President Barack Obama is set to announce Thursday the waiver of the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind law in the following 10 states; Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.
The president’s announcement comes two years prior to a strict provision in the law.
The No Child Left Behind law requires students to be proficient in math and reading by the year 2014. The law defines proficiency by a set of standards determined individually state by state, that were set when the Bush administration originally signed the act into law.
Mr. Obama’s waiver on Thursday will free the above mentioned states from being required to meet the standards that they previously set for themselves in 2002.
In addition to the 10 states that will be granted the waiver on Thursday, New Mexico and another reportedly 28 other states have requested to be freed from the standards previously set by the law, The Associated Press reports.
When originally implemented, No Child Left Behind was set for renewal in the year 2007.
However, partisan gridlock in Congress and other education based priorities have prevented the renewal or major changes being implemented for the law.
President Obama has been critical of the law throughout his presidency, as he believes that certain provisions of No Child Left Behind are simply too rigid and don’t address the needs of students that have changed since its original enactment by President Bush in 2002.
Students are failing
Mr. Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have recently stated that 80 percent of public schools are considered to be failing according to the standards of the No Child Left Behind law.
In 2011, nearly 50 percent of all public schools had shown no progress towards enabling students to pass the standardized math and reading tests that were set in place under No Child Left Behind, according to the Center on Education Policy, a Washington-based nonpartisan research group.
That would be an increase from the Center on Education Policy analysis of public schools released in 2010.
Mr. Duncan believes that the original law had an “artificial purpose,” as he recently stated in a January op-ed article for The Washington Post.
“NCLB has significant flaws. It created an artificial goal of proficiency that encouraged states to set low standards to make it easier for students to meet the goal,” wrote Mr. Duncan in January. “The act’s emphasis on test scores as the primary measure of school performance has narrowed the curriculum, and the one-size-fits-all accountability system has mislabeled schools as failures even if their students are demonstrating real academic growth.”
The original intent of No Child Left Behind was to specifically target low income and minority students throughout the U.S.
The Bush administration wanted to target that demographic and push more minority and low income students towards becoming college graduates, by starting with new standardized tests at the elementary, middle school and high school levels of education.
However, the law did not achieve its purpose as several different minority groups, primarily Hispanics and African Americans, continue to have the highest high school drop out rates and lower literacy levels.
Going forward
The 10 states receiving waivers from the No Child Left Behind law will now be exempt from meeting the 2014 deadline originally set for them in 2002 with the enactment of the law.
Originally, if the standard of having all of their students passing the standardized tests were not met, schools would have had to take measures to replace teachers, offer more tutoring and transport more students to higher performing schools in their districts.
Schools in the 10 states receiving the waiver Thursday will be granted permission to use more federal funds to target specific demographics of students that are considered to be under performing their peers.
Those states will implement new measures that meet specific needs of students based on their individual needs according to social settings, region of the country, local statistics, barriers to achievement and other factors determined state by state.
The Obama administration is essentially providing a test case in these 10 states to see what are the most efficient methods that can be used to improve literacy rates throughout the country going forward.
Members of both chambers of Congress are currently working on drafting new legislation that could potentially update the law, or replace the No Child Left Behind standards altogether.
