There’s plenty of handwringing over the Obama Administration’s decision yesterday to not extend the No Child waiver given to Oklahoma two years ago. Common Core supporters such as Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute are concerned that the underlying reason for the administration’s decision — the Sooner State’s lack of college-and-career ready curricula standards after it moved in May to halt Common Core implementation — plays into the narrative of opponents that the standards are merely a federal scheme forced upon states. In fact, Petrilli is so worried that he called in a Politico article for Gov. Mary Fallin to file suit against the Obama Administration over its waiver decision, claiming that it is illegal for the federal government to put conditions on its waivers.
Meanwhile Sooner State officials are annoyed that the Obama Administration’ decision will force them back into using No Child’s Adequate Yearly Progress accountability rules instead of the A-to-F grading system they put in place as a condition of their successful waiver request. In the process, the state fears that it will have to label 1,600 of its 1,763 schools as not meeting AYP, something it wouldn’t have to do under the A-to-F system.
From where your editor sits, both perspectives are off the mark. Certainly the No Child waivers have certainly proven to be a disastrous adventure in education policymaking — and one that is damaging a decade of systemic reform efforts. [More on that later in this piece.] The Obama Administration should stop with this policymaking run amock right now. At the same time, the administration is correct in holding Oklahoma accountable for its failures to keep the promise that was a condition of attaining the waiver in the first place. The Sooner State could have saved the waiver if it just did a little work. So it deserves no sympathy for bad decision-making.
One thing to keep in perspective: Oklahoma keeps its No Child waiver until the end of the 2014-2015 school year. This means that Sooner State officials could immediately address the matter of college-and-career ready standards within the next six months, submit a new No Child waiver request for approval. Given that the Obama Administration has been giving out waivers like candy — and even granting extensions to states such as Indiana in spite of strong concerns over how the sparring between reformers and traditionalist-oriented Supt. Glenda Ritz is bogging down efforts to implement promised reforms — Oklahoma can easily receive a new waiver by early next year. So all the worrying is unnecessary to start.
Another thing to keep in mind: Common Core opponents have long ago abandoned any effort to weave the No Child waivers into their narrative that Common Core was an Obama Administration plot to expand federal control over education. The waivers are hardly mentioned in Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s latest lawsuit in his jihad against the standards, while other opponents barely mention it at all. Perhaps Common Core foes will now try again to weave the waivers into their fanciful narrative. But even they have long ago given up on that because the waiver gambit doesn’t fit comfortably into their timeline.
Most importantly of all, we must keep in mind that under the No Child waiver gambit, the Obama Administration is essentially allowing states to ignore federal law — most-notably AYP and other accountability provisions — in exchange for implementing promised reforms. One of them is putting in place college-and-career ready standards of some kind that help kids attain the comprehensive college-preparatory curricula. While implementation of Common Core’s reading and math standards have been supported by the Obama Administration, the waiver process is structured in such a loose way that any standards that someone can call college-and-career ready can pass muster. This was clear two years ago when the Obama Administration granted a No Child waiver to Virginia despite evidence that its Standards of Learning regime were rated inferior to both Common Core and standards previous enacted by Indiana and Massachusetts by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. This was also clear yesterday when the administration extended Indiana’s waiver in spite of the fact that its officials halted Common Core implementation last year.
Given that Oklahoma had begun implementing Common Core in 2010, a year before it applied for a No Child waiver, the Sooner State already had this matter covered. In fact, the state could have not even bothered with implementing Common Core at all; Fordham rated the math and reading portion of its Priority Academic Student Skills standards a B+, below the rating for Common Core, but better than most other states. But the Sooner State proceeded to implement Common Core not in lieu of any waiver — that wasn’t coming on line for at least another year or so — but because reform-minded state officials at the time realized that the latter was better for achieving their goal of helping all kids succeed. Implementing Common Core was such a key part of its waiver proposal to the Obama Administration that putting the standards in place (along with tests aligned with it) took up 14 of the 88 pages (not including attachments) in its original proposal, the second-biggest after discussion about its proposed accountability regime.
So when the Sooner State legislature moved in May to halt Common Core implementation, Fallin and outgoing Supt. Janet Barresi knew that they had three months to meet their promise under the No Child waiver in order to get it extended for another year. They could have easily asked for a quick-and-dirty study to determine that the old PASS standards (to which the state had reverted) were college-and-career ready. Given how fast and loose the Obama Administration plays when it comes to waiver matters, this could have happened; in fact, the Obama Administration gave Oklahoma an assist by asking the Sooner State’s higher education agency to make that determination. But for some reason, neither Fallin nor Barresi made this happen. As a result, the Obama Administration declined to extend the No Child waiver, precipitating all this hand-wringing.
