The days of No Child Left Behind are numbered.
The House of Representatives is voting this afternoon on a new education law, a compromise reached by a bipartisan committee from the House and the Senate, that would reduce the federal role in K-12 education for the first time since the 1980s.
The bill, the Every Student Succeeds Act, would keep the most familiar feature of No Child Left Behind: annual tests in reading and math for students in third through eighth grades. But it drops the 2002 law's other big idea: that the federal government, which spends $14 billion each year on poor schools, should directly hold those schools accountable for the quality of their education.
This is a major victory for the conservative vision for education policy, which puts the states, not Washington, in charge of holding schools accountable — and it means states could scale back their efforts to improve schools for poor and minority children.
None of these kids were supposed to be left behind. (Shutterstock)
Since the 1980s, every major education law has expanded the federal government's power over state policy. This bill is the first to reverse that trend, undoing much of the federal control introduced in No Child Left Behind.
That law is best known for its emphasis on standardized testing. But the testing regimen was in service of a larger project: step-by-step prescriptions of what states had to do to hold schools accountable if they weren't making "adequate progress" toward the goal of nationwide proficiency in reading and math by 2014.
If schools that got federal money to educate low-income students weren't making enough progress, they faced an escalating series of consequences, ending with drastic changes such as replacing the principal and most of the staff.
Because closing the gaps in reading and math abilities between black and Hispanic students, students with disabilities, and their peers was No Child Left Behind's central goal, those consequences kicked in even if the entire school was making progress if certain groups of students — such as students with disabilities or students learning English — were still falling behind.
Research has found that many consequences were ineffective, with the exception of the most dramatic options, which kicked in only after schools had failed for years. Still, No Child Left Behind improved fourth- and eighth-grade math scores, particularly for African-American students and students from poor families.
The law failed to meet its goal of getting every student able to read and do math by the end of the 2013-'14 academic year, and because it became synonymous with standardized testing and Washington mandates, it also was politically unpopular. But it wasn't a complete failure.
The new education bill would keep some of No Child Left Behind's ideas. But states, not the federal government, would largely be in charge of holding schools accountable, reversing a trend toward greater federal control.
That means states are free to design their own system. States decide what factors are most important, although they have a few guidelines: They need to pick three academic factors, including test scores and graduation rates, as well as one variable dealing with something besides a school's academic performance, such as surveys of students or parents.
Still, states decide how to weigh those factors, although academic factors must be most important. States decide what, if anything, happens to schools that don't make their goals. States decide what happens if large numbers of parents opt their students out of required standardized tests. And states decide what to do about the bottom 5 percent of schools where they're required to intervene.
The federal government would have to approve states' accountability plans within 120 days after the states submit them. But there are limits on whether they can reject them, part of a broader set of measures meant to curb the Education Department's power. The education secretary can't urge states to adopt academic standards, as Arne Duncan did with the Common Core. And they can't change the requirements for accountability systems to emphasize different priorities.
Kids will still have to take tests. (Shutterstock)
The struggle to reach the compromise bill was the latest example of a new dynamic in education policy. Republicans and teachers unions, historic enemies, were on one side, with civil rights groups and some Democrats on the other.
The final bill got a broad array of support. Conservatives support the Every Student Succeeds Act because it means states will take the lead on education, historically a local responsibility, although some conservatives are concerned that it doesn't go far enough. The National Governors Association also supported it. Teachers unions support it because they became strong opponents of No Child Left Behind's approach to testing and accountability, which they argued had a negative effect on classrooms.
Civil rights groups, which supported No Child Left Behind because of its mission to force states to pay attention to poor and minority students, were harder to win over, although they eventually endorsed the bill because they decided it was better than the status quo.
Before No Child Left Behind was passed in 2002, most states didn't hold all students to the same standard on standardized tests — instead, they were compared with their peers. Nearly half of states didn't break out scores by students' family income. And while 29 states had methods to hold schools accountable, that means 21 still did not.
In other words, some states didn't do anything to hold schools accountable for the performance of poor or minority children until the federal government forced them to. The question is whether states will continue to do so with less pressure from Washington.
Some almost certainly will. Compared with 2002, the education reform movement is better funded and has more national reach. And states will still be required to report test score data, meaning they can't return to the earlier days of sweeping the problem under the rug. Conservative supporters of No Child Left Behind argue that the bill will unleash energy for new solutions and greater improvement in individual states now that they're no longer required to all take the same steps to change their schools.
But states' track record on other issues, such as voting rights or expanding Medicaid, makes clear that they don't always act when they're not federally required to do so. And holding schools or teachers accountable isn't always politically popular.
Generally, parents think their own public schools are good, even if they have a negative view of public education in the US as a whole. And public opinion has turned against standardized tests. Even President Obama has backed off parts of his education agenda due to a backlash.
Although No Child Left Behind has been overdue for renewal for years, a compromise that congressional Republicans could vote for and Obama would sign meant threading the tiniest of needles. It seems like Congress has actually pulled it off.
The bill includes some protections important to civil rights organizations and Democrats, such as the requirement that states identify schools where individual groups of students aren't performing well. It includes funding for preschool grants, a key priority for Senate Democrats. But it also rolls back the federal role in education and turns some federal programs into block grants. It checks off many boxes on the Republican wish list.
It might not be conservative enough for some House Republicans. The Heritage Foundation has criticized the bill for maintaining federal funding and for not turning Title I, the federal program sending money to students in poor schools, into a voucher program. Heritage Action has named opposing the bill as a key vote. And conservative bloggers and activists who nearly derailed a House vote on an early, more conservative version of the bill have organized against this one as well.
But those opponents don't seem to be gaining traction. Barring a last-minute change of heart among members of Congress, the bill could soon face its final hurdle: whether Obama will sign it.
