The Department of Education granted the state to blend the funds from programs that support teacher quality, English learners, student enrichment and afterschool programs, a move that Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said will shift “nearly $8 million and thousands of hours of staff time from bureaucracy to actually putting that expertise and those resources in the classroom.”

During an in western Iowa town of Denison, Education Secretary Linda McMahon called the move a “groundbreaking first step that gives state leaders more control over federal education dollars.” 

The waiver, however, is not as expansive as what Reynolds, a Republican, originally floated when she announced the request in March. The funding flexibility only applies to the dollars the state manages, not federal funds going to districts, such as money for low-income students. 

Anne Hyslop, director of policy development at All4Ed, an advocacy group — and a former Education Department official — called the consolidation of funds for state activities “unprecedented,” but noted that the state scaled down after conversations with the department. “This is not the seismic shift in federal funding that perhaps was first contemplated in their original draft.”

The department also granted the state an , which releases districts from some requirements tied to federal programs and gives them more time to spend the money. But , both blue and red, already participate in that program.

The Iowa is one of six before the department. , for example, has asked for a similar block grant, while both Indiana and want to make changes to their accountability systems. Once McMahon grants one, it will be “hard to say no to another state that shows up with the same asks,” said Adam Schott, former acting assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education during the Biden administration.

  with the aim of reducing bureaucracy and giving states and districts more authority over spending has long been a Republican policy goal. Supporters argue that block grants are a more efficient way to address local issues and can reduce staff time spent on paperwork. But skeptics argue that the students whom Congress intended to help through specific programs could be shortchanged as states shift funds to other priorities. 

“I see how this could help to perhaps reduce redundancies, but at what expense?” asked Melissa Peterson, legislative and policy director for the Iowa State Education Association, an affiliate of the National Education Association. “We do have grave concerns that some of the various student populations may, quite frankly, not receive the services as intended.” 

Republicans pushed for education block grants almost as soon as Congress established the Department of Education. In 1981, the Reagan administration in the Chapter 2 block grant. But Congress kept cutting funds for the program, and . 

In 1998, the House passed the Dollars to the Classroom Act, another block grant. Conservatives liked the “political symbolism of getting Washington out of what has traditionally been a state role,” said Vic Klatt, who worked at the department during George H.W. Bush’s administration and then spent several years working on education policy for House Republicans. But no one, he said, ever wanted to get rid of the major programs, like Title I for high-poverty schools and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The bill died in the Senate.

‘The data collection burden’

Some school finance experts stress that the Every Student Succeeds Act, the primary education law, already offers a lot of flexibility to combine funds. But Catherine Pozniak, a consultant based in Louisiana who works with states on waiver requests, said agencies and districts still struggle to manage multiple programs. The “grievances” that Iowa and Indiana have expressed are real, she said.

“Flexibilities exist, but they are actually quite difficult to take advantage of,” she said. 

While the department didn’t waive requirements related to data collection and reporting, McMahon wrote in to the state that “the conversations between our staff have been informative and insightful regarding the data collection burden” on states and districts.

Jim Blew, co-founder of the conservative Defense of Freedom Institute, called the announcement a “remarkable breakthrough” and said he hopes all states would try to follow Iowa’s example. “One of the most burdensome parts of dealing with the Education Department is the reporting,” he said. The agency “just needs time to think through how allowing it in one state will impact others, but I’ll bet they are going to make that a priority.”

Schott challenged the argument that reporting how states are using federal funds is a waste of time.

 â€œOne person’s compliance is another person’s accountability, transparency and general prudent treatment of funds,” he said. ​​”The reason you’ve got these discrete funding streams is not to make someone’s life difficult. It’s to make sure that marginalized student groups don’t have to fight and claw for the resources they’re going to need to access a high-quality education.”

In her comments during the event, McKenzie Snow, Iowa’s education chief, talked about using the flexibility to better train teachers to serve the state’s growing English learner population, which has increased by 40% over the past decade, she said. But Hyslop said the state has yet to “make a compelling case” for how the waiver would improve outcomes for those students.

For Snow, block grants are a familiar strategy. She served as an aide to former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos during Trump’s first administration. At the time, DeVos proposed  combining 29 programs into a $19.4 billion fund that would give states and districts more authority over how to spend the money. Democrats, who had control of the House at the time, didn’t support the idea, and e in both houses .

As Iowa’s chief, Snow asked the department to in the Perry Community School District following a 2024 at Perry High School that left two dead and six injured.

Schott said most of the waiver requests he received were due to similar tragedies or natural disasters that forced students to miss school. But he always urged states to work with regional education labs or other outside centers to evaluate how the changes they made affect students.

That will be more difficult, Hyslop said, due to the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize and shut down the Education Department.

“The department has fewer staff to monitor right now,” she said. “Understanding the impact of this is going to be really challenging.” 

That’s because ESSA is proving to be a weak law. Although it was hailed at the time for its bipartisan nature and “the largest devolution of federal control to the states in a quarter-century,” student achievement has fallen dramatically, especially for the lowest-performing youngsters.

Part of the problem is that ESSA doesn’t have the same muscular elements as its predecessor, the No Child Left Behind Act. It’s a pretty damning comparison: NCLB required states to hold districts accountable for their results; it paid close attention to low-performing student subgroups; and it included other improvement efforts like school choice, tutoring and a $1 billion reading program. ESSA has none of those things. This lack of ambition probably helped it win bipartisan support when it passed, and also why it has led to student achievement declines.  

Admittedly, this is an awkward point to be making at the current moment. At the national level, the Trump administration is doing everything in its power to kill the U.S. Department of Education and hand full control of education back to the states. Meanwhile, Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren are responding by the status quo with chants like “Save our Schools.”

But history suggests neither deregulation nor blind support for the current federal-state relationship is the right approach. And with state leaders seeking waivers for even less oversight over their use of federal funds, now is the time to start thinking about what a better accountability framework might look like. Here are five places to start:  

1. Trust states, but verify

The Trump administration wants to send even more control back to the states with “no-strings-attached formula block grants.” But that seems unwise, given the achievement declines most states have experienced over the last decade (many of which preceded COVID). More importantly, it wouldn’t make sense to offer the same flexibilities to, say, Maine or Oregon, where scores have rapidly over the last decade, as to Mississippi, which has dramatically improved outcomes for kids. Different states deserve different levels of earned autonomy.

