President Obama indicators No Youngster Left Behind rewrite shifting energy to states

It put pressure on school districts to raise their performance standards for every student.

Obama signed the bipartisan rewrite of No Child Left Behind at the White House on Thursday. Lamar Alexander called it, doesn’t turn out to be a lump of coal and that the result of the Every Student Succeeds Act is success.

Teacher unions and school administrators have also been on board with the changes.

And while states and local districts, not the federal government, will now decide how to use that data, and what else to use with that data, in holding schools accountable, Mathis said he’s still unclear about how much flexibility state-level actors will really have in designing their accountability systems for schools.

In strictly political terms, the fact that it was such a enthusiastic bipartisan effort may help it qualify as a Christmas miracle.

Students will still take federally required statewide math and reading exams but states will be encouraged to focus less on testing.

Many states, including Alabama, had sought and received waivers from the U.S. Department of Education regarding many NCLB requirements as state and federal officials recognized that the law’s goals of proficiency would not be met. Try as they might, teachers and schools just couldn’t get all students proficient in math and reading in the timeframe NCLB authors sought.

Murray, a former preschool teacher, said the work must now begin in “our schools, in our communities, in our states”, to find ways to make sure that all students achieve. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida and Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders.

The new federal law doesn’t require that testing be used as a marker to evaluate teachers, though under current education policy in New Jersey, student scores are used as a factor in evaluations for some educators.

On Common Core, education guidelines reviled by many conservatives, the bill says the federal government may not mandate or give states incentives to adopt or maintain any particular set of academic standards. That law, memorably, was championed by Republican President George W. Bush as well as by one of the more stalwart Democratic lawmakers in memory, Sen.

It was praised for its main intent, which was to use annual tests to identify achievement gaps in learning and failing schools in need of support.