While it is true that NCLB “created the nation’s first reform-minded federal regulatory regime in education, this regulatory system still left a great deal of power and flexibility to the states; it was up to the states to develop proficiency standards and accountability programs to ensure that all students had access to a quality education. As established in the previous section, it was not until President Obama’s waiver system was put into place that strong opposition to federal intrusion under this law began. The component of the plan which created the most difficulties for the states, and for which they sought relief under the waiver program, was the Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) requirement; under this requirement, states needed to set
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ESSA does add that schools should also be measured according to English Language Learner (ELL) proficiency, one other academic standard, and one non-academic standard. These new measures are a slight improvement over NCLB, but they are far too vague and ill-defined to qualify as the ‘world-class’ standards recommended by researchers such as Darling-Hammond. Schools need to be subject to much more robust and comprehensive standards than standardized tests, graduation rates (which are generally used as the other “academic standard”), and an unspecific ‘non-academic’ …show more content…
While ESSA does also stipulate that states must have “college and career” standards, it does very little to outline what those are — in the name, of course, of state and local control of education. It is well established in the literature on NCLB that when the states were given the freedom to create their own definition of what constituted ‘proficiency,’ the result was very uneven definitions that led to wide discrepancies between states. When evaluating the potential efficacy of ESSA, the state 's’ overwhelming failure under NCLB to come up with robust definitions of proficiency seems likely to repeat itself; only, in this instance, it will be under the guise of ‘college and career-based
ESSA does add that schools should also be measured according to English Language Learner (ELL) proficiency, one other academic standard, and one non-academic standard. These new measures are a slight improvement over NCLB, but they are far too vague and ill-defined to qualify as the ‘world-class’ standards recommended by researchers such as Darling-Hammond. Schools need to be subject to much more robust and comprehensive standards than standardized tests, graduation rates (which are generally used as the other “academic standard”), and an unspecific ‘non-academic’ …show more content…
While ESSA does also stipulate that states must have “college and career” standards, it does very little to outline what those are — in the name, of course, of state and local control of education. It is well established in the literature on NCLB that when the states were given the freedom to create their own definition of what constituted ‘proficiency,’ the result was very uneven definitions that led to wide discrepancies between states. When evaluating the potential efficacy of ESSA, the state 's’ overwhelming failure under NCLB to come up with robust definitions of proficiency seems likely to repeat itself; only, in this instance, it will be under the guise of ‘college and career-based