When President Barack Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act on Dec. 10, 2015 , he called it a “Christmas miracle.” The law, which replaced the much-criticized No Child Left Behind Act, represented years of negotiations, promising signs that fizzled, and eventual bipartisan agreement. Since then, the story about the law has become a lot more complicated.
Although the law shifted key authority over school improvement, teacher evaluations, and funding transparency to states and districts, public schools are still in the process of formally adjusting to ESSA. Amid recent headlines that U.S. students’ performance on standardized exams is stagnating or worse, we don’t know what if any impact the law will have long-term on schools’ ability to serve all students and serve them well.
One thing can be said for sure: Even though ESSA’s authorization period has now technically expired—it was originally authorized for four years—and even though the Trump administration’s approach to ESSA has sharply divided Democrats and Republicans, the universal expectation on Capitol Hill is that it will effectively be the law of the land for years to come. There’s recent precedent for the main federal K-12 law to be overdue for an update for years at a time; No Child Left Behind’s authorization expired in 2007.
To gauge how ESSA is being viewed four years on by those who are living with the law day to day, we touched base with educators and officials across the K-12 spectrum, from classroom teachers and principals to superintendents and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, to get their views of ESSA. Click on the menu below to see what these people had to say:
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn. | Jessica Baghian | Jillian Balow | Diana Cournoyer | Ryan Daniel | U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos | Denise Forte | Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C. | Rosemary Hughes | Renee Hyde, Ed.D. | Sara Kerr | Lillian Lowery | Carlas McCauley | Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. | Shanna Peeples | Marguerite Roza, Ph.D. | Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va. | Mark Sass | Michelle Youngblood Jarman
DeVos has encouraged states to take full advantage of the flexibility ESSA offers them because, she said in a statement, “It represented an important step in shifting power to where it belongs in education: families and the states.”
And she hasn’t been afraid to criticize states publicly when she believes they haven’t used ESSA to blaze new trails, as she did in 2018 during public remarks to state education chiefs.
Yet so far, her efforts to use ESSA to leverage new school choice opportunities have fallen short on Capitol Hill.
For the most part, DeVos declined to pick fights with states over their proposed ESSA plans. That’s in large part due to her distaste for robust federal intervention in state and local education decisions. In fact, she recently told state lawmakers that ESSA should be the starting point for a conversation about why the federal role in education has failed. And she said the same motivation behind ESSA to shift power from Washington to the states should be taken up in turn by states.
“Local lawmakers should always look to extend the same flexibility ESSA allows states to teachers, parents, and students themselves,” she said in her same statement. “More states need to embrace the opportunities ESSA affords to do what’s right for their students.”
