Three states at risk of losing No Child Left Behind waivers

This material was published by the Daily Kos.

byLaura Clawson Follow for Daily Kos Labor

Education Secretary Arne Duncan is threatening that if Kansas, Oregon, and Washington state can't meet the crappy conditions he laid out for states to get No Child Left Behind waivers, they'll lose the waivers and have to meet the crappy conditions of No Child Left Behind. Duncan's waivers require that states tie teacher evaluations to student tests that weren't designed to evaluate teachers and haven't been proven effective at doing so. No Child Left Behind, on the other hand, tied school funding to test performance goals that have been generally agreed to be not just unreasonable but flat-out impossible.

Each of the three states is in danger of losing its NCLB waiver for different reasons: Oregon, which is expanding a pilot program from 12 districts to 25, is simply not moving fast enough for the Obama Education Department, because why would you want to take the time to try to get things right? Kansas, too, isn't far enough along in designing at method of enforcing teaching to the test and tying teachers' fates to that. Washington law currently allows teacher assessment to be done by means other than state tests, at the discretion of the school district, so the federal government says that to get a waiver, Washington will need to change its law.

The emphasis on high-stakes testing and evaluating teachers on test results should be a whole lot more controversial than it is—it gets presented as the road to improvement, but is emphatically not practiced in, for instance, Finland, a country often cited for its excellent education system. Additionally, the question of how to evaluate teachers by the results of student tests is an enormously complicated one and many of the efforts to answer it have been disastrous. Yet there's little room for those complexities in today's money-driven education policy debate, and Duncan and the president he serves under have shown next to no interest in acknowledging that their magic bullet—test-based evaluation—is, in the ways it's being implemented at their demand, more likely to be a regular bullet tearing at our education system.

No Child Left Behind was a disaster. Unfortunately, President Obama's policies are no improvement.