Andy Smarick, Kelly Robson and I outlined this approach in a 2015 report we called “.” We envisioned a set of federal-state compacts where each state established ambitious student performance goals and developed a comprehensive plan for reaching them. In exchange, states would be freed from strict federal rules on how to identify low-performing schools and the specific steps for improvement those schools must take, and the government would monitor the results. The feds could then extend the length of compacts with states that make progress and ask those where performance has stalled to revisit their plans.

ESSA has some elements of this framework. Nominally, states are in charge of writing their own plans and the feds are responsible for oversight. But the states would tell you the feds are too strict on what’s allowable and what’s not. More importantly, that process ignores student results, and performance can — and has — stalled without any impetus for change.

2. Focus on districts, not schools

Whereas NCLB had both school and district accountability components, ESSA focuses solely on schools. That turned out to be a huge mistake.

The school-level emphasis was fundamentally flawed. After all, district leaders control the budget, adopt the school calendar, negotiate major contracts and determine pay schedules. In other words, district leaders should be blamed if a school doesn’t have the resources it needs to succeed.

The nation saw this play out during COVID. It wasn’t teachers or principals who set COVID policies, yet the national education law ignored the district role and instead required states to focus on individual schools.

That made no sense — and it was borne out in the data. The latest Education Recovery Scorecard found achievement gaps within the same districts stayed about the same during the course of the pandemic. Meanwhile, achievement gaps between districts grew substantially.

Why? Because the districts were making different decisions. As a research team led by Dan Goldhaber , “In districts that went remote, achievement growth was lower for all subgroups, but especially for students attending high-poverty schools. In areas that remained in person, there were still modest losses in achievement, but there was no widening of gaps between high and low-poverty schools.”

That is, district decisions over how to handle COVID, not COVID itself, were what caused gaps to grow. Going forward, districts, not schools should be the primary unit of accountability.

3. Hold states and districts accountable for the performance of low-performing students

American society is becoming more diverse, and old categories of race and ethnicity are becoming to neatly measure and define. It’s not that the U.S. has suddenly become colorblind or that race doesn’t matter, but policies haven’t caught up to the fact that people who identify as multiracial are the group in the country. Moreover, there’s wide in which children are identified as having disabilities.

These categories are also less salient in education than they once were. While there’s been in the gap between the highest- and lowest-achieving students, who those students are has changed. Yes, the bottom has fallen out for children in traditionally low-performing subgroups, but for native English speakers, students without disabilities and those who do not live in poverty.

As such, policymakers should follow the lead of states like and , which specifically look at how the bottom 25% of students are doing, regardless of their race, ethnicity or disability status. Those kids rely on public schools the most, they’re struggling right now and it’s where the policy focus should be going forward.

4. Give parents information

ESSA states to share results with families “as soon as is practicable” after standardized tests are administered. But reporting has actually over time. Even with the shift to digital exams, states take longer to process the scores than they did two decades ago.

That’s inexcusable. States could speed this up on their own, or the feds could step in and define “as soon as practicable” to be no more than, say, two weeks after the test. That’s the standard in the private sector, and there’s no reason it can’t be met in public education.

5. Give parents options

Did you know that all students in low-performing public schools once had access to free after-school tutoring? Or that all families in low-performing schools once had the right to transfer to another public school of their choice?

Both these programs existed under NCLB. They had flaws, for sure, and school districts tended to hate them, but they pressured schools to improve, and of families took advantage of them each year. Congress should consider bringing back these other forms of accountability too.

This is far from a comprehensive list of all the things that need to improve with current accountability systems, but it’s not enough to shout “local control” or defend the status quo.Policymakers from both sides of the aisle need to reckon with the current state of public education and articulate a vision for the future that matches that reality.

Submitted March 7, the plan offers a blueprint for Republican governors seeking more control over how federal education funds are spent. The current formulas, according to a brief summary of the plan provided to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, result in “1,400 different funding streams across 325 school districts.”  

“Unfortunately, dollars that flow through the Department of Education typically come with all kinds of bureaucratic strings attached that blunt the impact they might otherwise make,” Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds wrote last week. “Prescriptive requirements prevent states from scaling innovative programs.”

Iowa isn’t the only state interested in winning more control over its federal education dollars. But others say granting Iowa the waiver would bypass Congress’ authority and could shortchange the marginalized students the money was intended to help.

The proposal comes as the Trump administration moves to dismantle the federal department. In , Education Secretary Linda McMahon said growth in states like Alabama and Louisiana, amid the generally dismal showing on last year’s national test scores, proves that leaders don’t need Washington’s help. 

The Every Student Succeeds Act, the main federal law governing K-12 education, already offers spending flexibility, allowing leaders to combine funds from some individual grant programs. But experts say Iowa’s request seems to stretch the limits of the law and would need congressional approval. For instance, the law prohibits changes to how $18 billion in Title I funds for low-income students are allocated to districts.

McMahon might nonetheless approve it, they say, to signal support for a more hands-off approach. 

“I can’t see how there would be a path to making all of these different formula grant programs into one program without Congress,” said Anne Hyslop, director of policy development at All4Ed, a think tank. She worked at the department during the Obama administration and helped draft the ESSA legislation. The largest program, , provides funds for extra staff and services in high-poverty schools. Iowa’s grant last year was $110 million.  

“Title I funds have to be spent in Title I schools,” Hyslop said. “It’s an understatement to say that a lot of things have happened in the past few months that no one would have ever predicted. I would not be surprised to see something outside of the norm.”

Some think Iowa, which has a universal Education Savings Account program, might use the flexibility to allow more families to spend state funds on . 

The state could argue that vouchers would better serve more vulnerable students, said Douglas Harris, a Tulane University economist and school choice expert.

“Certainly, the current administration would approve it,” he said. 

The state did not respond to a question over whether promoting school choice is part of the plan.

Iowa’s waiver request and interest from other states has already drawn concern from Democrats. In a statement Tuesday, Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott, ranking member of the House education committee, called block granting federal education funds “not only illegal but extremely dangerous.”

“Converting these funds will make it virtually impossible for the federal government to hold states accountable for providing all students with a high-quality education free from discrimination,” his statement said.

The state’s summary says Iowa has a “strong focus on accountability for student outcomes” and would continue to track achievement data for different student groups. On last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, Iowa’s results landed in the middle of student performance nationally. Its students saw declines in both fourth grade reading and eighth grade math.

