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Louis Freedberg

Some loftier level diplomacy is called for to cease the Cold War between Sacramento and Washington that has frozen out the state from benefiting from the major education initiatives of President Obama'southward instruction reform agenda.

The administration has awarded 34 states and the District of Columbia waivers from onerous provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind legislation signed into law a decade ago past Obama's predecessor.

Simply the administration has rejected California's asking for a waiver from the police force – the same ane that President Barack Obama has criticized during well-nigh of the time he has been in office.

Instead, his assistants has left California to implement a law that his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has described as a "boring-motion train wreck" that "serves as a disincentive to higher standards, rather than as an incentive."

The administration is currently considering a separate waiver application from a consortium of ix school districts, including Los Angeles Unified, San Francisco and Oakland, with a combined enrollment of more than 1 1000000 children. But even if the waiver is granted, the vast majority of school children, and districts, would still be left laboring under the former police.

Withal in event is the unattainable NCLB provision that will crave every student in California to be "expert" on standardized tests by next year.

California could see that goal past simply lowering its standards. But it has, rightly, refused to do and so.

That means that e'er-growing numbers of schools serving low-income students will be effectively labeled equally "failures" – in demand of "plan improvement" – nether the NCLB police force. At the latest count, there were four,402 of them in California.

The assistants's rejection of California'south waiver follows the state's near shut out from President Obama's signature teaching initiative, the $4.3 billion Race to the Top fund. California has been awarded a mere $l million from the fund, despite having one in eight public school children in the nation.

What's more, those funds were designated for simply three school districts serving about 20,000 students – out of vi.2 million in the state.

President Obama declared that the guiding principle for his waiver program would be to give states flexibility in implementing information technology. But in render he is demanding that to become the waiver every school – nearly x,000 of them – must encounter many new requirements that weren't even in the original police.

The virtually publicized sticking indicate is requiring each of the country'due south near 10,000 schools to introduce a new manner of evaluating teachers. The new evaluation arrangement must include "equally a pregnant factor" measures of "educatee growth for all students including English language learners and special education students."

The administration says districts can used "multiple formats and sources" to measure out growth, including "rigorous instructor performance standards, teacher portfolios, and student and parent surveys."

Information technology's obvious that better teaching leads to ameliorate learning outcomes. But at that place is no assurance that the evaluation organization being demanded by the administration will be more constructive than the NCLB police has been in closing the achievement gap.

The assistants's plan could help remove some of the least effective teachers from the classroom. But whether it will drastically improve student outcomes for the bulk of California's students is unknown.

Overshadowed past the controversy over instructor evaluation is the boosted requirement that California devise an entirely new, and untested, organization of "priority schools," "focus schools" and "reward schools" to "differentiate" schools based on based on student performance. Without additional support from Washington, the state would be required to provide "incentives and supports" to "ensure continuous improvement" of the everyman-performing schools.

It is time for a reset of California's relations with Washington on the instruction front. The Obama and Brownish administrations should initiate discussions at the highest levels to figure out a mode for California to receive a waiver from the NCLB law. California's congressional leadership should do any information technology can to facilitate these discussions.

It is also late for California to become more than than the sliver of Race to the Elevation funds it has already received. But the assistants's rejection of California's NCLB waiver request is likewise important an issue to accept without further urgent efforts on both sides to reach a resolution.

Louis Freedberg is executive manager of EdSource.

A version of this commentary offset appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on April 28, 2013.

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