Let’s get this out of the way: Your editor can only politely applaud today’s move by the Obama Administration to revoke Washington State’s waiver to ignore the No Child Left Behind Act and its accountability provisions. Why? Because the administration shouldn’t have granted a waiver to the Evergreen State — or engaged in what can best be called an education policy misadventure — in the first place.
Back in 2012, the peer review panel charged by the administration to review Washington State’s proposal concluded that the state faced “significant statutory obstacles” to implementing its promised teacher evaluation reforms. The fact that Evergreen State law didn’t require the use of student test score growth data in measuring teacher performance, along with rules only requiring tenured teachers to be evaluated every four years, meant that there was no way the state could actually proceed with any overhaul. More importantly, Washington State officials couldn’t even assure the Obama Administration that it could even get districts to implement the new evaluations.
Considering that replacing subjective observations with objective evaluations on student achievement over time was a key condition of attaining a No Child waiver, there was no way that the Obama Administration should have granted Washington State a waiver. The fact that the peer review panel found other problems with the state’s proposal should have also ended waiver consideration altogether. Yet U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan proceeded to do so, altogether ignoring the peer review findings. Two years later, the concerns expressed by the peer review panel were proven correct as the Evergreen State’s legislature proceeded to do the bidding of the National Education Association’s state affiliate and refused to pass Senate Bill 5246, which would have required districts to consider using student test score data in teacher evaluations within the next four years. [By the way: The defeat was particularly embarrassing for Gov. Jay Inslee, who had found himself battling with the NEA affiliate which backed his election two years ago, because an ally of his who wrote the bill, State Sen. Rosemary McAuliffe, reversed course and voted against it.]
If Duncan and his staff at the Department of Education simply paid heed to the peer review panel’s warnings and not granted Washington State a waiver, the Obama Administration wouldn’t have found itself having to revoke a waiver in the first place. The administration also wouldn’t also have to face the ire of the Evergreen State’s congressional delegation, especially Sen. Patty Murray, who chairs the committee now considering President Barack Obama’s last real chance to cement his overall legacy.
At the very least, the Obama Administration’s move to revoke Washington State’s waiver is one positive sign that it will occasionally be serious about holding the 42 other states granted waivers accountable for their promises to implement reforms and improve student achievement. It needs whatever credibility on the education policy front it has left. Given that Duncan, in particular, has found himself back-tracking on his threat last year to sanction California (by withholding at least some $7.3 billion in federal funding) for its move to eliminate all but a few of its standardized tests and ultimately scrap accountability, there was no way that the administration could not hold the Evergreen State to account. So expect Duncan to announce that it will revoke the waivers of at least one of the three other states — Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon — for failing to implement promised teacher evaluation reforms.
But if the Obama Administration didn’t embark on this counterproductive gambit — and if Obama and Duncan didn’t indulge their arrogant desires to place their stamp on federal education policy at the expense of sound and disciplined decisionmaking — there would be no waivers to revoke in the first place.
As you know by now, Dropout Nation has been among the few outlets pointing out the folly of the Obama Administration’s effort to ditch No Child and its sensible Adequate Yearly Progress accountability measures. By abandoning AYP and the law’s underlying goal of forcing states and districts to take responsibility for how they educate poor and minority kids, the administration weakens the decade of strong reform efforts which the law’s accountability provisions helped usher — including Race to the Top, the most-sensible of the initiatives the Obama Administration has undertaken. At the same time, in eviscerating AYP, the Obama Administration took away real data on school and student performance, making it more difficult for families from being the lead decision-makers reformers need them to be in order for overhauls to gain traction.
By allowing states to focus on the worst five percent of schools (along with another 10 percent or more of schools with wide achievement gaps), the administration is also letting districts not under watch off the hook for serving up mediocre instruction and curricula. Even worse, by allowing states such as Florida to set Plessy v. Ferguson-like proficiency targets, the Obama Administration has essentially allowed for poor and minority children — including young black men who look like Obama himself — to once again be subjected to the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Yet even these problems would have been relatively easy to resolve if not the Obama Administration didn’t abandon the policymaking discipline it displayed earlier on in implementing Race to the Top for aggressively careless and incompetent decisionmaking. By consistently ignoring concerns about waiver proposals raised by its own peer reviewers, and proudly granting waivers to states which hadn’t fully put their proposed reforms in place, the administration set its own self up for failure. This was particularly clear last August when Duncan granted a waiver to the California Office of Reform Education coalition of eight districts in spite of numerous concerns that the school systems would struggle mightily in meeting its promises, especially given that the Golden State itself was still under No Child’s accountability provisions.
The consequences — from allowing states to render poor and minority kids invisible altogether through such subterfuges as lumping all of subgroups into a so-called super subgroup category, to intolerable incoherence in federal education policy, to the array of new waivers letting states off the hook for improving student achievement (including so-called double-testing waivers given to eight states that allow them to evade accountability ostensibly to field test new Common Core-aligned tests) — were clear a long time ago. They have manifested themselves spectacularly. But the damage wrought by the waiver gambit have extended far beyond these matters. From move by Texas legislators and Gov. Rick Perry last year to derail three decades of successful reforms undertaken in the Lone Star State, to the struggles in New York to implement Common Core reading and math standards, the administration’s waiver gambit has effectively signaled to traditionalists and others that it is perfectly okay to return to the bad old days before No Child when futures of poor and minority children were allowed to be cast into the economic and social abyss.
Ultimately, it is the children who will suffer the most from the Obama Administration’s waiver gambit. At the same time, the administration is also paying a price. The administration’s legacy on school policy, tenuous even before it proceeded to eviscerate No Child, is even shakier as it squandered its earlier gains on the school reform front in order to place its stamp on federal education law. The president himself, weakened by scandals on the national security front, isolated from both Republicans and fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill tired of his penchant for using executive orders instead of negotiating with them properly, and scarred from the botched implementation of the Affordable Care Act, struggles to tout school reform as a meaningful accomplishment. As I noted in today’s column on the pages of Rare, the failures on this front explain why Duncan’s colleague, U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez, has all but displaced him as the administration’s education policy front man.
If only the Obama Administration stopped its arrogant effort to eviscerate No Child, it wouldn’t have to revoke Washington State’s waiver. More importantly, Obama would have a legacy on education policy worthy of his predecessor.