McKenzie Snow, director of the Iowa Department of Education, was one of 12 state chiefs who asked McMahon in January to work with Congress on supporting the idea of consolidating multiple programs into a block grant. But that process could drag out, and even with Republicans in control, might not be successful. A waiver could come as early as summer.

Also on the list was Kirsten Baesler, North Dakota’s longtime superintendent, who is awaiting confirmation to become assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education. 

In a March 14 letter, Hayley Sanon, acting U.S. assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, told staff she looked forward to working with them to “get the federal bureaucracy out of your way so you can give parents more choices, improve academic achievement and ensure students reach their God-given potential.”

Department spokeswoman Madi Biedermann confirmed that officials are considering Iowa’s plan. The department has until early July to make a decision, and other states are watching closely. 

Utah Superintendent Sydnee Dickson, who also signed the chiefs’ letter, told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· her state wants more flexibility to pursue “competency-based systems that adhere less to seat time and more about outcomes.”

Oklahoma state Superintendent Ryan Walters, who last year established a , is eyeing a different law for a waiver. He wants to allow families to spend funds from the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act on private schools or tutors for students with disabilities, .

‘Lots of federal regulations’

In addition to Title I, Iowa receives $16 million from the federal government to and for programs like  bullying prevention, mental health support and school safety measures. Districts already have the option of combining these grants with Title I or with each other to support their own priorities.

The block grant would add into the mix funds for ($5 million) ($4.5 million), migrant students ($3.4 million), ($403,180), ($7.8 million) and ($5 million). 

Education organizations in the state, including the administrators association and the teachers union, told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· that they don’t yet know enough about the plan to comment on  it. States are required to submit comments from the public along with waiver requests, but Iowa education department spokesperson Heather Doe said officials would do that if the federal department approves the waiver and then submit comments along with revisions. 

One policy analyst welcomed the idea and thinks it would help some districts focus more on meeting students’ needs than compliance with reporting requirements.

“Often for smaller, rural districts, any individual funding stream nets a small amount of dollars, but has lots of federal regulations. The funding altogether might actually be able to accomplish some important work,” said Margaret Buckton,  the executive director of the Urban Education Network of Iowa. “A low-income student might also be homeless or migratory. When the funding is consolidated, the district can determine which of the services are most appropriate.”

The state’s summary says it’s “steadfast in its commitment to ensuring the civil rights protections” outlined in federal law and that it would still require school districts to explain how they would “meet the needs of all students.” 

Iowa is also asking to waive some parts of a separate federal law that provides funds for homeless students in an effort to make services “more comprehensive and better coordinated,” Doe said.

But Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, which advocates for homeless students, criticized the idea.

The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act “does not contain any provision that would allow for a state to distribute funds in any other way, or for any other purpose or population,” she said.

Last year, Iowa received almost $752,000 for homeless students through McKinney-Vento, funds that can pay for extra academic support and transportation so students don’t have to change schools. A shows many districts are failing to identify students who would qualify for the support.

School choice advocacy

Observers noted that Snow, Iowa’s education chief, is well versed in ESSA. She worked at the U.S. Department of Education during Trump’s first term. A private school choice advocate, she helped craft a tax-credit scholarship proposal under former Secretary Betsy DeVos. While the effort failed, the plan could see new life in a major Republicans are finalizing. 

Republicans have wanted to block grant education funds for decades. Most recently, Trump and DeVos pushed the idea during budget negotiations. They proposed to consolidate 29 programs into a $19.4 billion fund that would grant states and districts more say over how to spend the money. They argued the plan would reduce federal overreach and allow the government to cut education department staff. 

But Democrats, who controlled the House at the time, didn’t go for it. in both houses rejected the idea, and the plan fizzled.

DeVos hasn’t given up. In December, : “Take the U.S. Department of Education’s meddling bureaucrats out of the equation.”

“Standards-based reform” in the heyday of the education reform movement was a bit like the title of a recent film: Everything Everywhere All at Once. The strategy of setting statewide standards, measuring student performance against those standards, and then holding schools accountable for the results was at the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and dominated education policy for most of the “long NCLB period” from the 1990s into the 2010s. To many observers, standards-based reform was education reform, and so the question about whether standards-based reform worked is equivalent to asking whether education reform worked.

Answering that question is only possible if we define what’s in and what’s out: What counts under the umbrella of standards-based reform? Did it succeed as an overall strategy? Were there individual components that were particularly effective?

In this chapter, we will work our way through these and related questions, but readers should beware that the results will not be entirely satisfying. Get ready for a lot of shrugging. We know, for example, that student achievement improved markedly in the late 1990s and early 2000s—the very time that states were starting to put standards, tests, and “consequential accountability” into place. Some of the gains can be directly attributed to those policies. But the improvement was likely driven by other factors, too, some of which had very little to do with education policy or even schools, such as the plummeting child poverty rate at the time.

On the flip side, when student achievement plateaued and even started to decline in the 2010s, it’s plausible that the tapering off was related to the softening of school-level accountability, as NCLB lost steam and eventually gave way to the Every Student Succeeds Act and the Common Core State Standards. But hard evidence is scant, and it’s difficult to know for sure, especially because—again—so much else was going on at the same time. That included the aftermath of the Great Recession (and its budget cuts) as well as the advent of smartphones and social media, which may have depressed student achievement just as they boosted teenage anxiety and depression.

And while we know that standards, testing, and especially accountability drove some of the improvements in student outcomes in the 1990s and 2000s, especially in math, we unfortunately have limited information about exactly what schools did to get those better results. For the most part, the “black box” that is the typical K–12 classroom stayed shut.

Here’s the good news: despite all these uncertainties, there’s still much we can learn from the era of standards-based reform—both for future efforts to use standards, assessments, and accountability to improve outcomes and for education reform writ large.

A short history of standards-based reform

The NCLB Act locked into place a specific version of standards-based reform, one that incorporated a mishmash of ideas that had been floating around since the 1980s and arguably since the 1960s. Think of it like a dish at a fusion restaurant, reflecting a novel combination of flavors and culinary lineages—not always with a satisfying outcome.

One might even say that this version of standards-based reform was incoherent—which is ironic, given that coherence was arguably the number-one goal of the original progenitors of the idea. In a series of articles and books in the late 1980s, scholars Jennifer O’Day and Marshall Smith argued for what they called “systemic reform.” Their key insight was that the multiple layers of governance baked into the US education system as well as myriad conflicting policies emanating from the many cooks in the K–12 kitchen were pulling educators in too many directions. What we needed was to fix the system as a whole, to think comprehensively and coherently and thereby get everyone rowing in the same direction in pursuit of stronger and more equitable student outcomes.

