Leaving behind No Child Left Behind

It had passed with overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress and reverses a decades-long trend of more federal control of K-12 education. The new law is imperfect but nevertheless an important reform that gives states greater flexibility in holding schools accountable for academic achievement.

It reflects widespread agreement that the No Child Left Behind Act, signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, was deeply flawed.

No Child Left Behind greatly expanded federal involvement in education, imposing a standardized testing system obliging schools to demonstrate progress toward making every child proficient in reading and math by 2014. Schools were also required to narrow the gap in achievement and graduation rates between poor, minority and disabled students and their higher-achieving peers.

Schools that failed to achieve “adequate yearly progress” were labeled deficient and punished. Underperforming schools were forced to change their curricula, fire weak teachers, lengthen the school day and make other “fundamental changes” to avoid closure.

It was well-intentioned — too many children were being betrayed by schools run less for them than for the educational and policital establishment — but unfortunately the law created perverse incentives.

Many states dumbed down standards so all schools passed and avoided sanctions. Teachers narrowed their curricula and taught solely to get children through their tests rather than genuinely to educate them. Getting higher scores does not necessarily mean students understand the subject material. Worse still, standardized test scores have actually declined since No Child Left Behind was enacted.

In 2010, the Obama administration began granting low-performing states — this law category would eventually come to include 40 of the 50 states — waivers from the law’s most difficult mandates, including the 100 percent proficiency requirement.

But to be granted a waiver, states had to adopt federal academic standards known as “common core,” which effectively established the Department of Education as a national school board.

The Every Student Succeeds Act is a name that tempts fate absurdly — the word “every” is the same as the 100 percent proficiency, and is as unattainable — but the new law is nevertheless an improvement. It mitigates some of the most glaring flaws of the law it replaces. It ends the federal waiver system and gives states, not the federal government, the job of evaluating schools and establishing systems to make teachers and schools accountable. The federal government still must approve states’ accountability plans within 120 days of submission. But there are limits on whether Washington can reject them.

States are still required to enact high standards to close student achievement gaps and to report annual achievement scores to the federal government, breaking down the results by race, disability, income and other factors.

But there’s less federally-required testing and those that remain won’t have the same sort of federal financial consequences. States can pick from among academic factors, not only test scores but also graduation rates, student surveys and other variables, to assess student and school performance.

It still requires too many federally-mandated standardized tests in math and reading, and it increases spending, in part by codifying a $250 million grant program for federal pre-K education programs.

A better bill would have expanded school choice through Title I portability, allowing states to give federal funds to poor students to attend public or private school of their choice.

It would be best if the federal government’s role in education policy dwindled ultimately to zero, but this isn’t on the horizon for now.

Most of the the new law’s shortcomings result from the kind of compromises often necessary to secure agreement among a diverse coalition of interest groups and enactment in a divided Washington. But they also provide an early list of additional reforms for Republicans to pursue should they retain their congressional majority and win the presidency next year.

Despite its flaws, the Every Student Succeeds Act should be seen as a victory for a conservative vision of education that begins to restore control to its proper place in the states.