With the dust finally settling on the passage of ESSA—the Every Student Succeeds Act—the implications are clear: The pendulum has swung. No matter who becomes our next president, we are entering an era in which the federal government is loosening its grip on public education policy. Without that backstop, the onus of school accountability will rest squarely on the states with the start of the 2017-18 school year. As a result, public and private leaders at the state and local levels will need to fundamentally rethink their roles.
This has been a long time coming. The No Child Left Behind Act, the ESSA predecessor passed by Congress in 2001, created a fairly muscular federal role in public school accountability. Through legislative authority and funding allocations, the federal government inspired a shift toward rewards and sanctions based on student assessments developed by each of the states.
The Obama administration’s Race to the Top challenge, in 2009, took things further. By offering hundreds of millions of dollars of grant funding in exchange for important but hard-to-implement state strategies, the U.S. Department of Education catalyzed higher standards; aligned assessments; stronger teacher and school accountability; better college access; classroom innovation; and a raft of efforts to support these ideas at the classroom level.
Today, 14 years after No Child Left Behind was signed into law and six years after Race to the Top—its dollars spent and scrutinized—the country has repositioned the role of the federal government in education. Despite several unknowns about the path ahead, the left and the right seem to agree that power and influence should swing from the feds to the states…
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