ESSA as Reform Absent Repair?
September 23, 2019
ESSA “was designed to remedy the wrongs” of NCLB, Andrew Saultz, Jack Schneider, and Karalyn McGovern write in the Phi Delta Kappan. But the law has failed to live up to its promise. The trio argue that this is the result of the U.S. Department of Education being “trapped in a bind”—faced “with a choice between yielding essential authority and wielding too much (federal) control, it has opted for neither.” Instead, it has “performed a playact of ‘fixing the system’—a delay tactic that constitutes a response but not a resolution.”