Simply put, neither Oklahoma officials nor Common Core supporters have a case here. Whatever you think of the Obama Administration’s misadventures on the waiver front — and you know where I stand on the whole affair — it has behaved responsibly in holding the Sooner State accountable for not even trying to implement college-and-career ready standards as it promised. The fact that Fallin and Barresi didn’t even go out and hire a consultant who can bless PASS as college-and-career ready (something that they could have done by taking a trip out to the Beltway and hiring any of the myriad education policy shops out there,or any Common Core foe) is especially amazing. Oklahoma’s legislative and executive branches, both of whom already deserve scorn for halting Common Core and denying Sooner State kids high-quality curricula, merit all the disdain they can get for failing to do a few simple things to keep the No Child waiver in place beyond this school year.
Meanwhile Petrilli is wrong in arguing that Oklahoma can make a case in court that the Obama Administration’s decision is legally out-of-bounds. For one thing, the state adopted and began Common Core implementation a year before applying for the waiver; so the state can’t claim that the administration’s move is a reprisal against it for its own bad decision. The fact that the waiver rules only ask states to implement college-and-career ready standards of some sort (and not specifically Common Core), along with the administration’s approval of Virginia’s waiver (and extension of Indiana’s), also makes it difficult for the Sooner State to win in court.
At best, you can argue that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obamacare ruling in NFIB v. Sebelius could apply; after all, the High Court ruled that the federal government couldn’t apply conditions to existing federal subsidies other than those originally in place. But even that could be a stretch because of the differences in the laws governing healthcare and education. In fact, the only way Oklahoma can possibly win is if it attacks the legally questionable basis on which the administration is granting waivers (and allowing states to ignore federal law) in the first place. But that wouldn’t exactly be in the Sooner State’s best interest. After all, it (along with other states) benefits from the gambit’s very existence.
As for the end of the waiver itself? It wouldn’t be a bad thing at all for Oklahoma’s children. This is because the state’s waiver probably shouldn’t have been granted in the first place. Two years ago, peer reviewers charged by the Obama Administration with reviewing the Sooner State’s waiver expressed concern that the A-to-F grading system it was planning to implement wasn’t ready for prime time. One reason: Because state officials left several elements of the plan — including how much graduation rates would make up in the underlying calculation — were still “to be determined”, and didn’t include a student achievement growth model that would reward or hold schools and districts accountable for their work with kids in their care.
In fact, the lack of a fully-developed A-to-F grading program was so glaring that it made it difficult for peer reviewers to fully weigh out whether the entire accountability system would pass muster. [There’s also the fact that A-to-F grading has been criticized by civil rights-based reformers and others for not fully breaking down how minority students are faring, and in fact, obscuring how schools and districts are actually performing in improving achievement for all kids.]
Peer reviewers dinged Oklahoma’s waiver proposal on other matters. For example, its proposed changes to its Annual Measurable Objectives were dinged because the state was only including data from kids enrolled during the first 10 days of a school year, leaving out crucial data on kids who may start attending afterward. Meanwhile the state’s plan for identifying so-called Focus schools, or those with wide achievement gaps, was criticized for obscuring data on achievement gaps for subgroups who are minorities in otherwise homogeneous schools.
The concerns of the peer reviewers — many of which were ignored by the Obama Administration — have become a reality. As former New America Foundation analyst Anne Hyslop noted last year in a study on the No Child waivers, 54 percent of the schools previously identified under the law as academically failing didn’t were allowed to escape scrutiny under the new accountability system developed under the waiver. This means that 85 schools likely serving 32,448 (or 4.8 percent of the state’s student population) were likely performing poorly in improving student achievement, but got away with it because they weren’t identified under the new accountability system.
While this is lower than that for other states surveyed by Hyslop for her report, this still meant that the Sooner State’s wasn’t identifying schools (many of which are likely serving the state’s black, Latino, and American Indian children) that deserved scrutiny. [Hyslop’s data also proves lie to the contention by Oklahoma officials that a return to No Child will lead to nearly all of its traditional and public charter schools being identified as failing.] This is especially problematic given that 35 percent of the Sooner State’s fourth-graders read Below Basic, according to the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress, three percentage points higher than the national average.
The fact that Oklahoma’s waiver allowed it to obscure much-needed data and accountability shows the need for No Child. It also exemplifies one of the numerous reasons why the Obama Administration should have never undertaken the waiver gambit in the first place. Departing from No Child’s solid, sensible, and comprehensive approach to accountability was never a smart decision in the first place. Now, with handwringing over Oklahoma’s waiver and how it may affect efforts to continue Common Core implementation, the gambit may end doing even more damage than anyone opposing the effort may have first thought.
Oklahoma deserves to lose its waiver. And the Obama Administration should stop with this waiver nonsense once and for all.