Obama Signs Education Law Rewrite, Shifting Power To States

Obama will sign a bipartisan bill that easily passed the Senate on Wednesday and the House last week — long-awaited legislation that would replace the landmark No Child Left Behind education law of 2002, now widely viewed as unworkable and overreaching.

In Washington this morning, President Obama is signing – The Every Student Succeeds Act. The bill, the “Every Student Succeeds Act”, was championed by Sens.

Sens. Alexander and Murray were heralded by their colleagues for crafting an agreement that broke through congressional gridlock.

“Those are precisely the kind of reforms parents, teachers, and state and local education leaders deserve, and I am grateful for all of the hard work of our House and Senate colleagues for helping to make these reforms a reality”, said Rep. John Kline (R-Minnesota) after the bill was passed on Wednesday.

The bill, called the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, will now move to the President’s desk for his signature, racking up another major bipartisan achievement for the new Republican Senate. “A bipartisan bill signing right here!” It’s a testament to the four leaders of the respective committees that they set that kind of tone. And he didn’t apologize for how Education Secretary Arne Duncan implemented it. “Sometimes, in the nicest possible way, he’s gotten on people’s nerves because he’s pushed them and prodded them”, Obama said.

Alexander said the bill doesn’t include all the changes he supports, but he argued that a vote against it would mean maintaining the “Common Core mandate” and continuing the U.S. Department of Education’s ability to act as a “national school board” through the requirements it has imposed on states in exchange for giving them waivers to escape some of No Child Left Behind’s regulations.

The new legislation does away with the so-called “Adequate Yearly Progress” goals in No Child Left Behind.

In his remarks, Obama stated that No Child Left Behind had the right intentions, but in practice often fell short.

The law leaves it up to the states to develop and design their own evaluation systems. Both sides of the aisle compromised to draft Every Student Succeeds, which still requires states to test students in reading and math in grades 3 through 8, and at least once in high school. But states will now be able to decide how to deal with low participation and will not be subject to the threat of penalization if less than 95 percent of students are tested in schools.

The legislation comes as the state looks to revamp its primary measurement of school evaluation – School Performance Profile scores.

The legislation dismantles a second federal accountability system the Obama administration created, in which states were excused from the demands of No Child Left Behind if they adopted the administration’s favored policies. In 2012, MA received a waiver on certain aspects of the law, and had a new goal of reducing proficiency gaps by half by the end of the 2016-2017 school year.

It is unclear whether states will retain those policies absent a federal mandate.

The Gardner-Peters amendment will allow Title I funds to be used to support concurrent and dual enrollment programs at eligible schools, enabling high school students to simultaneously receive college-credit from courses taught by college approved teachers in secondary education.

But if ESSA is ambiguous, that puts it squarely in the tradition of its great-grandaddy, the original ESEA of 1965, said Mike Kirst, who worked on implementation of the very first version of the law during President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. With the new flexibility that the law gives to states and local school districts, Garcia said, policymakers and administrators have the chance to “take a look at making this a respected profession where teachers are allowed to make decisions that they know are in the best interest of students”.