Nearly eight years overdue, No Child Left Behind has finally been replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act, signed into law by President Obama last week. Now, education reformers have turned their attention to ensuring the law is implemented as smoothly as possible.
Burdened by almost 14 years of federal prescriptions and waiver requests, school districts will gain increased flexibility in their policies as the law is implemented. The challenge for the Department of Education lies in trying to release definitions and clarifications of federal rules while complying with new limitations.
After years of waivers granted on condition of Obama-favored education reforms, Congress was eager to limit executive overreach. Congress included many restrictions on the secretary of education in the new law.
The new law gives states more power over what to do with failing schools, although it requires the creation of some state-designed plans to identify and reform failing schools. Federally-required tests are no longer tied to any federal consequences. The bill also prohibits the Department of Education from giving states special positive or negative incentives to adopt specific academic standards, as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been doing with Common Core using waivers from No Child Left Behind.
“The letter of the law has some really quite distinct and unprecedented restrictions on what the [Department of Education] can do,” said Claire Voorhees during a webcast on implementing the new law hosted by the conservative Fordham Institute. Voorhees is the director of K-12 reform for the Foundation for Excellence in Education. “An example is they cannot, in rulemaking, add a requirement in accountability that is outside the scope of the law. They can’t prescribe goals or assessment standards. So there are lots of restrictions like that.”
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But the department still has to explain how the law is supposed to work from a federal viewpoint.
“On the other hand, in creating those restrictions and in other pieces there’s also a lot of lack of clarity in the law. … [The department has] a constitutional responsibility to explain to states what these things mean,” Voorhees said.
This needs to be done as soon as possible. Much of the Department of Education’s staff will prepare to leave office when a new president is inaugurated in January 2017. There will also be some turnover in January 2016, with John King taking over for Duncan, who’s retiring.
The rulemaking process could take months, years, depending on how thorough the department is.
Noelle Ellerson, associate executive director of policy and advocacy at the American Association of School Administrators, says efforts from states and school districts can make the process smoother. “We have to be diligent to not set up a scenario that’s too prescriptive,” Ellerson said. She added that state and local education agencies need to figure out what questions they have during the interim 2016 to 2017 school year before new rules take effect. Under new rules, states should have a lot more flexibility with accountability and testing. “But with that comes expanded responsibility. And they have one shot to get this right,” Ellerson said.
In the meantime, schools won’t need to enact any major changes before the 2016 to 2017 school year. Even if they wanted to, it may be wise to wait until the 2017 to 2018 school year to make big changes, when it will be clear what federal rules schools need to handle.
It’s a long and arduous process, but schools should be better off for it in the end. “You can see why there’s going to be a lot of lawyers involved in this process,” Fordham President Michael Petrilli said. “My head is starting to hurt already.”
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
