Free Republic

Not that that's a good thing. At the Cato Institute, several conservatives squared off to discuss education reform. David Cleary, Majority Staff Director for the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee attached to the office of Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), defended the recently-passed "Every Student Succeeds Act," or ESSA. The Heritage Foundation’s education policy analyst Lindsey Burke disagreed with ESSA's promised reforms, while former education commissioner Michael Hansen straddled both sides of the political aisle. Cleary claimed that ESSA scaled back some of the Department of Education's overreach with Common Core and Race to the Top but was not...

2015 came to a close with something many people thought they'd never see: The end of the No Child Left Behind Act, the federal education law that no one seemed to like, but that was long overdue for replacement because no one could agree on how to change it. Finally Congress and the Obama administration did agree, and to the delight of many conservatives NCLB was replaced with the Ensuring Student Success Act, a statute that appears to end federal micromanagement. Or does it? While the law says a lot that seems to rein Washington in, it leaves open several...

One thing about teaching that is easy for parents, policy-makers and others to forget is that working with students for hours every weekday to help them learn is very, very hard work. Even in the best of schools and even with supportive administrators, teachers have unrelenting jobs. In recent years, a growing number of teachers have found that reforms which force them to test students more than ever, collect more data than ever and attend more meetings than ever, are making the job literally impossible. That’s what happened to Scott Ervin, who has worked as a teacher, principal and discipline...

The Republican leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives has worked a tremendous disservice on its members and the American children, parents, and taxpayers.  Yesterday, after heavy wrangling by Republican leadership, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 5, the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). By failing to eliminate or even curb the federal testing mandates, the bill instead serves the testing industry rather than the people.  Under NCLB, that industry has grown to a $2 billion per year enterprise. As reported by PR Watch: School testing corporations have spent at least $20 million on lobbying along with wining and...

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in education continue to crumble when they encounter reality. “Not a single junior at Seattle’s Nathan Hale High School showed up to take this spring’s Smarter Balanced tests (SBAC—one version of the COMMON Core standardized tests), according to a school district spokeswoman,” according to the editors at Rethinking Schools. “Earlier this year, a group of teachers, administrators, parents, and students had agreed to boycott the standardized tests, but Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Larry Nyland threatened teachers with the loss of their teachers licenses if they didn’t administer the test.” “Under this pressure, the school’s...

Editor's Note: this column was co-authored by Lisa Henson, an attorney, activist, and mom, regarding the No Child Left Behind Re-authorization and the Common Core testing opt-out movement.The latest attempt to reauthorize No Child Left Behind (NCLB), sponsored by Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Patti Murray (D-WA) and euphemistically named the Every Child Achieves Act), has surprisingly gained bi-partisan support. But it targets the Opt-Out movement, one of the great grassroots phenomena. Here’s what’s going on.For decades, education policy-making has been increasingly centralized. Legislatures, local boards of education, and parents have been marginalized. In 2002, NCLB made things worse. Building on prior...

When it becomes successful in their own backyards, even die-hard liberals support school choice. “I support [means-tested, not universal] vouchers, I support homeschooling, I support charter schools, I support changes in the traditional system, [and] I support virtual schools,” Dr. Howard Fuller, author of No Struggle, No Progress and former Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent, said recently at an international educational summit in Austin, Texas. “For me it’s about providing low-income and working-class parents with the capacity to choose” among various schooling alternatives. howard fuller book While acknowledging that “[e]very public policy has an upside and a downside,” Fuller believes “the...

No way to know when Common Core will die or whether No Child Left Behind will suffer a similar fate but the trend nationwide is obvious. Parents, teachers, schools and districts want the federal government out Americans are learning the hard way that the federal government should not be permitted to impose one-size-fits-all standards to education. It was never intended to play a role in education and the absence of any mention in the Constitution is proof enough that education was intended to be supervised by the states where the school districts, schools, and parents are closest to the process....

The federal mandate to test U.S. school kids annually was at the center of a Senate panel’s work on Wednesday to fix the long outdated No Child Left Behind education law. […] Many educators and parents have complained that the law led to teaching to the test and too much test preparation, but supporters of the mandate such as civil rights and business groups said it’s a critical way to ensure that historically underserved groups of students are learning before it’s too late to help them. […] Sen. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee,...

Conservatives have regularly complained that the last time the Republican Party held both chambers of Congress and the White House – during six of President George W. Bush’s eight years in office – we missed a once-in-a-lifetime chance to dramatically roll back the federal leviathan.

