By Charles Barone, DFER Policy Director
Part 4 of 4
All this week, this blog series has focused on whether the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) could be reauthorized in the next two years. Monday’s discussed a possibile shift in DC politics from partisan gridlock to bipartisan pragmatism. Tuesday’s focused on that would look like on ESEA for Republicans, and yesterday’s focused on Democrats.
Today’s post focuses on what the Obama Administration would have to do politically to move ESEA reauthorization forward. Not surprisingly, history shows that Presidential leadership is crucial. President Clinton led in spurring states to set academic standards, create assessments, design accountability systems, and start-up public charter schools. (See here and here.) President George W. Bush led – although he entered the White House in sync with where some Democratic leaders in Congress already wanted to go – federal efforts to disaggregate data, test all students annually in math and reading in grades 3-8, and hold schools accountable for results.
The Obama Administration pursued the same model right out of the gate with Race to the Top (RttT). The President and Secretary Duncan defined the Administration’s priorities early and clearly, and used the bully pulpit to spur states in that direction. As a result, the initiative catalyzed unprecedented changes in state and local education policies.
With ESEA, however, the Administration never seemed to get out in front of the process. Although they did issue a highly touted ESEA blueprint, it was vague on specifics. Maybe they had political fatigue from Race to the Top. Maybe they read the political landscape differently. It could have been any number of things.
After the Blueprint was issued, Administration officials seemed to convey that their priority, i.e., where they thought ESEA could/would make a difference, was state adoption of college and career standards. That’s a worthy goal. But the reality was that the Common Core Standards Initiative was already underway, led by states and NGO’s. Moreover, most people think that the Administration’s advocacy for Common Core makes both states’ adoption of Common Core and ESEA reauthorization more, rather than less, politically difficult.
Even if you give the Administration the benefit of the doubt on standards, it never really got its overall ESEA reauthorization message in sync. A few examples:
- The Administration pressed for an ESEA tradeoff: higher state standards tied to college and career readiness, in exchange for state and local license to set their own goals for which students would be expected to meet those standards, and when (if ever).
- To make its case for eliminating annual progress goals, the Administration blamed the ambitious yearly benchmarks under ESEA for causing states to lower their student performance standards (for the record, fewer than half of states did, and more than half didn’t).
- This seemed to imply that there were only two equally bad options: set ambitious annual goals for performance and let states lower standards, or make states maintain high standards with no clear goals for student progress toward them.
- The Administration pressed to require intervention only in the 5% of lowest-performing schools [with another 10% flagged as unsatisfactory]. This might make sense for triaging interventions. But it doesn’t make sense if it sends the message to states and districts that they don’t have to worry about student performanve in the other 85%.
- And there is reason to worry because, if college and career readiness is the goal, none of this adds up. For example, [insert your favorite gloomy high school graduation, or college entry or completion stat here] about half of students who graduate high school and enter college require remedial instruction, a disproportionate share of whom belong to groups (e.g., minorities and low-income families) that ESEA is supposed to serve.