Every Student Succeeds Act

Based on Wikipedia: Every Student Succeeds Act

In December 2015, something remarkable happened in Washington: Democrats and Republicans agreed on education policy. The Every Student Succeeds Act passed the House of Representatives 359 to 64, and the Senate 85 to 12. In an era of bitter partisan gridlock, these numbers seem almost fictional.

But the real story isn't the bipartisan handshake. It's what the law actually changed—and what it reveals about a half-century of American uncertainty over a fundamental question: Who should be in charge of teaching our children?

The Great American Education Experiment

To understand what the Every Student Succeeds Act did, you need to understand what came before it. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a landmark law that dramatically expanded the federal government's role in public schools. Before that, education had been almost entirely a state and local affair. The Constitution doesn't mention schools, so under the Tenth Amendment, educational authority defaults to the states.

Johnson's law changed the calculus. By offering federal money, Washington gained leverage. Accept the funds, follow the rules. This is how the federal government influences domains technically outside its constitutional authority—through the power of the purse.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act has been renewed and revised roughly every six years since. Each reauthorization tweaked the federal-state balance. But two laws stand out as seismic shifts: the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and its replacement, the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015.

No Child Left Behind: The Federal Takeover

The No Child Left Behind Act, signed by President George W. Bush, represented the high-water mark of federal involvement in K-through-12 education. Its philosophy was straightforward: test students every year, publish the results, and punish schools that fail to meet performance targets.

The intentions were noble. Supporters argued that for decades, schools had swept their failures under the rug. Poor and minority students were disproportionately stuck in terrible schools, and nobody was held accountable. No Child Left Behind would force transparency. Every school would have to show whether its students—including subgroups like low-income children, English learners, and students with disabilities—were actually learning.

The president of the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers union, later characterized the law as a "one-size-fits-all model of test, blame, and punish."

By the time No Child Left Behind was due for reauthorization in 2007, the law had become deeply unpopular across the political spectrum. Conservatives complained about federal overreach. Liberals worried about teaching to the test. Teachers felt micromanaged. Parents organized "opt out" movements, refusing to let their children take standardized tests.

Yet Congress couldn't agree on a replacement. The reauthorization stalled for eight years.

The Waiver Era

President Obama's administration faced a problem. No Child Left Behind had set performance targets that ratcheted up each year, with the expectation that 100 percent of students would be "proficient" by 2014. This was, to put it gently, unrealistic. By 2012, most schools in America were technically failing under the law's standards.

Unable to get Congress to fix the law, the Obama administration improvised. It offered states waivers from No Child Left Behind's requirements—but with strings attached. States that wanted relief typically had to adopt the Common Core State Standards, a set of academic benchmarks developed by a consortium of states but controversial among both conservatives and some progressives.

This was governance by executive discretion, and it made many uncomfortable. The federal Department of Education was essentially rewriting law through the waiver process, demanding reforms that Congress had never approved.

The Unlikely Coalition

In 2014, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee became chairman of the Senate's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee—known by its acronym, the HELP Committee. Alexander had served as Secretary of Education under President George H.W. Bush and had long advocated for returning power to states.

Alexander partnered with Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington State. Together, they crafted a bill that could satisfy both parties' core concerns. Republicans wanted to strip the federal government of its enforcement powers. Democrats wanted to preserve some guardrails to protect vulnerable students.

In the House, Representative John Kline of Minnesota, a Republican, pushed his own version. Representative Bobby Scott of Virginia, a Democrat, became crucial to assembling enough Democratic votes to ensure passage.

President Obama stayed mostly on the sidelines. He made one key commitment early: he wouldn't threaten to veto the bill during negotiations. This gave legislators room to compromise without worrying that their work would be instantly rejected.

The process nearly collapsed when House Speaker John Boehner suddenly resigned in the fall of 2015. Incoming Speaker Paul Ryan's support helped rescue the bill. By December, it passed both chambers with overwhelming bipartisan majorities.

What the Law Actually Does

The Every Student Succeeds Act kept the testing. Students in grades three through eight, plus once in high school, still take annual standardized assessments in reading and math. This was non-negotiable for civil rights groups, who argued that data is essential for exposing inequities.

What changed was accountability. Under No Child Left Behind, the federal government defined success and failure. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, states define their own goals, set their own standards, and decide their own consequences for low-performing schools.

States must submit their plans to the federal Department of Education, which reviews them for completeness and ambition. But the law explicitly prohibits the Education Secretary from mandating specific academic standards or assessments. States cannot be required to adopt Common Core or any other particular curriculum.

The shift represents a philosophical about-face. The federal government went from micromanager to auditor. It checks that states have a plan, not that states have the right plan.

How Schools Are Measured

The law requires states to build what it calls a "multiple-measure accountability system." This means schools can't be judged on test scores alone. States must include at least five indicators:

• Student achievement or growth on reading and math assessments
• English language proficiency for students learning English
• An academic measure for elementary and middle schools (often a growth metric showing whether students improve year over year)
• High school graduation rates
• At least one additional measure of "school quality or student success"

This fifth indicator has become the wild card. States have chosen everything from chronic absenteeism to school climate surveys to access to advanced coursework. Most states use chronic absenteeism—typically defined as missing 10 percent or more of school days—because it correlates strongly with later academic failure and is relatively easy to measure.

The law also requires states to identify their lowest-performing schools—specifically, the bottom 5 percent based on test proficiency or the schools where fewer than two-thirds of students graduate. These schools must develop improvement plans, and states must intervene in some way. But what intervention looks like is left almost entirely to state discretion.

Students with Disabilities

The Every Student Succeeds Act created new expectations for students with disabilities, though with a notable caveat. The law says that most students with disabilities must take the same assessments as their peers and be held to the same academic standards.

