By Lanae Erickson Hatalsky and Tamara Hiler
This month, the President signed the most sweeping rewrite of our country’s education laws since No Child Left Behind in 2001. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) garnered strong bipartisan support, but in the wake of its passage some have begun to cast it as a surrender to the forces of educational mediocrity. While the new education law is by no means perfect, it is anything but a surrender.
To start with, critics of the No Child Left Behind rewrite use the wrong points of comparison. They either contrast the new law to the 2001 statute or to the Obama Administration’s system of waivers under which most states have been operating for years. Yet by this time next year when the law goes into effect, both of those comparisons will be moot.
The more apt question is this: how does this law stack up to the systems the current Presidential candidates would unilaterally create upon taking office in 2017? So many schools would be deemed “failing” under No Child Left Behind’s edict of reaching 100% proficiency that the next Administration would have had carte blanche to take the reins of Obama’s waiver system and implement any scheme he or she preferred. Since many of the current White House aspirants want to liquidate the Department of Education and auction it off for parts, it tests the limits of credulity to posit they would urge even greater federal oversight than does ESSA. Even Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton has questioned the hallmarks of Obama-era waivers, so the likelihood that future education policy would look anything like the last 7 years is zero. That means contrasting either NCLB or the current waiver system to the new law is irrelevant, at best.
“Some ESSA critics argued that the civil rights community could have gotten a better deal if it waited until the next Congress. That’s not a bet worth taking.”
Some ESSA critics argued that the civil rights community could have gotten a better deal if it waited until the next Congress. That’s not a bet worth taking. Even if Democrats gain seats, Republicans will likely control the House of Representatives in the next Congress, so any piece of legislation would have to satisfy House Republicans — not a group famous for their warmth toward federal education mandates. And though the political firestorm around testing and accountability was heated this year, we have every reason to believe it would’ve spread, not flamed out, if Congress didn’t act.
It is difficult to see how reliving the debate of the past few months in an environment where standardized tests and their consequences are even more politically toxic would have yielded a more prescriptive law than this one. That is especially true given that there is little chance the person with the next veto pen would want to use it to defend annual testing and accountability — a threat which greatly strengthened the hand of the civil rights community this year.
Finally, critics argue that states will use the increased flexibility the new law allows to throw certain students under the bus. And it is true that states will carry a greater burden in ensuring every student is learning under this new system. But it does not revert back to the anything goes-days prior to No Child Left Behind.
Back then, states were not required to even measure their achievement gaps, let alone address them. Now they must consistently identify those gaps, and that in and of itself changes the playing field. In addition to operating in a new world of transparency, states are also dealing with a new status quo. The actions taken by the Obama Administration drastically changed the landscape; for example, 42 states now use student achievement data as part of teacher evaluations, while just 15 did in 2009. The power of inertia is strong in politics, and undoing those policies (many of which are now embedded in state law) will be a hard road to hoe in most places. States will have more opportunity for hijinks under ESSA, and advocates will have to fight hard at the state level to hold them accountable — especially when it comes to taking tough action to turn around schools that are failing some or all of their students. But the new law contains important levers to hold states accountable, including crucial provisions added to escape the threat of filibuster by civil rights proponents in the Senate, and states are unlikely to do a complete reversal to their pre-No Child Left Behind ways.
No Child Left Behind was a historic achievement but had run its course. This new law gives our country the opportunity to finally move forward from the vitriolic debates around testing, Common Core, and federally mandated turnarounds that have cast a shadow over our schools in recent years. ESSA ushers in a new era of education in this country, and if properly implemented, it offers a brighter future than the tumult of operating under an expired No Child Left Behind.
Lanae Erickson Hatalsky is Vice President for Social Policy & Politics and Tamara Hiler is Education Policy Advisor at Third Way, a centrist think tank in Washington, D.C.
