Editorial: Education reform nears final test
As soon as next week, the nation may leave behind No Child Left Behind, the sweeping education reforms signed by the president in 2002 but increasingly criticized as evidence of its defects accumulated.
The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Every Student Succeeds Act on Wednesday. Quick Senate action and a signature from President Obama are expected.
Sen. Patty Murray can take a share of the credit for the reforms. As ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, she and Chairman Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., embarked on a bipartisan effort to replace a law that had laudable but unrealistic goals.
No Child’s fundamental flaw was its over-reliance on the U.S. Department of Education to enforce one-size-fits-all standards. The objectives were good – a quality education for all students no matter where they lived, and accountability for the districts failing their students – but the seemingly endless testing to measure progress alienated normally antagonistic constituencies like teacher unions and conservative groups.
Testing became an end in itself, taking time and resources away from education’s mission – learning.
Most Washington school districts, including Spokane Public Schools, failed to meet federal standards. The story was the same nationally, with every state obtaining a waiver – until Washington did not.
The new law maintains requirements for testing but allows states to set their own standards for success. Nor do they have to use the same curriculum, which should help quiet the anti-Common Core crowd, which has misconstrued “common” to mean “same.”
States still will have to intervene in their lowest-performing schools, including high school “dropout factories.” They also will have to continue the reporting of student test results that has exposed disparities by race and wealth.
The disparities persist; one reason why the Department of Education cannot allow states to slack off.
Hard-core conservatives wanted the federal government completely out of the schools, but the bill, S1177, has drawn a rare endorsement from the Republican-dominated National Governors Association as well as teacher unions.
Murray, although pleased with her renewed success negotiating a bipartisan deal – she worked with now House Speaker Paul Ryan on a 2013 budget – did not get all the funding she wanted for pre-kindergarten. She was once a preschool teacher.
Adoption of ESSA is critical. U.S. students trail many of their foreign peers by many measures. Education has always been a state responsibility, but as a nation we must do better in and by our classrooms.