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The Answer Sheet
By Valerie Strauss

Obama administration’s NCLB waivers and strong-arm tactics

Obama administration officials said today that they are moving forward with a program to grant states waivers from key provisions of the No Child Left Behind law, but only to those states “willing to embrace education reform” — meaning Obama-style education reform.

Melody Barnes, director of the Domestic Policy Council at the White House, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters on a conference call that NCLB was fundamentally flawed and that states were begging for relief because Congress had failed to fix it.

Still, as flawed as it is, they said that any relief will only go to states that accept the administration’s version of reform, which includes using standardized test scores to measure “student growth” for the purposes of evaluating schools and teachers.

“Every single state can” get a waiver, Barnes said. “But the bar will be high for flexibility to be granted and we are going to consistently insist on accountability. ... And those states that aren’t able to comply will have to continue to operate under No Child Left Behind.”

In some circles, that is known as strong-arming. Why not give waivers to any state that wants relief from a law the administration admits is flawed?

The most pressing issue facing states under No Child Left Behind, the key education initiative of former president George W. Bush’s administration, involves the “annual yearly progress” mandate that almost all students achieve proficient levels on math and reading standardized exams by 2014.

States were allowed to decide individually how to reach the goal, and almost half set easy targets early in the last decade. As the 2014 deadline approached, the goal became tougher to reach.

Duncan has said that the target is unattainable, and that more than 80 percent of America’s schools could be labeled failing by then if action is not taken. Today he said that some states face the possibility that 90 percent of their schools could be labeled failing “and that just doesn’t reflect reality.”

Barnes and Duncan said that details of the waiver program will be released next month, and that states should submit applications for review.

Duncan also said more than once that he does not support “overtesting” of students — “We don’t support that,” he said — but he did not explain what “overtesting” meant, nor did he say that he was changing any policy that has led to states adding tests for already test-saturated school schedules.

To assess teachers on student test scores, some states are planning to give students exams in every single subject. Would Duncan consider that overkill?

So while the administration moves to fix NCLB’s unattainable 2014 deadline, it continues to take steps to force its own education reform agenda on states — even while saying it isn’t. What a way to run education policy.

From the Education Week...

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Duncan's "Backdoor Blueprint" Strategy

By Rick Hess

Hidy, all. It's me. I'm back from points south, west, north, and so forth. I want to thank our terrific line-up of guest bloggers for their outstanding work. Anyway, I was going to settle in with a few broad musings, but I'll hold that for a moment in light of ED's decision, teased Friday but embargoed until this morning, to test new heights of hubris when it comes to ESEA.

On Friday afternoon, in a hush-hush press call, Secretary Duncan and White House domestic policy honcho Melody Barnes told a handful of select national press more details about their scheme to offer conditional NCLB waivers. On the call, Duncan finally dropped his disingenuous (or ill-informed) insistence that NCLB reauthorization would happen this year. Like a forlorn groom finally conceding at dusk that his bride-to-be isn't showing for their noon wedding, he acknowledged that reauth isn't going to happen this year (as I've said before, it's not going to happen next year either). Second, Duncan and Barnes said they'd be allowing states to apply for waivers in return for pledging fealty to elements of the administration's NCLB "blueprint." Apparently, the Department will pen a request for proposals, including various blueprinty requirements, and then convene some kind of "peer review" process to judge them.

ED's press release explains, "The administration's proposal for fixing NCLB calls for college and career-ready standards, more great teachers and principals, robust use of data and a more flexible and targeted accountability system based on measuring annual student growth. Barnes and Duncan said that the final details on the ESEA flexibility package will reflect similar goals." I'm curious to see just what Duncan has in mind. Is he planning to condition regulatory relief on states agreeing to adopt the Common Core and associated assessments, or to require the use of value-added scores in teacher evaluation? If so, it's going to be an interesting fall.

Three thoughts:

First, this all represents a pretty novel theory of waiver authority, one which turns waivers into something more like a statutory bypass. What Duncan and Barnes seem to have in mind is not insisting that states demonstrate that they'll abide by the spirit of the law, or find other ways to comply with NCLB's requirements, but letting states ignore federal legislation in return for promising to do other stuff that they like. I'd think that Obama would want to tread real gingerly here, as a Romney or Perry administration could use this play to wreak havoc on health care or financial reform.

Second, maybe it's just me, but this whole plan for an RFP process and peer reviews sounds a lot more like a way to push desperate states to embrace the administration's agenda than a way to provide regulatory relief from a law "forcing districts into one-size-fits-all solutions that just don't work" (the Department of Ed's own words in its press release). In fact, the whole scheme sounds more like the framing of a back-door grant competition than anything else.

Third, let's remember that Duncan and Barnes are preparing to push states to embrace a blueprint that isn't the law of the land and that hasn't even been adopted by a single house of Congress--not even when the Democrats enjoyed two years of unified control. The administration's stance is more than a little ironic, given the President's repeated assurances that he's not interested in expanding Washington's footprint. Indeed, I remember candidate Obama's compelling critique of the Bush administration's creative efforts to expand executive authority, and his promise that things would be different in an Obama administration. Ah, well.

Oh, and just for good measure, in a gratuitous slap at House Republicans, the release quoted Barnes saying that the administration was forced to act because its "proposal to fix NCLB has been with Congress for 16 months" but had been sunk by "partisan politics in the House." The funny thing is that the "partisan" Republican majority in the House (which has held sway for eight months) has passed elements of reauthorization legislation while the (presumably nonpartisan) Senate hasn't passed anything. Ah, the vaunted Obama political operation at work. With this kind of velvet touch, it's hard to imagine why the GOP hasn't been more cooperative on the administration's edu-agenda.