Last week, President Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The new law reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, replacing the much maligned No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which governed US public and private schools since 2002.
Now that the ink is dry, here are some quick thoughts on what the law will mean for the various stakeholders in K-12 education.
State education chiefs. Thanks to ESSA, state departments of education will become new hubs of innovation and accountability. With a green light from Congress to take over more responsibility for curriculum, standards and testing, state chiefs can work with the US Department of Education (DOE) and not feel as if they work for it. Yet these new responsibilities will also create a human capital strain on state departments of education. ESSA will also push states to develop more thoughtful technological and financial capacities to keep up with their new responsibilities.
Barack Obama signs the Every Student Succeeds Act into law in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building at the White House in Washington December 10, 2015. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst.
School superintendents. Education is a local matter, but the rules and regulations that shape its delivery come from the state capitol and Washington, D.C. On face value, with ESSA, superintendents have one less stakeholder to manage. The challenge, nonetheless, is the possibility that a state department of education will become more prescriptive with new power, not less. Rather than having two stakeholders to manage, a superintendent may have a bigger one that is closer to home.
Principals. ESSA will benefit principals through professional development. The on-going practice of plucking the best and brightest teachers from the classroom to become principals could accelerate given the incentives in ESSA. This could result in fewer good teachers in the classroom, and could result in more really well prepared but only partially committed principals who jumped at the chance to become a school leader due to higher pay.
Teacher unions. NCLB was the bane of teacher unions’ existence. ESSA abolishes Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), meaning that teachers will be able to focus more on teaching and less on test scores. While NCLB defined what made for a highly qualified teacher, this will now be left to the states. Teachers will benefit from ESSA because their “local” voice will matter to “local” policy discussions about education. The challenge is that ESSA will not settle the teacher evaluation problem – it has always been a state issue and will continue to be so, but now with less federal input.
Parents. Fewer tests, an empirically based approach to student learning and outcomes, and access to better teachers and schools are all wins for parents.
Overall, ESSA is a win for each of these stakeholders. It returns power to state and local officials and curtails some of the power of the federal government.
Still, the group that matters most in the new law is students, and we will first have to see how the adults behave before we can know what it means for them.
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