To do so, we needed to get serious about “alignment.” We should start with a clear set of desired outcomes, also known as standards, delineating what we expect students to know and be able to do—at the end of high school but also at key milestones along the way. Those curricular standards would set forth both the content of what kids needed to learn and the level at which they needed to learn it. Regular assessments would help practitioners and policymakers understand whether kids were on track to meet expectations and ready to progress to the next grade level and, ultimately, high school graduation. This approach would allow for the assessment of student performance against common expectations and criteria rather than measuring students against one another (norm-referenced evaluation and rankings) to determine academic achievement. But perhaps most importantly, all the other key pieces of the education apparatus needed to be aligned to the standards as well—especially teacher preparation, professional development, instructional materials, and funding systems.

O’Day and Smith didn’t say much about “accountability” as we would later come to talk about it—consequences that would accrue to educators, especially for poor student performance. Instead, their focus was primarily on coherence, alignment, and building “capacity” in the system to improve teaching and learning.

Systemic reform was popular with traditional education groups. It spoke to the frustration of classroom teachers as well as principals and superintendents, without directly threatening the political power of key constituencies, especially teachers’ unions. They welcomed the additional help envisioned by scholars such as O’Day and Smith—and the additional money.

But this approach was hardly the only school improvement game in town. Other ideas were gaining prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s, too, ideas promulgated by governors, economists, political scientists, and business leaders. To oversimplify a bit, they coalesced around the “reinventing government” frame — namely that to reform a broken system like K–12 education, leaders needed to embrace a “tight-loose” strategy: tight about the results to be accomplished and loose about how people closer to the problem might get there. This was how business titans of the time steered their organizations, especially as the economy was shifting to knowledge work. To get the best results, people on the front lines had to have the autonomy to make decisions and solve problems themselves in real time rather than take orders from the top. They should be rewarded when they improved productivity accordingly. But if they failed to generate the desired results, unpleasantness might be expected to follow. They might even lose their jobs.

This struck a chord among some education scholars as well. As far back as 1966’s Coleman Report, we knew about the disconnect between education inputs and outcomes. If we wanted better results, it made sense to focus on the latter. Furthermore, many of the reforms embraced in the wake of 1983’s A Nation at Risk report tried to tweak inputs such as teacher salaries, course requirements, and days in the school year. In an era of stagnant achievement and widening achievement gaps, none of that seemed to be working. It was time, many thought, for something else.

By the early 1990s, the tight-loose frame was a big driver behind the charter schools movement and the notion of “accountability for results” for public schools writ large. Lamar Alexander, who was governor of Tennessee before becoming US secretary of education under George H. W. Bush, was apt to talk about “an old-fashioned horse trade”: greater autonomy for schools and educators in return for greater accountability for improved student outcomes. And it wasn’t just Republican governors who embraced this model; several Democratic ones did, too, especially southern governors such as Jim Hunt (North Carolina), Richard Riley (South Carolina), and Bill Clinton (Arkansas). It helped that the Progressive Policy Institute—a think tank for the New Dems—supported this approach enthusiastically.

This version of standards-based reform had some overlap with O’Day and Smith’s systemic reform, especially when it came to the centrality of academic standards. But it put greater emphasis on the measurement of achievement against those standards—in other words, high-stakes testing—and especially on accountability measures connected to results. This reflected the thinking of both economists and political scientists, who thought that the right incentives might allow local schools and school systems to break through the political barriers to change. With enough pressure from on high, schools might finally put the needs of kids first rather than follow the lead of adult interest groups, especially unions. They would remove ineffective teachers from the classroom, for example, ditch misguided curricula, and untie the hands of principals. The assumption was that the major barrier to improvement was not incoherence or the lack of capacity per se, but small-p politics and, especially, union politics. Getting the incentives right by tying real accountability to results could take a sledgehammer to the political status quo in communities nationwide.

This made sense to some key actors on the political left as well, especially the Education Trust and other civil rights organizations. They bought into this version of standards-based reform but with an important twist: doing right by kids would be defined primarily as doing right by kids who had been mistreated by the education system. That meant Black, Hispanic, and low-income students especially. These reformers wanted to counterbalance the political power of the unions but also that of affluent parents and other actors who tended to steer resources to the children and families who needed them the least. They wanted to use top-down accountability to redirect money, qualified teachers, and attention to the highest-poverty schools and the most disadvantaged kids.

These various flavors of standards-based reform were all in the mix in the 1990s, with many public discussions in particular about the wisdom of a strategy focused on “capacity building” versus one that stressed “accountability for results.” The enactment of NCLB settled the debate; the accountability hawks won. Capacity building would mostly be put on the shelf in favor of a muscular, federally driven effort to hold schools accountable, especially for the achievement of the groups that most concerned civil rights leaders.

Enter No Child Left Behind

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the Bush-era reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, was the law of the land for an entire generation of students. The kids who entered kindergarten in the fall of 2002, nine months after then president George W. Bush put his signature on NCLB, were seniors in high school in December 2015 when then president Barack Obama signed into law the Every Student Succeeds Act (its reauthorized successor).

That’s not to say that the same policy was set in stone for those thirteen years. For the first half of its life, federal officials implemented it rather faithfully, but the second half came with major policy shifts driven by regulatory actions and what might be termed “strategic nonenforcement.” Let’s take a brief trip down memory lane.

“NCLB-classic”—which was the 2001 reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act—centered on the three-legged stool of standards, tests, and accountability. But those three elements were not treated with the same level of prescription. States had complete control over their standards—both in terms of the content to be included and in terms of the level of performance that would be considered good enough. Not so when it came to the tests—those had to be given annually to students in grades three through eight in reading and in math, plus once in high school, plus three times in science. And the assessments had to meet a variety of technical requirements.

But where NCLB’s designers really got prescriptive was around accountability requirements. They created a measure called adequate yearly progress, which judged schools against statewide targets for performance and decreed that subgroups of students—the major racial groups plus low-income kids, students with disabilities, and English learners—would need to hit those targets as well. If schools failed to achieve any of their goals in a given year, they would face a cascade of sanctions that grew more severe with each unsuccessful year. Students would have the right to attend other public schools in their same district and, eventually, to receive “supplemental education services” (i.e., free tutoring) from private providers. Districts were charged with intervening in low-performing schools with ever-increasing intensity.

