At the end of 2015, Congress finally replaced No Child Left Behind–ten years late–with a new law called Every Student Succeeds. The two names actually mean exactly the same thing, and mean nothing at all. Does anyone really believe that a federal law will cause “no child” to be “left behind,” or that “every student” will “succeed”? Washington ships out some money and some mandates, and therefore what? Hyperbole.

No Child Left Behind introduced an unprecedented level of federal control of education, a function traditionally left to the states. The federal contribution of about 10% of overall education funding enabled the government via NCLB to set conditions, specifically to require that every child in grades 3-8 must be tested in reading and math every year. Based on test scores, teachers and principals have been fired, and schools have been closed for not reaching unrealistic targets. NCLB was an intrusive, misguided, evidence-free law that was uninformed by knowledge of children, communities and pedagogy.

Arne Duncan twisted the screws on schools with his absurd Race to the Top. Education is not a race, and there is no top. But once again, the standardized tests became the measure and the purpose of education.

After 15 years of NCLB and RTTT, there is a great deal of wreckage, demoralized teachers, and widespread teacher shortages. And if the point of all that testing was to reach the top of international tests and/or close the achievement gaps among groups, it didn’t happen.

ESSA attempted to heal some of the harm done by NCLB and RTTT. It limited the power of the Secretary of education, to prevent another out-of-control Duncan. But it left in place the federal mandate for annual testing of all children in grades 3-8. This mandate has warped education for nearly two decades but civil rights groups became convinced by the the Gates Foundation that these norm-referenced tests were the pinnacle of civil rights protection. This was the height of absurdity: black and Latino children, as well as students with disabilities, are disproportionately ranked in the bottom half of the normed curve because these tests accurately reflect family income and education. Normed tests, by definition, have a top and a bottom, and the gaps never close, by design.

Pushed by DC think tanks, Democrats became convinced that the testing regime introduced by George W. Bush was the linchpin of the civil rights movement. They fought to retain Bush’s testing mandates, which themselves were based on the hoax of the fraudulent “Texas miracle.” Testing did not make Texas #1, but this fraud was the foundation of NCLB.

So Democrats insisted that the new law had to include annual testing because the civil rights groups wanted it. What a coalition: civil rights groups, Democrats, Republican accountability hawks, and Republicans eager to prove the phony claim that public schools are subpar.

And now we have ESSA. The Senate just voted to kill the accountability regulations of ESSA drafted by the Obama regulations. This post at a Education Week explains what was killed and what remains. It’s complicated. Not surprisingly, it turns out that the Obama administration staffer who wrote the defunct regulations now works for Jeb Bush’s accountability-crazed, privatization-loving “Chiefs for Change,” the most rightwing state and local superintendents.

Peter Greene explains here that it is a mess because it is a collection of generalities. No one agrees how it should be interpreted. Former Secretary John King wanted it to mean that nothing had changed with the replacement of NCLB, but Senator Alexander was not having that.

Greene says there are no heroes here, just confusion.

In the meantime, ESSA sits there, uninterpreted and unclear, a stunning example of how badly top-down rules can go wrong– if the people at the top can’t get their act together and figure out what they want the rules to mean, all you get is top-down confusion and paralysis. States, districts and schools have no way of knowing which sets of bad federal rules we’ll have to cope with, but in the meantime we have to keep doing our day to day work. Best of luck to us all.