Federal education policy might get a major reform for the first time since 2002, and the New York Times editorial page wants to help reform get across the finish line.
Over the course of the year, the Every Student Succeeds Act has made its way through the long legislative process. The final version has now passed the House of Representatives and is expected to be voted on in the Senate on Tuesday. President Obama has not confirmed that he will sign the bill if it passes, but is generally expected to.
“The compromise version that passed the House last week and that deserves to pass the Senate as well preserves important parts of the original law while eliminating some significant flaws,” the editorial board wrote Monday. “The bill isn’t perfect. But it is a considerable improvement over the original law and would continue pushing schools toward better performance.”
The Times supports the bill mainly because it would reform how standardized testing is conducted. “The part of [No Child Left Behind] that labeled schools in need of improvement and subjected them to sanctions was flawed. … School officials who were afraid of the failing label deployed constant waves of so-called diagnostic exams that were actually practice rounds for the real thing. These were often junk tests that were useless for measuring the writing and reasoning skills,” the editorial board writes. As a result, the average student now takes about eight standardized tests a year, though only two are federally required. Over the course of prekindergarten to 12th grade, a typical student takes 112 standardized tests.
The bill still requires testing annually in math and reading from third grade through eighth grade, and once again at some point in high school. The federally-prescribed consequences, however, are gone, although states still need some kind of plan to improve failing schools.
“It takes some emphasis away from testing by requiring states to rate schools on other measures of student progress, including graduation rates, advance courses and so on. States are still required to take steps to improve the lowest performing schools and to make clear when subgroups are performing poorly in any school,” the Times’ editorial board writes.
Before last week’s House vote, it seemed as if the biggest remaining obstacle for the bill would have been getting approval from very conservative members of the House. And that turned out to be true. Every Democrat and 178 Republicans in the House voted for the bill, with 64 Republicans dissenting. An earlier endorsement from the Times’ liberal editorial board may have been used by very conservative Republicans as ammo against the bill.
The last federal education overhaul was the No Child Left Behind Act, implemented in 2002. It technically expired in 2007, so reform is more than eight years overdue.
The bill also prohibits the Department of Education from encouraging states to adopt specific academic standards, as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been doing with Common Core using waivers from No Child Left Behind.
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