NCLB had a plethora of other provisions, from mandating that schools hire only “highly qualified teachers” to bringing “scientifically based reading instruction” (now called the science of reading) to the nation’s schools. Some of these other pieces could be considered capacitybuilding efforts. But overwhelmingly, NCLB was about accountability for results. It assumed that with enough pressure, schools and districts would cut through the Gordian knot that was holding them back in order to raise the achievement of students, especially those from marginalized groups. That was the theory. And as we’ll get to in a moment, it partly worked.

But it also soon became clear that many schools and systems didn’t know what to do in response to the accountability pressure—or couldn’t steel themselves to make the requisite changes in long-established practices and structures. Some educators narrowed the curriculum, significantly expanding the time spent on math and reading at the expense of other subjects. Stories filled the nation’s newspapers about schools teaching to the test, canceling recess, even ignoring lice outbreaks, all because of the accountability pressures of NCLB. In perhaps the most notable education scandal, teachers and principals in the Atlanta Public Schools district were found to have cheated on state-administered tests by providing students with the correct answers to questions and even changing students’ answers and modifying test sheets to ensure higher scores.

NCLB Evolves

As with most federal statutes, Congress was supposed to update NCLB after a few years. A reauthorization push in 2007 came close to doing so and would have made the law even tougher, but it fell apart under fierce opposition from teachers’ unions and other education advocacy groups. So the law lumbered on even as it became clearer to its strongest supporters, including then education secretary Margaret Spellings, that parts of it were becoming unworkable.

One of the major issues was that an increasing number of schools were failing to meet NCLB’s adequate yearly progress provisions. If tens of thousands of schools were deemed subpar, then the sting and stigma were lost, as was much of the motivation to do something to fix it. In particular, the law’s focus on achievement rather than progress over time was snaring virtually all high-poverty schools in its trap, given the enduring relationship between test scores and kids’ socioeconomic backgrounds. Now that annual tests were in place, and states had, with federal money and support, built more sophisticated data systems, it was technically feasible to measure individual students’ progress from one year to the next. Such measures were much fairer to schools whose students arrived several years below grade level. But these growth models weren’t contemplated back in 2001, so they weren’t allowed under the law.

Through a series of regulatory actions, Spellings (under George W. Bush) and Arne Duncan (under Obama) allowed states to make critical changes to their implementation of NCLB to address these concerns. They allowed growth models provided the models still expected students to hit “proficiency” within a few years. They loosened rules around supplemental services so that school districts could provide tutoring themselves rather than outsource it to private providers. The cascade of sanctions was replaced with a menu of intervention options and funded generously through the School Improvement Grants program—all meant to encourage “school turnarounds.” An Obama-era waiver program allowed states even greater flexibility to tinker with their accountability targets in return for commitments to embrace other reforms the administration supported.

Meanwhile, states were working to address another key issue with NCLB: its encouragement of low level academic standards and much-too-easy-to-pass tests. Because the law required states to set targets that would result in virtually all students reaching the “proficient” level by 2014, it incentivized states to set the proficiency bar very low. This, in turn, may have encouraged educators to engage in low-level instruction, with teaching to the test and “drill and kill” methods. It also provided parents with misleading information, as states told most parents that their children were “proficient” in reading and math, even if they were actually several years below grade level and nowhere near on track for college or a decent-paying career. In Tennessee, for example, the state reported that 90 percent of students were “proficient” in fourth-grade reading in 2009 while the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) had the number at 28 percent. Advocates came to call this the “honesty gap.”

Under the leadership of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, states started collaborating on a set of common standards for English language arts and math—what would eventually become the Common Core State Standards. The hope was that, by working together and providing political cover to one another, the states would finally set the bar suitably high—at a level that indicated that high school graduates were truly ready for college or career and that would encourage teachers to aim for higher-level teaching. It would certainly be hard for the effort to result in worse standards than what most states had in place. Multiple reviews of state standards over the years from the American Federation of Teachers, Achieve, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found that they were generally vague, poorly written, and lacking in the type of curricular content that “systemic reformers” had envisioned so many years before.10 It wasn’t surprising, then, that so many educators reported teaching to the test. The tests became the true standards, and they were perceived to be of low quality too.

The Common Core standards were adopted by more than forty states in 2010 and 2011, changing the very foundation of NCLB’s architecture. No longer were states aiming to get low-achieving students to basic literacy and numeracy; now the goal was to get everyone to college and career readiness. But that shift was largely overlooked at the time, drowned out by a fierce political backlash to the Common Core. It mostly came from the right, as the newly emerging conservative populist movement seized on Obama’s involvement in encouraging the adoption of the standards (through his Race to the Top [RttT] initiative). Nonetheless, by 2015, more than a dozen states were using new assessments tied to the standards (largely paid for through RttT funds), and even today, most states still use the Common Core standards or close facsimiles.

So did standards-based reform work during the NCLB era?

As mentioned before, judging the success or failure of such a sprawling reform effort is hard to do. Thankfully, scholars Dan Goldhaber and Michael DeArmond of the CALDER Center at the American Institutes for Research offered a wonderful overview of the research literature in a recent report for the US Chamber of Commerce, Looking Back to Look Forward: Quantitative and Qualitative Reviews of the Past 20 Years of K–12 Education Assessment and Accountability Policy. I strongly encourage readers to review their findings; allow me to summarize them here.

First, it’s clear that student achievement in the United States improved dramatically from the mid to late 1990s until the early 2010s—especially in math, especially at the elementary and middle school levels, and especially for the most marginalized student groups. Pointing to studies by M. Danish Shakeel, Paul Peterson, Eric Hanushek, Ayesha Hashim, Sean Reardon, and others, Goldhaber and DeArmond conclude that “the long-term gains on the NAEP reveal a decades-long narrowing of test score achievement gaps between underserved groups (e.g., students of color, lower achieving students) and more advantaged groups (e.g., White students, higher achieving students).”

My own analysis of NAEP trends from that time period focused on the impressive gains made by the nation’s low-income, Black, and Hispanic students, especially at the lower levels of achievement. The proportion of Black fourth-graders scoring at the “below basic” level on the NAEP reading exam, for example, dropped from more than two-thirds in 1992 to less than half in 2015. Likewise, the percentage of Hispanic eighth-graders scoring “below basic” in math dropped from two-thirds in 1990 to 40 percent in 2015. Those numbers were still much too high, but the improvement over time was breathtaking.