As a result of its retreat from Common Core, a set of reading and math standards adopted by more than 40 states, Oklahoma was notified Thursday that it lost its waiver from key provisions of No Child Left Behind, the signature Bush-era education law. Under the waiver, Oklahoma — along with 42 other states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico — were released from the requirement under the old law that all students demonstrate proficiency in reading and math by 2014 or be declared failing. To receive the waiver, Oklahoma had committed to adopting more rigorous “college and career...

AUSTIN, Tex. — Former President George W. Bush called the achievement gap between white and black children “a national scandal” on Thursday and urged both parties to come together to address it as the central civil rights issue of the modern era. Paying tribute to President Lyndon B. Johnson at a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, Mr. Bush said the real test of the nation’s commitment to equality would be to fix an educational system that has tolerated low standards for too long. “There’s a growing temptation among public officials in both political parties at...

L.A. Unified and seven other California school districts on Tuesday won relief from some strict and costly provisions of federal education law. Besides Los Angeles, the school districts are Long Beach, Santa Ana, Fresno, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco and Sanger.

The Obama administration, teachers unions and some Republicans are joining forces to gut core provisions of the education law that was one of the Bush administration's crowning achievements....No Child Left Behind, which began in 2002, focused on the low performance of African-American and Hispanic students. It required that all students, no matter their race or ethnicity, reach proficiency by 2014. Since minority students had the longest road to travel, schools placed special emphasis on their instruction, and measured the quality of their instruction by ascertaining their performance on standardized tests. .."We can meet high-standards without forcing teachers and students to...

A Republican rewrite of the No Child Left Behind education law seems to be losing momentum as conservatives in the party don't think the bill does enough to reduce Washington’s influence and moderates warily eye proposals that would expand charter schools’ role. The sweeping education law’s update was the latest example of fractured Republicans in the House, where the party has a majority but often stumbles over internal disagreements. Majority Leader Eric Cantor on Tuesday visited a Washington public charter school and pledged his support for such programs that compete with traditional public schools for students and dollars. The Virginia...

Three Congressional bills have been introduced to alter No Child Left Behind as the 2014 proficiency deadline approaches. Newsmax reported on June 7 that “House Education Committee Chairman John Kline introduced a bill Thursday that would gut the decade-old No Child Left Behind law, returning power to the states to craft their own curriculums without strings attached to qualify for federal school funds” (emphasis added). However, so many states have been granted waivers on No Child Left Behind that the law has been essentially gutted already. Currently, 37 states and the District of Columbia have received waivers which exempt them...

A number of states have decided to separate their education achievement goals by race as part of their No Child Left Behind waivers. The question remains whether this move marks a “realistic” approach to education, or a major step backward for education fueled by lowered expectations for racial groups. “I put the question of states adjusting expectations based on a student’s ethnicity to Carla O’Connor, an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Michigan,” writes Emily Richmond for The Atlantic. “O’Connor, who specializes in African-American student achievement and urban education, said the new sliding bar for...

Nationwide states are taking a different road for No Child Left Behind, with 34 states now having applied for or been granted NCLB waivers by the Obama Administration. In particular, Florida has come under fire for its publicized race-based education goals. As the New York Times notes, only eight of 34 states may have avoided this waiver provision. According to Lizette Alvarez, reporting for the Times, “Florida is one of several states required to cut its achievement gap in half for all students by 2018, including those who are black, Hispanic, white, Asian, low-income, disabled or speak English as a...

According to CBS Tampa, the Florida State Board of Education just recently “passed a plan that sets goals for students in math and reading based upon their race.” It assumes that Asians will perform highest in Florida schools, followed by whites, Hispanics, and African-Americans. This mirrors the proficiencies demonstrated in the pictured ACT Composite scores chart, via IntellectualTakeout.org. “On Tuesday, the board passed a revised strategic plan that says that by 2018, it wants 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of black students to be reading at or above...

Texas is asking the federal government to waive requirements associated with No Child Left Behind, the signature package of education reforms championed by former President (and former Texas Governor) George W. Bush. The announcement comes after more than half of Texas schools failed to meet the annually escalating standards last school year. In a message on the Texas Education Agency website, the new Texas Education Commissioner Michael Williams announces plans to submit requests to the U.S. Department of Education waiving provisions in 2001’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, as well as parts of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act....