JOVE23
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http://www.nytimes.c...ion/23educ.html
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Obama to Waive Parts of No Child Left Behind
By SAM DILLON
Criticizing Congress for months of inaction in updating No Child Left Behind, President Obama on Friday offered to lift the law’s most onerous provisions, including its 2014 deadline for bringing all students to proficiency in reading and math, for states that promise to follow his administration’s own school improvement agenda.
“Congress hasn’t been able to do it, so I will,” Mr. Obama said in a speech at the White House.
“Starting today, we’ll be giving states more flexibility to meet high standards.”
Under the plan outlined by the White House, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is inviting states that agree to overhaul low-performing schools and adopt more rigorous teacher evaluation systems to apply for relief from the Bush-era law’s 2014 deadline and other unpopular provisions. States that qualify for the waivers would be allowed to design their own school accountability systems.
Mr. Duncan sent to state governments on Friday a 17-page guidance document outlining 10 key provisions of the law that the administration is offering to waive for states that qualify. Besides the 2014 proficiency deadline, they also include requirements that schools declared failing must provide students with after-school tutoring and free bus transportation to better schools nearby. Administration officials said both those provisions of the law have been ineffective.
“This is the beginning of the end of the No Child era,” said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonpartisan research group.
Under the new policy, only those states that have adopted new academic standards that the administration calls “college and career ready” will be eligible to receive the waivers, according to White House documents distributed on Thursday. Also, states applying for the flexibility must sketch their plans for transforming their lowest-performing schools and for establishing new ways to measure the performance of teachers and principals.
Those that meet those conditions will be eligible to ask Mr. Duncan to relieve them from the 2014 deadline on student proficiency, which state and school district leaders have long said was an impossibly high bar.
The qualifying states may also ask to be allowed to replace the No Child law’s pass-fail school report card system with accountability systems of their own design, and for new flexibility in using an estimated $1 billion of federal education money.
The commitments the administration is requiring of states closely resemble elements of the administration’s own blueprint for rewriting the No Child law, sent to Congress last year but never acted upon.
“They want to tell the states that from now on the states are going to be in charge, not the federal government,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Fordham Institute, a conservative research group. “But to get this flexibility, states have to agree to conditions that are tantamount to the blueprint that Duncan put out a year ago, so this looks like a kind of unilateral reauthorization of the law.”
The No Child law, signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, requires testing in reading and math from grades 3 through 8 and once in high school, and reporting of scores for groups of students including racial and ethnic minorities. Even the law’s critics praise it for drawing attention to student achievement gaps. But Mr. Duncan says the law, long overdue for an update, has become an obstacle as many states seek to put in new standards and other improvements.
The law gives the secretary of education broad authority to waive some of its provisions, but some Republicans have insisted that it does not empower him to condition waivers on states’ adopting a particular education agenda.
“While I appreciate some of the policies outlined in the secretary’s waivers plan, I simply cannot support a process that grants the secretary of education sweeping authority to handpick winners and losers,” said Representative John Kline, Republican of Minnesota, who is chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee.
“This sets a dangerous precedent. Make no mistake — this is a political move that could have a damaging impact on Congressional efforts to enact lasting reforms to current elementary and secondary education law.”
The House last week passed the first of a series of bills Mr. Kline has introduced in an effort to rewrite the No Child law, but there has been no prospect for bipartisan consensus on a full rewrite in the House or the Senate.
Under the process administration officials described on Thursday, some states that apply for waivers this fall could be reviewed by the Education Department early next year, perhaps in time to make changes before they administer spring testing. For other states applying early next year, the waivers would probably not take effect until the 2012-13 school year.
Only a handful of states, probably including Georgia, Kentucky, Wisconsin and Colorado, would be ready to apply for the waivers right away, said Eugene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, which worked closely with the administration in preparing the waivers process. Perhaps 20 other states could apply in 2012 after watching how the process unfolds for other states, he said.
And some states will probably not apply at all, because they are wary of disrupting their current systems of school accountability when Congress is likely to thoroughly rewrite the law within the next couple of years, Mr. Wilhoit said.
Even in states granted waivers, many of the No Child law’s fundamental features would remain in effect, including the requirements that all schools administer reading and math tests every year, and release the scores to the public in a form that shows the progress made by minority groups and disabled students.
“Students and schools need relief from No Child Left Behind and from the high stakes tests, so this looks like a good move,” said Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union. “But this is just a short-term solution. We still need Congress to rewrite the law.”
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