Nor was it just student achievement. High school graduation rates shot up as well, climbing fifteen points on average from the mid-1990s until today. We saw major improvements in college completion, too, with the percentage of Black and Hispanic young adults with four-year degrees climbing from 15 percent and 9 percent, respectively, in 1995 to 23 percent and 21 percent by 2017. Some analysts have argued that these improvements might reflect a softening of graduation standards, but rigorous studies have found that a significant proportion of the gains were real.

Alas, the progress in test scores stalled in the early to mid-2010s, and achievement even declined in some subjects and grade levels in the late 2010s, before the pandemic wiped out decades of gains. As Goldhaber and DeArmond explain, this has led some analysts to argue that the rise and fall of test-based accountability can explain the rise and fall of student achievement.

That’s possible, but NAEP’s design makes it hard to know for sure. What scholars can do is compare states with various policies (and policy implementation timelines) to try to link the adoption of standards-based reform to changes in student achievement. That’s exactly what a series of studies did in the 2000s, including ones by Martin Carnoy and Susanna Loeb, another by Eric Hanushek and Margaret Raymond, and a seminal paper by Tom Dee and Brian Jacob. The latter compared states that adopted “consequential accountability” in the late 1990s to those that adopted it in the early 2000s, once NCLB mandated them to do so. Dee and Jacob found large impacts of those policies on math achievement (an effect size in the neighborhood of half a year of learning), with even greater effects for the lowest-achieving students as well as Black, Hispanic, and low-income kids. The impacts on reading and science were null.

Another study, by Manyee Wong, Thomas D. Cook, and Peter M. Steiner, used Catholic schools as a control group and found more evidence that accountability policies raised achievement in math in the public schools. Other research, also reviewed by Goldhaber and DeArmond, looked at the impact of NCLB on the so-called bubble kids—the students who were closest to the proficiency line or the schools most at risk of sanctions. Most studies found the largest gains for such students and schools, for better or worse.

A brand-new study, by Ozkan Eren, David N. Figlio, Naci H. Mocan, and Orgul Ozturk, found that accountability policies had an impact on more than just test scores. “Our findings indicate that a school’s receipt of a lower accountability rating, at the bottom end of the ratings distribution, decreases adult criminal involvement. Accountability pressures also reduce the propensity of students’ reliance on social welfare programs in adulthood and these effects persist at least until when individuals reach their early 30s.”

Circumstantial evidence from individual states also points to a big impact from consequential accountability. Massachusetts, which combined standards-based reform with an enormous increase in spending in its 1993 Education Reform Act, saw student achievement skyrocket in the late 1990s and early 2000s—the much-remarked “Massachusetts miracle.” Fourth-grade reading scores increased by nineteen points from 1998 through 2007—the equivalent of about two grade levels. Eighth-grade math scores jumped thirty-one points from 2000 to 2009. With its high-quality academic standards, intensive supports for teachers, lavish funding, and new high school graduation exam for students, the Bay State showed what was possible.

Nor was Massachusetts alone. Other states made significant progress, too, including Texas and North Carolina in the 1990s, Florida in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Mississippi in the 2010s, and the District of Columbia throughout the entire reform period.

What we can say, then, is that NCLB-style accountability worked, at least for a while and at least in math. Nationally, it didn’t make an impact in reading, even though reading achievement was improving during the NCLB era (including in states like Massachusetts and Mississippi). We also aren’t sure if achievement plateaued in the 2010s because accountability necessarily stopped working or because accountability stopped.

It doesn’t help that we don’t have much evidence about the mechanisms that might have driven the gains Dee and Jacob (and others) found. Did schools improve their approach to teaching mathematics? Did they make more time for intensive interventions such as tutoring, especially for their lowest-performing kids? Did they work harder or smarter to support teachers and get their best folks where they were needed most? Why did accountability lead to gains in math but not in reading?

We only have a few studies on how these policies might have changed classroom practice. As mentioned above, it was widely perceived that schools—especially elementary schools, where the schedule is more flexible—narrowed the curriculum and spent more time on math and reading and less time on social studies and science. Several teacher surveys showed this to be the case.19 (Perhaps that’s one reason standards-based reform failed to move the needle on reading achievement, given the growing evidence linking content knowledge in subjects like social studies to improvements in reading comprehension.) The improvement of scores for bubble kids indicates that schools and teachers may have shifted their attention to kids near the proficiency line. And teaching to the test was also thought to be pervasive; some teacher surveys, for example, found that instruction became more teacher centered and focused on basic skills.

Alas, studying policy implementation all the way into the classroom is difficult and expensive. So save from surveying teachers about their practice—which is better than nothing but not terribly reliable—not much else was done. As a result, when it comes to changes that standards-based reform might have brought to the classroom, we have more questions than answers.

School improvement, school choice and school closure

In 2009, the Obama administration successfully lobbied Congress to allocate $3.5 billion (eventually growing to $7 billion) into the Title I School Improvement Grants program. This sum was directed primarily to the 5 percent of schools in each state with the lowest academic achievement. The federal government instructed districts to select from four intervention options, from replacing the principal to closing the school entirely. Most selected the least onerous option, and perhaps for that reason, a federal evaluation of the effort found no impacts on test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment.

However, as Goldhaber and DeArmond explain, some local and state studies did find positive impacts arising from the SIG initiative. California’s implementation was particularly well studied by scholars including Thomas Dee, Susanna Loeb, Min Sun, Emily K. Penner, and Katharine O. Strunk.25 Both statewide and in particular cities, the results were generally positive, with improvements in both reading and math. This may be because California required its lowest-performing schools to implement more intensive interventions. It also focused a great deal of money—up to $1.5 million—on each school and gave the school lots of help in spending it well.

Though not addressed by Goldhaber and DeArmond, another place to look for lessons on accountability is the school choice movement. In particular, we can compare the relative success of charter schools with private school choice, given that the former operates under a strict accountability regime while the latter, in most states, does not. A growing body of research, including a new study from CREDO at Stanford University, shows charter school students outpacing their traditional public school peers both on test scores and on long-term outcomes such as college completion. That is especially the case for urban charter schools and for Black and Hispanic students.

