Dive Brief:
- As No Child Left Behind waivers near their three-year anniversary, some critics are bemoaning the inflexibility they ironically represent.
- The waivers started out as a way for states to get out of the stringent Bush-era education policy (which remains in effect until the Elementary Secondary Education Act is reauthorized), but the Obama administration has tied the waivers to many of its own policy efforts, causing some tension.
- Conditions for waiver eligibility have included adopting the Common Core State Standards, along with new tests and teacher performance evaluations tied to those standards.
Dive Insight:
While NCLB was ridiculed for transitioning the United States into the age of high-stakes testing, some critics are arguing the waivers aren't doing much to alleviate the situation. While they give flexibility from that law's testing requirements, they replace them with their own. "They made so-called high-stakes testing much higher-stakes," Margaret Spellings, President George W. Bush's secretary of education and a lead designer of NCLB, told Education Week.
The Obama administration, however, disagrees, maintaining that its policies are different from NCLB because states are given some wiggle room when creating their personal accountability systems. (In other words, which testing consortium they will use for Common Core-aligned exams, etc.). It also gives states control of how they spend federal dollars when it comes to low-income students — under NCLB, tutoring was the main focus.
That doesn't mean everyone wants to be a part of Obama's plan. According to Education Week, Utah is considering voluntarily giving up its NCLB waiver in protest of what it views as stringent mandates. And many of the states that never received waivers — such as Californian and Vermont — are doing just fine.
"We've spent much less time looking over our shoulder and looking at what the federal government is doing," California Chief Deputy Superintendent Richard Zeiger told Education Week. " [This] enabled us to strike our own pathway."
Lastly, the fact that the Education Department has even backtracked and taken away waivers, as with Washington state, is another reason critics are skeptical. This uncertainty of keeping the waivers is exactly what Zeiger is talking about when he said Californian didn't have to look over its shoulder.