Chronicle Editorial

No more "No Child," no problem
     Following more than a decade of frustrating ineffectiveness and abject failure, a federal law that blocked states from adequately overseeing the administration of their K-12 education systems has been repealed.
     Yes, the No Child Left Behind Act is finally dead.
     President Barack Obama last week signed into law the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The bill was passed with strong bipartisan support in Congress and effectively replaces its oft-criticized predecessor. Where No Child Left Behind placed a crippling burden on schools to “pass” federal benchmarks with high test scores, the ESSA loosens the noose by allowing states to use their own measures when analyzing student achievement. Schools will no longer face the pressure cooker created by the old law’s stringent standards, and that’s a huge win for students and teachers across the country.
     Like most education policies, No Child Left Behind was created with good intentions. It aimed to boost student achievement by elevating educational benchmarks through increased testing and other means. However, the law fell short in many regards. Its rules were rigid and created unrealistic standards by requiring schools to have 100 percent of students perform at grade-level. That alone left most districts reeling, especially here in Iowa. Last year 81 percent of schools received failing grades because they weren’t meeting No Child Left Behind’s benchmarks in math or reading.
     The ESSA will attempt to quell these criticisms by reducing the emphasis on federal testing and allowing states to use their own measures of success. This gives more power back to the state legislators who know their school districts best. How are federal bureaucrats supposed to know what’s best for rural Iowa schools faced with declining enrollment, limited resources and changing student demographics? They don’t, and that blatant incompetence hurt most rural districts during No Child Left Behind’s reign. Many found it difficult to keep up with the law’s hardline goals that unfairly placed them in the “failing” category far too often.
     Hopefully those days are behind us. Many leaders have lauded the ESSA’s passage and feel it will help create better administration of K-12 education on numerous levels. By fine-tuning testing methods, states will be able to measure classroom achievement based on their own standards, which should lead to more thorough analysis of a school’s strengths and weaknesses. It also requires states to help low-performing schools instead of punishing them by removing administrators and other means. That was another criticism of No Child Left Behind, and many felt its intervention methods hurt schools more than they helped.
     It’s not perfect, but the ESSA is an obvious step in the right direction. Administrators, teachers and students were handcuffed under the previous law, but Washington has loosened the regulatory grip. That’s a big win for schools and should translate to higher achievement and added education opportunities in the future. No Child Left Behind was an unrealistic attempt at increasing student success, but it appears logic has finally reigned supreme through its repeal.