“No Child Left Behind to be replaced with new education standards”
The best thing that they could do would be to dismantle the Federal Department of Education completely and leave it to the states. Education in the USA was so much better before the DoE was brought into existence.
After 15 years of No Child Left Behind, schools across the country are getting ready to embrace a new strategy for accountability known as the Every Student Succeeds Act.
The bill was passed by the United States Congress in December, and will be implemented when the 2017-18 school year begins.
“No Child Left Behind was extremely prescriptive in terms of what it required states to do in terms of accountability school improvement, all the funding streams and what that money could be used for,” Idaho State Department of Education Chief Policy Advisor Duncan Robb said. “The Every Student Succeeds Act, it lifts many of those requirements.”
The ESSA also aims to make the educational effort more collaborative between schools and the federal government. In the past, NCLB set strict standards for growth and proficiency, with teachers and superintendents at risk of losing their jobs if they fell below set standards for an extended period of time. Now in its place is a policy meant to help struggling schools rather than to punish them.
If a school falls in the bottom 5 percent in growth, proficiency and graduation rates, they are eligible to receive additional federal funding. The challenge now is making sure those schools still feel compelled to hold themselves to a higher standard, even if struggling means more funding.
“What we know from 15 years of No Child Left Behind is that … it just created a lot of animosity between schools and districts and the folks in the state capital and state department,” Robb said. “People at the state department come to work every day thinking about how they can support schools, but that wasn’t coming across because they were required to do all these punitive things.”
The Idaho SDE visited Moscow Middle School on Nov. 7 to go over new policies and regulations with local teachers and superintendents.
Via Daily News