Lindsay: I think keeping your principles in line as you're negotiating and making sure
that, you know, you can't compromise on these things, but you can on these things.
That's how you get legislation done.
Rick: Hey, I'm Rick Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise
Institute.
Great to have you with us today.
I've got the privilege of being joined by my good friend and colleague, Lindsay Fryer,
Vice President at the Penn Hill Group, former K-12 Lead for Senator Lemar Alexander, who
was point for Senator Alexander as two years ago when the U.S. Congress passed the Every
Student Succeeds Act.
The way overdue re-authorization of the No Child Left Behind Act.
Lindsay, first question, for folks who kind of follow these things, but don't know the
ins and outs, what is the Every Student Succeeds Act and how big a deal is it?
Lindsay: So the Every Student Succeeds Act reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act, which is the chief education K-12 law governing education in this country.
And this was a pretty major re-authorization.
We'd had No Child Left Behind which was probably the most famous re-authorization of ESEA since
'65, I'd say, which had in place very strict federal mandates about what states had to
do in order to get federal money.
And there's a lot of strings attached to it.
And the entire education community had gotten tired of that law and then other conditions
placed on it through the Obama administration and Arne Duncan's Waiver.
So ESSA was a chance to really reset the clock and say, let's re-examine the federal role
in education.
Let's return some control back to states and school districts.
And so it's a huge deal because the law essentially does that.
Rick: So if you look at Every Student Succeeds Act kind of from a little bit of a distance,
what are two or three or four of the biggest, most important things that it did?
Lindsay: So I would say the first is, it definitely restored state and local control and it turns
a lot of decision making power back from the Department of Education the Secretary of Education
telling states what to do, really putting that decision back in the hands of states
and school districts.
So that's the first thing.
And that was the real intended goal, I'd say bipartisanly, across the board.
Second thing is, probably one of the most hotly debated topics that the Congress had
over this was the issue of assessment and testing.
Everybody talks about it all the time.
And under No Child Left Behind, you basically had a federal test saying this is the one
point in time to show whether or not your school is failing or succeeding.
The test mattered so much.
And what ESSA does is say, the tests are still important.
It's still important to know how students are achieving, but it shouldn't be the be
all end all as to if your school is succeeding or failing.
So ESSA really said, we'll keep the tests, but we'll return control about the decisions
of the results of those tests to states and districts.
And it's your decision to figure out what to do with them and how to use them as a barometer
to judge whether or not your school is succeeding or failing.
And that was one of the main things that ESSA addressed really figuring out how to re-balance
the focus on tests.
And then, lastly, I'd say is we've seen a lot of Secretary creep in terms of interfering
in state and local decision making and the law puts in place very strict prohibitions
on the Secretary to say, these are the things you can and cannot add to state and local
plans, state and local decision making and really to keep him or her away from decisions
that were meant to be state and local.
Rick: So what's an example of that, when you say prohibitions on the Secretary?
Lindsay: So I think the biggest one is states have a lot of flexibility in what indicators
to choose in their accountability system.
There's some parameters and guardrails around that, but there's a lot of leeway to say,
what do you want to do to, again, determine whether your school is succeeding or failing?
How do you want to weigh certain things together to judge your schools?
And one of the prohibitions says the Secretary cannot force you to say, you know, it has
to be school climate, it has to be bullying that you have to include in there.
You can figure out what you as a state want to include, and then how to weigh all those
indicators together to look at your schools across the gambit.
So the Secretary can't interfere with that, can't interfere with anything to do with your
state standards.
So, you know, common core was a hugely debated topic and that's partially because the federal
government got involved with something that was originally a state idea for states to
come together and figure out what good standards look like and adopt those if they so choose.
But then the federal government said, "Well, actually, we think this is a great idea and
we're gonna give everyone extra points or give them a waiver if they adopt the common
core state standards."
Now that type of activity could never happen again.
There's very strict prohibitions about federal interference with state standards.
So I think those are two major examples there.
Rick: And how did that play out on the Hill?
So were there people who were saying, "Look, if there's good standards, of course Washington
should push states to use them because they're good.
And we can't give states too much control over how to judge if schools are doing okay,
because some states might make bad decisions for kids"?
Were there people saying that and how did you negotiate where ESSA wound up?
Lindsay: So definitely, I'd say this general framing of accountability was the most hotly
debated topic during re-authorization and standards fit within to that frame.
The biggest thing I think in terms of the standards is there actually was bipartisan,
bicameral agreement that the Secretary shouldn't be interfering with state standards because
the politics around Common Core, I think.
Something again that should have been left up to the states to adopt if they wanted became
a federal thing.
And so I think that across the board everybody said, "Let's pump the brakes on this and make
sure that the secretary can't get involved with this in the future."
But the idea of how they fit into accountability systems and if states are settings high bars
for their students and then what to do if the states bars aren't high enough, that was
definitely a big negotiation point.
And you had Republicans saying, "Complete hands off from the department of Ed," and
the Democrats saying, "Well, we do need some federal involvement, maybe less than No Child
Left Behind.
But we still want some," I believe they called them guardrails, "federal parameters about
what was really important for the department to look at."
And so it was just this push pull of what's the federal role in education.
That fundamental question, you know it sounds like a cliche sometimes, but it really did
come down to Democrats versus Republicans saying, "Well, less versus more and what's
the sweet spot?
What's the middle ground?"
And that's where the compromise point needed to be made.
Rick: And on these guardrails that you're talking about, when somebody says, "Hey, that
state's standards aren't high enough.
That state has..."
Like how do we know?
Who judges what's high enough and who judges what's like a necessary guardrail?
