Ten of 11 states that applied for waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act have received that flexibility from federal officials, while one of them, New Mexico, has not yet been granted it, the U.S. Department of Education said today.
The states awarded waivers are Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.
The waivers allow states to escape from some of the central provisions and sanctions associated with the decade-old federal law, policies that critics have branded onerous and unrealistic. In exchange, states have agreed to set new academic targets and establish new strategies for evaluating educators and turning around struggling schools, among other expectations.
From the Star-Ledger:
In seeking the waiver from 100 percent compliance, the state’s application proposes a new system for public school accountability that would group schools into three tiers based on students’ performance on standardized tests. The federal law deems any school not in compliance as failing, a penalty that could result in withheld funds after the 2014 deadline.
According to the state’s application, the 5 percent of schools with the lowest test scores would be deemed "priority." Another group with low graduation rates or wide achievement gaps would be considered "focus." The state’s best schools would be called "reward."
Acting Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf said the proposed accountability system would support struggling schools and offer credit for progress toward the "flawed" federal law’s goal of having all students demonstrate proficiency in math and reading.
From The Record:
High-achieving schools in North Jersey have long bristled at being unfairly tarnished as “failing” even when only a fraction of students – often those with special needs – missed their testing goals. Now these schools, including ones in Fort Lee and Glen Rock, will be spared that stigma.
“This is a transformational moment in New Jersey,” said Acting Education Commissioner Chris Cerf. “We have developed a new and considerably more effective and meaningful accountability system that preserves the best features of No Child Left Behind but corrects its deficiencies.”
From the Courier-Post:
Of the 70 lowest performing schools in the state that face interventions, 23 of them are in Camden. Interventions could include removing the principal, reviewing the staff or lengthening the school day.
Father Jeff Putthoff, founder and executive director of HopeWorks ‘N Camden, was cautiously optimistic that the waiver would do some good in Camden, the tri-county area’s neediest district. There, five district schools have failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress for 11 consecutive years, and several charter schools also remain on the Schools In Need of Improvement list.
“What we had before wasn’t working here. This waiver is supposed to allow for more innovative and creative responses. If that will happen, I’ll be all for it,” Puthoff said.
From NJ Spotlight:
Still, all schools will be held to achievement targets for each group of students, similar to the AYP targets but now different for each school and each group depending on how far they have to go. Instead of the previous target under NCLB of all students reading and doing math at grade level by 2014, schools under the new rules will be compelled to meet varying targets each year -- now called “annual measurable objectives” (AMOs) -- that reduce the number of students not proficient by at least 50 percent by 2016.
Starting next year, the state also will provide a vastly different report card for every school, renamed the School Scorecard, that will publicly report this progress. The reports will directly compare schools’ test scores against their socio-economic peers, call them out where the achievement gaps are wide or narrow, and in general provide analysis along with the numbers. The state has yet to release this year’s final version of the 17-year-old School Report Card, a little later than usual due to a new computation of graduation rates, officials said.
“A lot of this was done behind closed doors,” said Stan Karp, of the Education Law Center, which has represented the state’s most disadvantaged students in the 31 urban Abbott districts. “There has been no real attention to the cost of these proposals, and the plans we do know about mean more testing for students and more intervention from Trenton. There is no flexibility from testing every child.”
He said the reforms proposed will put tremendous pressure on the most vulnerable schools at a time when the state seems to be moving away from providing funding for those schools and instead promoting more charter schools and vouchers.
“It’s a blank check to experiment on poor kids,” Karp said.