Education Week - August 30, 2017 - 19

MONIQUE DARRISAW-AKIL is the assistant
superintendent of secondary education at Brentwood
Union Free School District, in New York.

of students' achievement.
It is time for state education officials to act morally
and provide specific guidance to local school districts
to stop these known abusive and fraudulent practices, which ultimately harm the very children whom
schools are supposed to serve. n
BERNARD GASSAWAY is a former New York City public schools
teacher, principal, and superintendent of alternative schools and
programs of more than two decades. He is currently an adjunct
faculty member at the Center for Integrated Teacher Education, a
graduate school program affiliated with the College of Saint Rose
in Albany, N.Y.

Getty

that uses performance-based assessments, must present their final projects
to a committee of faculty and external advisers for evaluation. I once participated
in one of their final project committees as
an external evaluator and was amazed
by the effort these students put into their
thesis projects. Some of their projects rivaled work I completed in my freshman
year of college.
We can also set limits on how many
credit-recovery courses a student is eligible to take in a given semester. Online
programs can add value to a credit-recovery program, but we can't just outsource
teaching to a computer screen. The best
strategy for using an online program is a
blended model in which a teacher is present for a portion of the learning, facilitating the lesson and providing support to
students as they navigate the programs.
Lastly, we can solve the "values" problem by reframing the goal of education
from re-creating our way of doing school
to focusing on the individual and dynamic
needs of the students in front of us. If you
are sending students to summer school to
teach them a lesson, then perhaps there
are a few lessons you need to learn. The
goal of education is not to reward or punish individuals but to provide students
with skills they need to be productive, independent, and critical-thinking adults.
Let's use every tool available to make
that happen. n

Vanessa Solis/Getty

No community wants its local school
to be labeled "failing." But I would argue
that the most important reason schools
turn to credit recovery is the potential
impact the practice can have on students.
There is no greater despair than can be
found on the face of a 17-year-old student
with no hope of graduating from high
school. Once students cross the threshold between early adolescence and young
adulthood, thoughts of the future weigh
heavily on their minds. When they have
no sense of a future, well, they have no
hope. That's when dropping out seems to
be the only answer. Why come to school
day after day if you don't see your way
out and your school hasn't provided you
with a lifeline so you can stay afloat?
That is the reality for many of our overage, undercredited youths who struggle
in our traditional schools and seek transfer and alternative schooling in order to
graduate. When schools don't create viable pathways to graduation for struggling
students, we are effectively pushing those
students out of school.
Many of the problems with credit recovery are adult problems. As adults, we can
fix them. We don't want the standards of
our institutions lowered? So don't lower
them. We can create high-quality creditrecovery programs by establishing committees of teachers and administrators to
establish thoughtful guidelines for these
programs. School committees can determine that students have to demonstrate
competency in a course.
For example, the students at Forsyth
Satellite Academy, a New York City school

ESSA Co-Author:
Enforce the Law

By John Kline
ongress in December
2015 passed the Every
Student Succeeds Act,
the federal law that
supports K-12 education in schools across
the country and, in
doing so, replaced the
outdated No Child Left Behind Act
of 2002. As the chairman of the U.S.
House Education & Workforce Committee at the time, I co-authored the
new law alongside the Senate Health,
Education, Labor, & Pensions Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander,
R-Tenn.; its ranking member, Sen.
Patty Murray, D-Wash.; the ranking
member of the House committee, Rep.
Bobby Scott, D-Va.; and many of our
colleagues.
During the eight long years our team
spent working to pass this bill, no topic
was more hotly debated than that of
annual testing. We listened carefully
as parents, teachers, students, and
school administrators explained their
concerns about overtesting and using
state math and reading assessments
as essentially the only factors in determining if schools were succeeding or
failing. On the other hand, we heard
from researchers and the civil rights
and business communities about their
concerns that eliminating annual testing requirements would reduce the
focus on improving outcomes for disadvantaged and minority children across
America and disguise important information about their achievement.
In the end, we arrived at a fair
and sensible compromise in the law:
Keep the requirement that "the same
academic assessments [be] used to
measure the achievement of all public elementary school and secondary
school students in the state" beginning in 3rd grade. However, we made
it clear that states-not the U.S. Department of Education-would decide
how to use the testing results to measure and improve school performance.
Tests would still be an important part
of assessing school quality but not the
only significant factor. And the tests
are important so that students and
parents can compare the progress of
their school with that of other schools
across the state.

However, Arizona and New Hampshire recently passed laws that violate
ESSA by permitting individual school
districts to choose which assessments to
administer, according to an analysis by
Dennis M. Cariello, a former top lawyer
for the Education Department under
President George W. Bush. Such violations undermine ESSA in its entirety.
Since the passage of ESSA a year
and a half ago, states and districts
have been working hard to implement
the new law. Those of us who had a
hand in crafting the law are all paying very close attention to ensure that
states and the Education Department
do this in a way that is consistent with
the law and the principles to which we
all agreed-state and local flexibility
but with important federal guardrails.
In Arizona and New Hampshire, state
policymakers and Education Department officials must work together to
fix the discrepancy so that every public school student is measured by the
same tests-whatever tests those state
administrators decide are best.
With respect to testing, we expect the
new law will result in a more balanced
use of state tests that keeps the focus
on student achievement and limits
classroom time spent on testing while
scaling back some of the high-stakes
uses that have been so controversial in
recent years.
Ultimately, states are required to
follow this law and, simply put, the
U.S. Department of Education must
enforce the fundamental requirement
that the same annual tests be given to
all students. After all, 359 members of
the U.S. House, 85 U.S. senators, and
President Barack Obama all supported
ESSA, ushering in a new era of innovation combined with state-based accountability.
I backed Secretary of Education
Betsy DeVos when President Donald
Trump originally nominated her, and
I still believe that she will succeed in
her pledge to defend ESSA. I am confident she will be a champion for states
as they implement the law-including
the necessity that all students take the
same annual tests. n
JOHN KLINE, a former Republican congressman
from Minnesota, chaired the House Education
and Workforce Committee and co-authored the
Every Student Succeeds Act.

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Education Week - August 30, 2017

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