How does that all work?
Lindsay: One thing for sure is the Secretary no longer says whether or not a state's standards
are good enough.
I think the point of ESSA was to say let's give states a shot.
Let them figure out what academic achievement they want their students to have and what
goals are good enough.
And let's use institutions of higher ed within that state to kind of align K-12 to higher
ed.
So you say, my standards are aligned so that when students graduate from high school they're
entering college without the need for remediation.
They're entering college being able to take credit-bearing coursework without the need
to be held back.
So that was the minimal descriptions that states had to consider within the setting
of their standards.
And then it's up to them to put that out to the public.
And the public should decide whether or not those are good enough, and whether the goals
that they set in regards to those standards are good enough.
So, you know, we really wanted the states to take charge of that.
We learned a lot, I'd say in the past decade, about education and we thought we wanted to
set the states off on a path to really say these are our standards, these are our goals,
let's see if this works for us.
Rick: So what were a couple of the real sticking points then as you guys were negotiating this?
Lindsay: I would say, again, back to this idea of accountability, you know, how many
indicators needed to be in the accountability system.
So, you know, No Child Left Behind just had tests and graduation rates.
So we wanted to add stuff around English Language Learner Proficiency being that the population
of the U.S. has changed significantly.
Rick: And the "we" here is?
Lindsay: "We" being, I'd say, Congress, in generally speaking.
So Republicans and Democrats, both sides of the Capitol, Senate and House wanted to...like
what indicators are enough, like how many should we have?
So, again, Republicans wanted less.
Democrats wanted more.
This idea of things that haven't been measured before, like school climate or bullying or
social and emotional learning...there's a lot of interest around that, especially from
the Democrats, I would say.
Should those be included in a more high stakes accountability system?
That was a huge sticking point.
And the agreement was, well, let's let the states decide.
They can include those measures if they want, but we're not gonna tell them to do that.
I'd say the weighting of indicators, academics versus non-academics...if we were gonna allow
some non-academic measures in there, what the weights of those would be.
That was a huge sticking point because a lot of my Democratic colleagues really wanted
the academics to be the be all end all, and place a high focus and prescription on what
the weights needed to be.
And then again the Republicans were more like, let's let the states figure out how to get
the conglomeration of these indicators together to determine whether our schools are successful.
So...
Rick: Now how did that come out?
Lindsay: So I think we came to pretty interesting ground there.
We said all academic measures have to be significant in the accountability system in terms of they're
given significant weight.
And, in the aggregate, all the academic indicators together have to weigh more than any non-academic
indicators.
But the states decide what the weights are and there's a prohibition on the back end
to make sure the Secretary can't interfere with those weights.
Rick: And when you say academic indicators, what are those?
Lindsay: So graduation rates, math and reading test scores, English language proficiency,
those are the academic indicators I'm talking about, student growth as well.
Rick: And those have to be more than half of how schools are graded.
Lindsay: Each of them individually has to be significant, which the state decides what
that means, and then in the aggregate more than non-academics.
Rick; And in the negotiation, how much of issue was school choice, was charter schooling,
that kind of stuff?
Lindsay: Pretty significant, I mean, Senator Alexander and Chairman Cline at the time...you
know, school choice is important to them.
Senator Alexander often said, you know, if he had his druthers and he was writing his
own education law, he would make everything a voucher and have the voucher follow the
child to the school they attend, public or private.
So, you know, that was a debated issue in the Senate.
The amendment failed, that he offered.
So, you know, it did come up again in negotiations because the house had a portability proposal
wherein Title 1 dollars, just Title 1 dollars, follow kids to the public school that they
attended.
So it was definitely discussed.
In the end of the day, you know, Alexander felt he had had his shot.
His amendment failed, so he lived to fight another day.
Cline kind of felt the same way, because the Democrats didn't want any type of that proposal
there.
So we decided not to include that aspect of school choice.
But there's very bipartisan support around the charter schools program and, you know,
a lot of work together to make sure that was included to strengthen the program so that
states have an opportunity, not just to open new schools, but replicate and expand existing
schools and, you know, look at their authorizing practices.
So there's a lot of bipartisan support around that program.
Rick: You know, one of the issues that was part of the conversation was trying to gives
states districts more flexibility about how to use federal dollars.
Could you talk a little bit about how that got talked about and what the law changed
if anything there?
Lindsay: Yeah, so I think in terms of like the fundamentals about how money flows to
states and then to districts, we didn't change too much with regards to the funding formulas,
except for Title 2, I'd say.
There was a funding formula change, so there will be some...
Rick: And Title 2 is?
Lindsay: Title 2 is the title in ESSA that focuses on teachers and teacher training.
So the fundamentals of how money flows didn't change.
I think just the politics around that is very interesting.
It's not Republican versus Democrat.
It's winners and losers in states.
Who loses money?
Who gains money?
It's very difficult to change funding formulas in a re-authorization.
But I think this idea of flexibility...you know, there's a lot more room for states to
figure out how they want to spend their money and on what activities they think are important
than I'd say in the past.
And the other thing that, it's probably a less talked about provision, is something
called transferability, where you can move money between titles.
You know, like I talked about the funding formulas, by the way that states and districts
get their money.
But once you get your money, you have flexibility with how to move it around between certain
titles to say, these are the initiatives that are important to me as a district, as a state
and this is how I wanna spend my money.
There's a lot more of that then there was in the past.
Rick: Hey everyone, thanks for watching part one of our discussion with Penn Hill Vice
President, Lindsay Fryer.
If you enjoyed what you saw, remember to like the video or leave us a comment.
And if you want to see more check out part number 2.