Only one percent of all students—roughly ten percent of students with disabilities—can take alternate assessments designed for those with the most severe cognitive disabilities. This cap is tighter than previous rules and reflects a philosophy that high expectations benefit most students, including those with learning differences.

Here's where it gets complicated: the law doesn't define which students count as having "severe cognitive disabilities." Each state creates its own definition. A student who qualifies for an alternate assessment in Texas might not qualify in Massachusetts. This makes cross-state comparisons murky.

The law also acknowledged something advocates had long documented: students with disabilities experience disproportionately high rates of bullying and harassment. States must now develop and implement plans to address bullying on school campuses.

College and Career for Everyone

Buried in the law's text is a requirement that seems obvious but wasn't previously mandatory: all students must have access to college and career counseling and to advanced coursework like Advanced Placement classes.

Before this provision, many schools—particularly under-resourced ones serving low-income students—simply didn't offer Advanced Placement courses or employed no college counselors. The law doesn't mandate that students take these opportunities, but it requires that schools provide them.

Testing: Less, But Still Mandatory

By 2015, testing fatigue had reached a breaking point. The Obama administration's own Department of Education issued a remarkable document titled "Testing Action Plan" that acknowledged state testing programs were "draining creative approaches from our classrooms" and "creating undue stress for educators and students."

The Every Student Succeeds Act gave states flexibility to reduce testing time but did not eliminate federal testing requirements. The tension remains unresolved. Critics argue that you cannot simultaneously require annual assessments and claim to reduce testing. Supporters counter that the annual testing mandate is what forces transparency—without it, low-performing schools could hide their failures for years.

An interesting wrinkle: the law allows states to meet federal assessment requirements with a single comprehensive test rather than multiple subject-specific exams administered throughout the year. Few states have pursued this option. As of recent years, a state like Maryland was still administering four or more separate standardized tests, with testing windows stretching from December through June.

The Critics

The Every Student Succeeds Act has drawn criticism from opposite directions, which is often a sign of genuine compromise but sometimes a sign that nobody is satisfied.

From the left, concerns center on equity. By granting states so much flexibility, the law may allow states to de-prioritize struggling schools serving poor and minority students. Journalist Libby Nelson wrote that the law was "a victory for conservatives" and warned that states "could scale back their efforts to improve schools for poor and minority children."

From the right—well, actually, most conservatives got what they wanted. The main concern from free-market education reformers is that the law doesn't go far enough. It still requires testing, still mandates certain accountability structures, still involves federal oversight.

A more technical critique emerged around teacher quality. Under No Child Left Behind, schools had to employ "highly qualified teachers"—a federal definition with specific requirements. The Every Student Succeeds Act eliminated this mandate, replacing it with a requirement for "equitable distribution" of teachers across high-income and low-income schools.

Research suggests this change has led to an increase in "out-of-field teaching," where teachers are assigned to instruct subjects outside their area of expertise. A chemistry teacher might be asked to teach physics; a history teacher might cover geography. This practice particularly affects schools serving low-income students, students with disabilities, and those in charter or remote settings.

What Actually Improved

Not everything about the law has been controversial. Several provisions have earned widespread praise.

The emphasis on evidence-based interventions was genuinely new. Schools seeking improvement funds must now document that their chosen strategies have research backing. This sounds obvious—why would you try unproven approaches?—but for decades, educational fads swept through schools with little evidence behind them. The law nudges decision-making toward what studies show actually works.

States like New Mexico and Tennessee have used the law's leadership development provisions to create training programs for principals and establish partnerships between struggling schools and universities. The theory is that school improvement depends heavily on the quality of school leaders, and investing in principal preparation pays dividends.

The law also required states to conduct comprehensive needs assessments before designing improvement plans—gathering input from teachers, parents, and community members rather than imposing solutions from above. In practice, this means struggling schools must engage stakeholders in diagnosing problems before prescribing remedies.

The Trump Administration's Adjustments

On Inauguration Day 2017, President Donald Trump's chief of staff issued a directive freezing pending regulations across the federal government. This delayed implementation of various Every Student Succeeds Act provisions still in the pipeline.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos encouraged states to continue developing their accountability plans while signaling that the administration would take a hands-off approach. In March 2017, Republican lawmakers used a procedural tool called the Congressional Review Act to eliminate accountability regulations that the Obama administration had issued in its final months.

The most symbolically significant action came in January 2019, when Florida's governor signed an executive order "eliminating Common Core and the vestiges of Common Core" from the state's public schools. This was possible precisely because the Every Student Succeeds Act had stripped federal authority to require any particular set of academic standards.

The Unfinished Experiment

The Every Student Succeeds Act represents an attempt to find middle ground on one of American education's oldest debates. Should Washington set standards and enforce them, ensuring that all children—regardless of where they live—receive a quality education? Or should states and communities control their own schools, tailored to local values and needs?

The law's answer is: mostly the latter, with federal transparency requirements to keep states honest. Annual testing remains to expose gaps. But what states do about those gaps is their own business.

Whether this approach works depends on whom you ask and where you look. Some states have used their flexibility to innovate, developing creative accountability systems that measure what matters beyond test scores. Others have arguably retreated from aggressive improvement efforts, lowering expectations and reducing pressure on struggling schools.

The law's designers would likely argue that this variability is the point. Fifty states running fifty experiments means we learn what works faster than one federal mandate applied everywhere. Critics would counter that children stuck in states that make poor choices pay the price for that experimentation.

What's clear is that the Every Student Succeeds Act settled the question of federal versus state control—at least for now—decisively in favor of the states. Whether the next reauthorization swings the pendulum back, or pushes it further toward local control, remains to be seen. In American education, the only constant is the argument itself.