President Barack Obama announced on Feb. 9 that ten states, including Massachusetts, have been waived from the controversial No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001.
The waiver will allow Massachusetts additional flexibility on certain provisions of NCLB, including the ability to adjust policies for particular schools and districts.
NCLB was signed into law by former President George W. Bush on Jan. 8, 2002 and set a goal of having 100 percent of children in public schools perform proficiently on state standardized exams in English and math by 2014. In Massachusetts, 80 percent of schools and 90 percent of districts are on track to miss that goal.
Obama said in a Feb. 9 press release that the purpose of the waiver is to allow states to create their own means of measuring and improving student performance.
"What might work in Minnesota may not work in Kentucky, but every student should have the same opportunity to reach their potential," he said.
The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education submitted a waiver application on Nov. 14 to the U.S. Department of Education. A revised application was submitted on Jan. 6.
Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Tennessee also received waivers.
In the press release, Obama highlighted particular features of each state's application.
"Massachusetts … has set a goal to cut the number of underperforming students in half over the next six years," he said.
NCLB enjoyed strong bipartisan support after its initial passage. But public opinion toward the law soured in the years that followed as school districts around the country complained that the measure is inadequately funded and places undue emphasis on standardized testing.
Obama acknowledged that the law exerts pressure on teachers to spend excessive class time preparing students for yearly exams.
"We've got to do [education reform] in a way that doesn't force teachers to teach to the test, or encourage schools to lower their standards to avoid being labeled as failures," Obama said.
Steven Cohen, a lecturer in the Department of Education at Tufts, agreed that successful education reform will have to place less importance on standardized testing, but he doesn't believe Obama's NCLB waiver does enough to alleviate the problem.
"As much as [Obama] has lately been talking about how teachers shouldn't be teaching to the test, as long as there's a test, they're going to be teaching to it," Cohen added. "There's been a constant struggle in Massachusetts over standardized tests."
In accordance with NCLB, students in Massachusetts currently take the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) and are required to pass the English, math, and science sections in order to receive a high school diploma, according to Cohen.
Cohen also believes NCLB failed to properly address the "achievement gap" between students who attend well-resourced schools and those who do not.
"One of the assumptions that I think was behind No Child Left Behind was that we were somehow going to test our way to equality," Cohen said. "I don't see any evidence [of that]."
Another goal of the waiver application is to create a scale for measuring school performance that does not consider Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), which is the measurement that allows the Department of Education to determine how public schools and school districts are performing based on standardized test results.
Massachusetts is the state with the highest scores in the country, according to Cohen. However, over 80 percent of public schools in Massachusetts did not make AYP, Cohen said.
"It's certainly nice for the schools to not have to worry about this annual process and being labeled as ‘failing,'" Cohen said. "The flip side is that as part of the waiver, there's been a demand that teachers be evaluated on a basis of their students' test scores."
"Evaluating teachers by student test scores is a very blunt instrument. It's not very calibrated to individual students or teachers," he added.
Though some worry that the waiver will lead to more high-stakes testing, Department of Education Lecturer Martha Tucker believes any relief from the current culture of teaching to the test is worth it.
"Test preparation has become the main goal of learning in our schools, and what the tests measure is very narrow in comparison to what we hope students will learn and be able to do," Tucker wrote in an email to the Daily.
Cohen hopes that schools will begin to broaden the ways they assess student performance rather than relying on machine-scored testing.
"I would like to see a new attempt to truly reform education and to put student learning at the center in all its complexity, and to recognize that there's not going to be a single bullet theory that is going to make everyone learn," Cohen said.
"Kids learn differently, and we should be trying to assess them differently," he added. "We shouldn't be trying to straightjacket them into one [method of evaluation]."
