WASHINGTON—Schools in San Diego hope that new waivers to No Child Left Behind will add flexibility, not more restrictions, in improving education.
One of the loudest complaints against the often-vilified law is that it unfairly demands impossible levels of student achievement and labels schools as “in need of improvement” if they fail to meet those demands.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced a waiver program last week that would allow states to get around some of the toughest—and some say unreasonable—requirements of the law. The full details of the package will be announced next month, but it will likely allow states to submit individual plans to determine if schools are improving enough.
In California, nearly 40 percent of schools have been designated for improvement programs, meaning that they have failed two years in a row to meet certain criteria for increasing the number of students meeting standards of proficiency.
As of February, 216 schools in San Diego County failed to meet these criteria, called Adequate Yearly Progress. There are 714 schools in the county.
“We’d like the flexibility to continue to pursue what is working in our successful schools,” said Bernie Rhinerson, chief of staff of the San Diego Unified School District. “Our concern is that a certain flavor of reform would be imposed on the district.”
Officials in California, which in April had to return federal money earmarked for developing a statewide data accountability system, sounded cautiously optimistic about the waivers.
“The need for an alternative model for accountability is clear,” said State Superintendent Tom Torlakson, in a statement. “If the U.S. Department of Education and the administration are actually open to a state-determined accountability system, I would welcome it because flexibility is appropriate, warranted, and urgently needed.”
But some experts said that relaxing the standards that determine a school’s improvement status could result in ignoring the needs of the lowest-performing students.
“What the current federal system forces is that schools are identified [as “in need of improvement”] even if they’re doing pretty well overall but failing English Language Learners or minority kids,” said Russ Whitehurst, the director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.
Rhinerson said that, at least in San Diego Unified, low-performing students won’t get left behind.
“We’re focused on those students and we’re focused on those schools,” he said. “I don’t think it would relieve any of the pressure we have on ourselves.”
Duncan and Melody Barnes, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, took care to emphasize that the waivers would not reduce accountability and that it would reward states willing to “raise the bar” on student standards and teacher effectiveness.
“We’re going to provide flexibility in exchange for that high bar,” Duncan said. “The current law provides penalties for that kind of courage.”
Until the details of the final waiver process are announced, many states remain hopeful that the package will provide a fix for the part of No Child Left Behind that receives some of the harshest criticism.
“Almost everyone who thinks they can get the waiver is going to try to get one,” Whitehurst said. “They all want to get out from under a system that is causing so many schools to be labeled.
“It’s not really politically viable to have a system where everyone appears to be failing.”