Something to get behind . . .

Mari Taylor, Washington State School Director Association (WSSDA) President, today distributed a resolution from her organization asking Congress to prioritize passage of a revision to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.  Doing so would replace NCLB, a law that Secretary Duncan in 2011 said was broken.

“No Child Left Behind is broken and we need to fix it now,” said Duncan during testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

“This law has created dozens of ways for schools to fail and very few ways to help them succeed. We should get out of the business of labeling schools as failures and create a new law that is fair and flexible, and focused on the schools and students most at risk,” Duncan continued.

Three years later the law is still in place and has led to the Secretary having the power to cancel our state's waiver from a law that he called broken.  This WSSDA effort makes complete sense to me and I welcome the opportunity to share it with our School Board.  This is an effort that I support, can get behind, and I thank WSSDA for taking the initiative to start this process.  The law has been in place for twelve years and should have been revised many years ago.  The time is now before other states suffer a similar fate for pushing back against a one size fits all model to school reform.