Does waiver plan end No Child Left Behind era? (The Lookout)

Obama gestures at a sixth-grader as he announces the waiver program (AP)

President Obama announced Friday that he will grant waivers to states struggling to meet the high standardized test scores required under the No Child Left Behind education law.

At least 20 states are expected to request the waivers next year. The White House says it will only grant those requests if the petitioning states agree to implement Obama-approved reforms such as evaluating teachers using their students' test scores.

Ever since he took office in 2009, Obama has tried to get Congress to reauthorize No Child Left Behind--which distributes the lion's share of federal education spending to states. However, lawmakers have been unable to reach consensus on how to retool the 2001 law. House Republicans put forward several bills that would largely dismantle the law earlier this month, but it's unlikely that all the bills would pass.

President George W. Bush signed the law in early 2002 as a way to hold schools responsible for low test scores and big achievement gaps between minority and white students. The law says every child must pass math and reading exams by 2014 and labels schools with students who don't improve on standardized tests by a certain percentage each year "failing." After several years of not improving enough, a school can be shut down or taken over by the state.

Education Secretary Duncan claimed that as many as 80 percent of schools would be labelled failures under the law by 2014. Last year, 37 percent of schools were labeled as failing. Under the waiver plan, states will be asked to focus on turning around the bottom 5 percent of schools, not on every school that is called failing under the law.

The waiver plan will let states design their own strategy for how to turn around their worst-performing schools; however, it still expects states to adopt many of the reforms Obama champions in order to qualify for the waiver.?Critics, including House Education Committee Chair John Kline (R-Minn), say this amounts to a backdoor reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. "While I appreciate some of the policies outlined in the secretary's waivers plan, I simply cannot support a process that grants the secretary of education sweeping authority to handpick winners and losers," Kline told the New York Times.

And fans of the 10-year-old version of the education law say the waiver plan is too easy on states.

"I'm skeptical about states' ability or will to do great reform or close the achievement gap," Margaret Spellings, George W. Bush's Education secretary, told the Washington Post. "The reason this whole waiver issue is before us is [the states] told us they were going to do something and didn't do it. And now they want a waiver against their own promises."

Michael Petrilli, vice president of the Fordham Institute, said in an interview with The Lookout that the waiver plan represents a rolling back of the accountability measures in No Child Left Behind. "I think it's fair to say that this will effectively neuter No Child Left Behind," he said.

But the core tenet of the law will remain intact: Schools will still be required to test their students and report those scores to the public. They also will still have to separate out how different demographic groups perform within their student bodies.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/education/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110923/us_yblog_thelookout/does-waiver-plan-end-no-child-left-behind-era

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