Outdated education law up for major makeover in Senate

The reading and math scores of black students are catching up to those of whites. The new law gives states back the control over setting educational goals and deciding how to hold students, teachers, schools and districts accountable for not reaching them. At the other end of the political spectrum, conservatives who wanted more local control of education bristled at what they saw as federal overreach. States would be left to figure out how best to set up their schools.

Minnesota offers an example of what can happen when a state puts a priority on closing achievement gaps.

Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, he was flanked by Ted Kennedy, who had shepherded the legislation through the Senate, and John Boehner, then the head of the House education committee.

According to a summary on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s website, the legislation would abandon No Child Left Behind’s mandate that all US schools meet “adequate yearly progress”, replacing it with state-designed accountability systems.

The legislation was advanced in the Senate by a vote of 84-12. The reauthorization bill, now dubbed the Every Student Succeeds Act, passed the House last week, 359 to 64, and should pass the Senate today by an similarly large margin.

The overhauled education framework includes a Messer provision that will allow states and local education agencies to use educator professional development funds to train teachers to protect student privacy, an issue on which Messer has focused on over the past year as education technology is increasingly used in the classroom.

End federal mandates on evaluations and allow states to develop and design new evaluation systems.

TESTING: The legislation continues required testing in math and reading for children in grades three to eight and once in high school.

Under the bill, schools would be required to publicly report the results by students’ race, family income and disability status. It set up regional “centers of excellence” to provide assistance to schools that were struggling.

There were various efforts made to make Title 1 money portable which many anxious would interrupt the flow of dollars to the poorest schools and hamper their ability to level the playing field. Furthermore, under the act, states would have to use “evidence-based interventions” in the bottom 5 percent of schools, determined, again, by test scores.

The school has been recognized five times in the state’s annual list of Reward Schools, recently scoring an 81 out of 100 on the Multiple Measurements Rating, which takes gap reduction into account. If Congress wanted to do ESSA right, they would make it easy – no, mandatory – to educate 21st century children in a 21st century way.

Not only did all kids need to show improvement on test scores, but all sub-groups had to also show improvement.

Still, Northern Virginia Democratic Congressman Don Beyer says the final bill represents significant progress. “I could see the realization on her face of how big of an accomplishment it was”.

Through years of inaction from Congress, we provided states with relief from the most burdensome parts of the law.

Murphy said he was aware of that some states might not take the law as seriously as others. Last week, it passed and sent to President Obama a five-year, $305 billion transportation bill, with a provision restoring the U.S. Export-Import Bank. Many Republicans insist that they largely support these reforms; they just don’t want the federal government involved.

But when it comes to what states now must do in regard to English-language learners, ESSA actually strengthens accountability.

For the rest of the country, he says, Every Student will bring relief from the tyranny of the test. “OK, well, we’re potentially going to get it now, so now it’s in the state’s court to make those changes”.

Jeanne Shaheen said in a conference call with New Hampshire educators and reporters. “Under these circumstances, that school can’t succeed, and the alternative is to invest resources that will attract a diverse population of students, but you can only do that with a high quality education”. There are some new charter schools that are doing a great job, there are still some public schools that are succeeding, but overall the situation is fairly bleak wherever poverty is concentrated. The problem: none of the Latino students at that school had Mexican heritage. Everything negative about the testing-industrial complex will remain; this is what good lobbying can buy you.