“If we confuse the Senate with populist rhetoric, they could become a powerful ally against state reform efforts…”
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Not content to let the House have all the fun in gutting state testing data and creating perverse incentives for schools to sweep their low-performing students under the rug, the Senate is getting ready to join in as well. The civil rights community is up in arms-they should be, and we should all be with them.
If you are nursing the hope that school officials would not do such a thing, let me direct you to the following table on the % of schools that actually wound up being including special education students as a part of their accountability subset in 2009-10:
So if you live in either Connecticut, Maine or Utah, then you can hang on to the hope that every child will be counted. If you live in a state education the other 98% of American students, it is time to wake up to the fact that school officials have a long and predictable history of following the path where perverse incentives lead them, and don’t tend to let little things like the interests of children bother them overly much. Given the opportunity to make use of a “parental” opt-out, it is blindingly obvious that school officials will take full advantage of the provision to make themselves look good, just as they have used every available loophole to bury special education scores.
Some in the beltway likes to think that Congress is some sort of gathering of Olympians best positioned to guide the nation towards technocratic K-12 improvement. The House has already provided (additional) recent evidence to demonstrate this to be incredibly misguided, and the Senate seems poised to follow suit. Anti-common core hysteria “The Devil Made Me Do It!” will not do for an excuse when one is contemplating wrecking state testing systems and creating a Freddie/Fannie level perverse incentive all in one fell swoop.
By the next time this law comes up for reauth some 13+ or so years hence, CC will likely be a distant memory. If you’ve been paying attention, states have been adopting their own tests left and right and they have control over their own cut scores. Oklahoma withdrew from the standards completely, and approximately nothing happened to them. Many states have begun a process to review and revise standards. The best case scenario is that states will choose to use something better than their old My Little Pony Book of Connect the Dots for their new tests, but it will be up to them in any case.
We would likely find a federal opt out of all criterion based tests not so easily dispatched. It would prove far more consequential if Hanushek and Loveless are to be believed. Once put into law, the unions will fiercely defend it, given that it completely thwarts the ability to consider test scores in tenure and retention decisions on the basis of criterion based tests. I would expect it to stay in place until the next reauth. States desiring to have campus level comparable data would have to create new systems to carry it out with non-criterion tests in an era of testing fatigue. Thanks DC!
None of this is likely to happen of course, given the high probability of a presidential veto. It grows ever more obvious however that the unions have outmanoeuvred reformers.
UPDATE: The Senate voted down the opt-out amendment most similar to the House Amendment 32-64. Faith in humanity (temporarily?) restored.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
Once again, while CC is not an excuse for individual legislators, it is clearly the factor making this close call with a federal opt-out possible.
Hard to guess how much of this is really driven by teacher eval opposition, how much CC, etc. The Texas system went down in flames in 2013 totally independent of CC.
Yes, but a federal testing opt-out was unthinkable before CC.
By the way, my daughter would appreciate it if you would quit gratuitously driving My Little Pony fans out of the reform coalition.
Done- how does she feel about He Man and the Masters of the Universe?
Fire away!