Private school choice programs, on the other hand, have been markedly less effective in boosting student outcomes, at least as judged by test scores. Recent studies of large-scale voucher programs in Ohio, Indiana, and Louisiana all show voucher recipients trailing their public school peers on test score growth, sometimes quite significantly. To be sure, another set of voucher studies finds positive long-term impacts on measures such as high school graduation and college enrollment. But the negative findings on achievement are still worrying and might reflect the lack of consequential accountability baked into these programs.

In the charter schools sector, authorizers are empowered to close low-performing or financially unsustainable schools, and they do so with regularity. This is real accountability, and the threat of closure very likely contributes to—perhaps even causes much of—the charter achievement advantage.

What’s less clear, once again, are the exact mechanisms. Does the threat of school closure encourage charter schools to improve? Perhaps—and a series of studies from the Fordham Institute and others have found that charter schools tend to embrace a variety of practices associated with improved achievement, from higher teacher expectations to greater teacher diversity to firmer policies around student discipline. On the other hand, it’s surely the case that school closures themselves automatically improve the performance of the charter sector, as the worst schools disappear, shifting the bell curve of achievement to the right. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that accountability plays a key role in the relative success of charter schools.

Unresolved tensions in standards-based reform

Accountability versus capacity building:

The most fateful decision in the history of standards-based reform might have been the move—cemented by NCLB — to place accountability at the heart of the strategy while largely neglecting capacity building; in other words, to assume that the only problem was the lack of will rather than skill. As Robert Pondiscio argues in chapter 5 of this series, that decision was particularly critical when it came to the issue of curriculum. Even those of us who believe in the importance of standards understand that they don’t teach themselves, nor do they provide day-to-day guidance to teachers on how to instruct students in an effective, engaging, evidence-based way.

Yet only in recent years have reformers embraced curriculum as a key lever for school improvement, with foundations and even states investing in building high-quality instructional materials and organizations such as EdReports judging them for alignment with rigorous standards. Imagine how much more progress we might have made had we embarked on these efforts twenty years earlier!

Yet that would have been hard to do, since back then states were just developing their standards, and they differed dramatically from one another even as most were of low quality. Only with the creation of the Common Core State Standards was there an opportunity to build a truly national marketplace for curricular materials, which is exactly what has happened in recent years. As high-quality products like Core Knowledge Language Arts and Eureka Math gain market share, we might be returning to the capacity-building effort we ditched so many decades ago. Perhaps fixing teacher preparation and professional development can come next.

It’s become clear that states need to show leadership around curriculum and instruction rather than sit back and hope districts make the right decisions on their own. States that have done so over the past twenty-five years—including, at various times, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Mississippi—have seen improvements in achievement (though, of course, correlation does not equal causation).

Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?:

As with so much else about this topic, it’s hard to know whether there were particular components of standards-based reform that made a bigger difference than others. As explained earlier, seminal studies found that it was “consequential accountability” that led to test score gains in the late 1990s and early 2000s—which meant some sort of system to classify schools and some legitimate threat that something might happen to those deemed low-performing. My vague language is intentional. State policies, especially pre-NCLB, varied greatly, and yet scholars still detected an impact on achievement. We can say, then, that the threat of rating schools as poor and potentially taking action was enough to move the needle—at least when these policies were first introduced.

It’s likely, though, that when accountability systems were discovered to be mostly bark and no bite—because state officials were loath to follow through and actually shutter schools—these impacts faded. That brought us to a new stage, when the federal government spent billions of dollars through the School Improvement Grants program to turn around low-performing schools. This was a helping-hand approach rather than tough love, and as discussed earlier, it mostly didn’t work.

Nor can we make strong claims about the standards and assessments that are at the heart of standards-based reform. Scholars have failed to detect any difference in achievement in states that had low standards versus high ones or weak tests versus strong ones. As they say, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. It’s hard to believe that the quality of standards and assessments does not matter; rather, it’s more likely that to drive positive change, demanding expectations and tests must be connected to sophisticated school rating systems; meaningful accountability for results; and capacity-building efforts, like the introduction of high-quality curricular materials, to help students succeed.

The lesson for standards-based reform—and many other reforms as well—is that policymakers can’t view components as items on an à la carte menu. In order to drive improvements, it’s all or nothing. Especially in the push for “systemic,” coherent reform, the effort is only as strong as its weakest link. If the question is which is most important (standards, assessments, school ratings, consequences, turnaround efforts, or capacity building, especially around curriculum), the correct answer is “all of the above.”

Common standards versus student variation:

Other key issues that reformers often swept under the rug were (1) the inevitable conflict between the desire to set a single, high standard for achievement and the undeniable reality that kids come into school with widely varying levels of readiness and may need varying amounts of support and time to reach standard; and (2) that schools and school systems in the United States have historically underserved and under-supported students experiencing poverty and students with lower socioeconomic status.

The standards-based reform movement succeeded in promoting the idea that “all students can learn” and that we must reject the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” These are powerful and necessary maxims. But they rub up against the lived experience of educators, who must cope with the reality of classrooms of students who can be as many as seven grade levels apart on the first day of school.

Slogans about “holding schools accountable for results” elide critical questions over the details. Results for which students? All of them? Including the ones who start the school year way above or way below grade level? The embrace of “growth models” in the late NCLB period and under ESSA helped to circle this square. By focusing on progress from one school year to the next, accountability systems could give schools credit for helping all of their students make gains, no matter where they started on the achievement spectrum.

NCLB had an answer to this question, implicit though it may have been: the sharp focus of NCLB was on helping the lowest-achieving students—who tended to be Black, Hispanic, or low-income, or students with disabilities, or those still learning English—reach basic standards. And as discussed earlier, this focus worked for a time (again mostly in math) as those were the precise groups whose achievement rose the most during the 1990s and 2000s and who were much more likely to graduate from high school in the 2010s. But did this hyperfocus unintentionally incentivize the success and growth of some students over others? And was getting these students to a baseline level of proficiency setting them up for postsecondary success?

Tests as accountability metrics versus instructional tools:

Another key conflict throughout the standards-based reform era was the role of testing. To put it mildly, “high-stakes tests” were not (and are not) popular—with the general public, parents, and especially educators—even though “accountability” in education polls quite well.

