For over ten years, the congressional attempts to amend the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) were futile. All this changed on December 10th, 2015 when the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was passed by the Senate and Senate and got signed by President Barack Obama.
The procurements of this 1,061-page bill (around 400 more than NCLB) do not differ profoundly from the responsibility through testing orders that have checked government training approach throughout the previous 14 years. The principle distinction is that the ESSA hands the instructive responsibility from the federal government to the states (Klein, 2015).
The Every Student Succeeds Act is better as it is rightly taking objectivity at the testing and punishing strategies and also coming up with some valuable programs. Just like the NCLB, the ESSA puts emphasis on the K-12 accountability over the main reasons for the inequality in the education sector. The ESSA stands up against the history’s lessons where the federal government oversight of education is seen as the best thing for the vulnerable children.
Some of the reasons that are making the ESSA better include several organizations that are having divergent views on education agreeing that it should indeed replace the NCLB. There are also civil rights leaders who were opposed to the initial versions of an NLCB revision among other Acts who are seeing the ESSA as being better that what currently exists.
The lesson from the Every Student Succeeds Act is that it is better as it gives more flexibility on testing. The Act as well ends Adequate Yearly Progress, which is a measure which was requiring educational institutions to show their test score gains. The institutions that were not able to meet the goals were getting penalized. There are also some provisions in Every Student Succeeds Act that steps forward that are deemed genuine such as the preschool improvement grants for the low-income children as well as the arts educational fund (Act, 2015).
The ESSA is also doing away with the practices of having several student subgroups such as the students with disabilities and the low-income students, and transforming them into super_subgroups which are a strategy to mask inequalities (Act, 2015).
Additionally, the ESSA does away with the term core academic subjects and in its place, it uses well-rounded education. This, to some extent, translates to the point that subjects like arts and social studies are going to be one study. It is worthy to note that these changes are more about what is bad in contemporary policies than what is right in the new bill.
For instance, in 2013, the low-income children, who are the pupils who are staying in households with incomes below the 185 percent of the poverty threshold, were the majority in the public schools. Thus the Southern Educational Foundation was prompted to give a warning that until more is provided for the students’; the trend was likely to result in a nation that is in decline and not just a nation at risk.
The ESSA is concerned with the K-12 schools. Investments in early childhood education were deemed critical to success in education, and they were also profitable (Klein, 2015). Quality teaching in preschool is particularly critical for the low-income children.
The ESSA is a mixture of compromises between political inclinations. The ESSA in one way or the other seems to be rewriting bad laws that were making things worse and at the same time offering little that is likely to make education better (“Why Every Student Succeeds Act Still Leaves Most Vulnerable Kids Behind | US News,” n.d.).
As long as attention remains on testable accountability in the K-12 schools and not on poverty, inequality, and early education, the Every Student Succeeds Act, just like the No Child Left Behind, is likely to be a discontented pledge.
References;
- Act, E. S. S. (2015). of 2015, Pub.
- Klein, A. (2015). ESEA reauthorization: The Every Student Succeeds Act explained. Education Week.
- Why Every Student Succeeds Act Still Leaves Most Vulnerable Kids Behind | US News. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015-12-14/why-every-student-succeeds-act-still-leaves-most-vulnerable-kids-behind