Education Department Drops New NCLB Waiver Guidance

The Department of Education is letting states apply to renew their waivers from No Child Left Behind, President George W. Bush's landmark education reform law, for three and in some cases four more years, but they'll have to do more to show they're turning around low-performing schools and closing student achievement gaps. 

In new guidance released Thursday, the department told chief state school officers they'll be able to apply to renew their waivers – many of which expire at the end of this school year – through the 2017-18 school year. States the department deems to be fully meeting the requirements of their waivers – such as implementing college and career ready standards, and teacher and principal evaluation systems based largely on student growth measures – could receive flexibility through the 2018-19 school year, long after the current administration leaves office. If Congress takes action to amend the law, which has been due for reauthorization since 2007, the department would give guidance to transition to the new law, officials said.

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Currently, 43 states and the District of Columbia have received waivers from No Child Left Behind, which allow them to forego certain accountability requirements law in exchange for implementing education reforms backed by the Obama administration. Two states – Washington and Oklahoma – had their waivers revoked for failing to follow through with some of those requirements. Oklahoma lost its waiver in August after it dropped the Common Core State Standards, and Washington's waiver was pulled in April due to problems with its teacher evaluation system.

Some education advocacy groups were pleased with the emphasis on requiring states to have a solid plan for improving student achievement for all groups of students – including English language learners, students with disabilities and low-income students – and prohibiting states from giving schools high scores on state accountability reports if they have large achievement gaps. 

"The renewal guidelines issued today begin to restore the focus of federal accountability on all groups of children," said Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, in a statement. "States will now be prohibited from giving top ratings to schools with high or improving performance for some groups, but not others. As Americans, we should welcome that renewed focus on the inequalities that eat away at our democracy."

But teachers unions saw the move as a step back from and olive branch the department offered when Education Secretary Arne Duncan said over the summer that a fixation on testing was "sucking the oxygen" out of classrooms and said states could ask for more time before tying teacher evaluations to student test scores. 

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the department is again offering waivers in exchange for policies that promoted a growth in student testing. 

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"The waiver guidance issued today says: No Child Left Behind failed, but you can get out of it if you have college- and career-ready standards, high-stakes testing on those standards, and teacher evaluations that rely heavily on testing," Weingarten said in a statement. "At best, it permits, and at worst, it rewards, states that habitually over-test – like Florida, whose kids now lose an average of 70 days of instruction due to testing. It lacks a concrete strategy to address the out-of-classroom factors that account for two-thirds of what affects student achievement. And sadly, even when focusing on teachers as a silver bullet, it lacks the answer to how we recruit, retain and support teachers at hard-to-staff schools."

Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, echoed Weingarten's concerns, saying the country's testing fixation "has reached the point of insanity."

"Whatever valuable information testing mandates provided have been completely overshadowed by the enormous collateral damage inflicted on too many students," Eskelsen Garcia said in a statement. "Our schools have been reduced to mere test prep factories and we are too-often ignoring student learning and opportunity in America."