Education Next – Frederick Hess
“I’m still shocked that the Every Student Succeeds Act actually got done. As late as this fall, I figured the odds that it would happen were really, really long. Shows what I know. Meanwhile, all the people who breathlessly predicted it would happen in 2010… and 2011… and 2012… and 2013… and 2014… finally got it right. Yay! Anyway, now that the dust has settled, here are five quick thoughts on what went down last week. First, I obviously like it. The big shifts broadly track with what I’ve been urging for a long while (as in the Conservative Reform Network’s “Room to Grow” compilation or in “A Federal Education Agenda” with my colleague Andrew Kelly). It retains NCLB’s federal framework for testing reading and math in grades 3-8 and again in high school, in addition to science in elementary, middle, and high school, while getting the federal government out of the business of trying to judge teacher or school quality or how to “fix” schools. This strikes me as congruent with what the federal government is supposed to do in our system and can do competently. In that, it did something exquisitely rare, which is to shrink the federal footprint in the domestic sphere (the normal course of events is a steady increase of federal control). I’d argue, in fact, that this marks the sharpest reversal of federal ambitions in domestic policy in 20 years—since the welfare reform act of 1996.”(more)