how to use their indicators to identify schools and whether to report a single score. Even better, the DoE should encourage states to drop their use of levels.
DoE draft regulation 200.18 further proposes that a state’s academic indicators together carry “much greater” weight than its “school quality” (non-academic) indicators. Members of Congress differ as to the intent of the relevant ESSA passage. Some say it simply means more than 50%, while others claim it implies much more than 50%. The phrase “much greater” is likely to push states to minimize the weight of non-academic factors in order to win plan approval from DOE, especially since the overall tone of the draft regulations emphasizes testing.
Recommendation: The regulations should state that the academic indicators must count for more than 50% of the weighting in how a state identifies schools needing support.
DoE draft regulation 200.18 also exceeds limits ESSA placed on DoE actions regarding state accountability plans.
DoE draft regulation 200.19 would require states to use 2016-17 data to select schools for “support and improvement” in 2017-18. This leaves states barely a year for implementation, too little time to overhaul accountability systems. It will have the harmful consequence of encouraging states to keep using a narrow set of test-based indicators and to select only one additional “non-academic” indicator.
Recommendation: The regulations should allow states to use 2017-18 data to identify schools for 2018-19. This change is entirely consistent with ESSA’s language.
Lastly, we are concerned that an additional effect of these unwarranted regulations will be to unhelpfully constrain states that choose to participate in ESSA’s “innovative assessment” program.
Think about who is in charge of the DoE what is going on with these regs make sense. The Obomber didn’t tap King for nothing.
Obama wants test and punish to be part of his “legacy.” The best thing Lamar Alexander can do is to work to get Congress to vote against any bill Obama and King concoct.http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/06/13/sen-lamar-alexander-fired-obama-administration-usurping-congress-authority-massive-education-law/
Alexander and Congress passed ESSA, which is far from perfect but better than NCLB.
King is trying to trick Congress and restore NCLB by regulation. It is a sneaky maneuver, not legislation
It’s not King.
It’s Obama.
King is just his new water boy– same as the old one.
King was a failure in New York, he’s a failure now. How ironic, but not surprising how, in our American system, failure and incompetency are “rewarded” and promoted. D, I agree, he’s a sneaky you-know-what and it’s not gonna fly. See what a maelstrom he caused in NY? If it goes national in the manner he attempted it in NYC, Ed Rheeform will certainly collapse on a biblical scale. Thank God.
Signed the letter- noting that, while the Aspen Institute’s education programs, funded by Gates, have the ear of Congress, e.g. “Senior Congressional Education Staff Network”, Congress is supposed to represent constituents. We’ll see (if the matter comes up for a vote), which way Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders vote. Are the AFT and NEA going to be active in getting their members to send letters?
An alternative letter to sign, for a sympathetic public, that doesn’t follow legislative detail, one that just highlights a few key points, would increase the number of comments sent.
I agree, but in my several forays into federal “open for public comment” invitations, most have been structured to focus on specific sections and language (as in this case).
I took advange of and modified the FairTest points to repeat the point that DoE should not be changing the law…and that is exactly what these “guidance” point do.
Title II is really outrageous, with more than $11 trillion thrown at charter academies of teacher prep with marginal or no connection to higher education. This Title was clearly written to send money to the darlings of private foundations–Urban Teachers, along with Aspire Public Schools, Blue Engine, Boston Teacher Residency, Match Teacher Residency, National Center for Teacher Residencies, Relay Graduate School of Education, Teach for America, and TNTP.
Interesting that these organizations have formed a coalition to shape accountability policies for all teacher prep programs, urging Congress and DoE to make student tests scores: (a) the central measures for teacher “effectiveness” and (b) the effectiveness of teacher prep programs. The lobbying for this is ongoing and evident here, with teacher prep reduced to “customer service” and test scores central in ratings of customer satisfaction. http://static1.squarespace.com/static/54dc2642e4b0469314195dca/t/5761ee149f7456a0f0a4e03f/1466036228280/CoalitionLetter.pdf scheme
Thanks, Laura, for providing the context.
One of the signers of the letter, Aspire, is partnered with Reed Hastings? American democracy has no protection in D.C. The anti-democracy tide from Silicon Valley, (1) Hastings, who is in a YouTube video calling for an end to democratically elected school boards (2) Marc Andreeson’s praise for colonialism and, the (3) unilateral decision making about America’s most important common good, by Bill Gates, should be a wake up call to America, including veterans groups, who have sacrificed so much for the nation’s freedom from tyrants.
People keep falling for the same trick,
It’s actually rather pathetic.
And Obama is the water boy for the rich.
It seems to me that NCLB and ESSA both have the effect of trashing the 10th amendment to the US constitution. Now the Yale college buddy of both Senator (DFER – owned) Booker and Governor (Corporate money rules) Malloy, John King continues his drive to replace Arne Duncan as Superintendent of Schools in the United States with even greater elicit powers.
He was a failure in New York and based on that abysmal record Obama nominated him for Secretary of Education. He is now striving to in effect spread his dysfunctional policies to every school system in America. The US congress needs to step up and stop this out of control bureaucrat who’s position they ratified.
I sat out the special NJ senatorial election (to replace deceased D-Sen Lauterberg) despite my leftist friends crying ‘but not Teapartier Steve Lonegan – knowing Booker as a neolibersal & anti-pubsch activist. Watching him now in the Senate, am happy at least to see he is standing up for gun control.
Done. Too few people have sined this petition. NPE should spread the word.
cx: signed
Obama is a lawyer. Enuf said.
Me too, sent a message . Thanks for the link.
ESSA = another BIG, FAT JOKE
ANYONE who thinks that this will change with $illary = wishful thinking. Remember WHO made states write standards and tests, because this worked sooooo well in AK.
Obama continually gives public school teacher the EAGLE. BAD ESSA and RTT, and test and punishment will be his legacy.