John Richard Schrock: Every Student Succeeds Act is new disaster

Hailed as a bipartisan success by Washington, D.C., the successor to the No Child Left Behind Act lays down a new blueprint to further de-professionalize education.

The original Elementary and Secondary Education Act was put into effect by President Johnson. That act merely provided block grant funds to states to support education for disabled and at-risk students. There was no attempt to drive curricula from Washington.

Federal interference with the states’ responsibility for schooling essentially began with President George W. Bush, who brought his No Child Left Behind strategy from Texas. Because education is a state’s right, he used the growing amount of money issued to states under federal title programs to extort compliance with No Child, a system designed to label school districts and teachers as failures and turn schools into test-prep factories.

At the time of its passage, I condemned No Child as a disastrous attack on teacher professionalism. I compared the requirement that schools have all students proficient by 2014 to a requirement that hospitals and doctors have all patients survive. Even the education newspaper of record, Education Week, admits that No Child is now universally despised.

Enough damage had accumulated by the 2008 elections that many hoped President Obama would work to overthrow No Child. Instead, under Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the “Race to the Top” program was No Child “on steroids.” With nearly all schools failing the absurd requirement to have students 100 percent proficient, these past few years have seen massive state waivers. The new law does not replace No Child as much as replace Duncan’s untenable waiver system.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) alters the federal role, shifting some but not all curricular control back to states. But it is also packed with special interests and a disdain for teachers and teacher-training institutions. States will have to measure “students’ opportunity to learn.” States will have to develop accountability systems and report out more subgroups. States will have to include English-language proficiency in their reporting and still have to identify and address the bottom 5 percent of schools.

However, the most serious problems center on the ESSA’s continued disdain for professionally trained teachers. ESSA promotes alternate-route teacher preparation academies – that is, nonuniversity programs. This diverts some teacher training to programs run by nonprofit organizations, such as Teach for America, where most new teachers soon move to other fields.

But ESSA continues to usurp state authority by saying that these alternate-route teachers should be paid more: “at least the equivalent of a master’s degree in education for the purpose of hiring, retention, compensation and promotion in the state.” The feds have no jurisdiction to determine what salaries states should pay teachers – another example of how ESSA continues the federal overreach. And the sole criteria for judging teacher competency continues to be student test scores.

Bringing these test-prep rookies into the classroom at a master’s-level salary, which well-trained regular-route teachers will not reach for six or more years, will depress teacher morale even further. And for school districts nationwide, it will raise the cost of hiring such teachers.

Though ESSA ends a few of the problems of No Child Left Behind, it creates a whole new disaster.

This story was originally published December 16, 2015 at 6:01 PM with the headline "John Richard Schrock: Every Student Succeeds Act is new disaster."