The pushback to testing has been significant. Some of that stemmed from how schools responded to the tests—as discussed earlier, by “teaching to the test” or narrowing the curriculum. Some of it related to the Obama-era push to tie teacher evaluations to test scores. Some of it focused on the tests themselves. Making kids sit for annual assessments from grades three through eight ate up precious instructional time. But since the results didn’t come back until months later—even until the next school year—they weren’t of much help to educators. They weren’t “instructionally useful.” Thus, most school districts opted to give students additional standardized tests, such as NWEA’s Measures of Academic Progress, in
order to receive real-time information about how students were doing. One study found students spending as many as twenty-five hours a year sitting for tests.

In recent years, some advocates and assessment providers have called for testing systems that can produce both accountability data and instructionally useful information for educators. That’s an understandable impulse, but trade-offs are unavoidable. Some approaches would assess students three times a year, for example—so-called through-year assessments—which might increase the testing load and encourage schools to adopt a curriculum closely aligned with the scope and sequence of the tests, for better or worse. Assessments that return results immediately, meanwhile, are by definition not graded by humans, and (so far at least) they can’t test the same higher-order skills that the better state assessments today can. This might encourage a return to low-level teaching of the skill-and-drill variety.

A key issue going forward is whether states will pursue these more instructionally useful assessment systems or simply acknowledge that we need a variety of tests, some to guide instruction and others to generate accountability data, as unpopular as the latter may be.

Lessons for the future

What can tomorrow’s policymakers learn from our experience with standards, assessments, and accountability?

• Be clear-eyed about capacity in the system. Some of us wrongly assumed that incentives were the only big problem—that once we put pressure on schools to improve, they would figure out how to help their students meet standards. What standards-based reform revealed, however, was how little capacity existed in many schools. Educators didn’t know how to boost achievement, or they only knew how to do this for some kids in their schools. They didn’t know what curricula to use. And accountability wasn’t generally strong enough to overcome the political incentives operating in the system, especially union politics. Reformers can’t wish realities like these away. Fixing perverse incentives is necessary but not sufficient; capacity building is needed too. And that means states need to take a more muscular role around issues like curriculum and teacher preparation than some of us once imagined.

• Be wary of any reform that is about “all” students (or all schools). Yes, all kids need to learn to read, write, and do math, and virtually all students can reach basic standards. But not all kids need to (or can be) college ready. Reforms that don’t come to terms with the huge variability in kids’ readiness levels, cognitive abilities, and prior achievements will lose popular support and will flounder.

• Don’t take success for granted! Especially in the wake of the awful COVID-19 pandemic and its disastrous impact on our schools, it’s hard not to romanticize the period in the late 1990s and early 2000s when achievement was skyrocketing. What we wouldn’t give to have those test score gains back! Yet the education debate at the time wasn’t full of celebration and confidence, but angst about things not moving quickly enough. What we need to remember is that education happens slowly, year by year, and we need to make sure that policy leaders stay on course over a long period of time. We should fight the urge to look for the “next big thing.” At the current moment, for example, there’s much enthusiasm about universal education savings accounts as new and exciting, in contrast to charter schools, which feel old and dated to some. Yet based on their strong track record, slowly but surely continuing to expand high-quality charter schools may be the best approach to improving student outcomes and expanding parental options. Policymakers, advocates, and philanthropists need to get better at finishing what we started.

• Scholars need new ways to study policy change all the way to the classroom. Thanks in part to the data produced by standards-based reforms, the field of education research has improved markedly in recent decades. Experimental and quasi-experimental designs are much more common, and every day brings important new findings about interventions and their impact on student outcomes. Yet as this chapter demonstrates, we still struggle to follow policy changes all the way down to the classroom. But that doesn’t have to be a given. It’s now technically and financially feasible to put cameras and microphones in classrooms nationwide to collect detailed information about teaching and learning. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence will soon allow us to analyze such data to gain insights about curriculum implementation, effective instructional strategies, grouping practices, student discipline, and much else. The question is whether we will have the political will to make this vision a reality while ensuring safeguards for teacher and student privacy.

The conventional wisdom in some quarters is that standards-based reform in general, and NCLB in particular, didn’t work. That conventional wisdom is incorrect. These policies deserve some of the credit for the historically large achievement gains of the 1990s and 2000s and the equally impressive improvements in the high school graduation and college completion rates of more recent years.

But this approach to reform will work much better if it is combined with efforts to boost the knowledge, skills, and confidence of educators on the front lines. Providing high-quality instructional materials is arguably the best way to do that, and it’s an effort that states have finally embarked upon. This is still no panacea; the Gordian knot hasn’t been sliced through, nor have teachers’ unions disappeared, nor have we solved the riddle of how to get fourteen thousand school districts to embrace smart policies and practices. Systemic dysfunction remains. But a recommitment to accountability for results, along with a focus on making classroom instruction more coherent, effective, and equitable, could yield stronger results in the years ahead.

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: . 

In the 2021-22 school year, more than one in four U.S. public school students missed at least 10% of school days. Before the pandemic, it was closer to one in seven, the Associated Press , relying on data from 40 states and the District of Columbia. 

In New York City, the nation’s largest district, chronic absenteeism , according to district officials, meaning some 375,000 students were regularly absent. In Washington, D.C., it . In Detroit, .

Data are just beginning to emerge for the most recent school year, but a few snapshots present a troubling picture:

• In Oakland, Calif., district officials said were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year; 
• In Providence, R.I., the district in September said of students missed at least 10 percent last year;
• And in suburban , near Washington, D.C., about 27% of students were chronically absent last year, up from 20% four years earlier. As elsewhere, high school students were more likely to be chronically absent. 

While many policymakers have cited disconnection from school as a key reason for the problem, others say it has different causes unique to the times we’re in — causes that educators have rarely had to deal with so fully until now, from the death of caregivers to rising teacher absences and even, for older students, a more attractive labor market. 

Here, according to researchers, school officials and parents’ organizations, among others, are six hidden (and not-so-hidden) reasons that chronic absenteeism rates remain high.

1. Worsening mental health

In a by the National Center for Education Statistics, 70% of public schools reported an increase in the percentage of students seeking mental health services at school since the start of the pandemic; 76% reported an increase in staff voicing concerns about students with symptoms of depression, anxiety and trauma.

And after modest declines in 2019 and 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported during the pandemic. Suicides are rising fastest among young people, among other groups.

“We’re in the middle of a mental health crisis for kids,” said , president of the National Parents Union. She said mental health support, both in our public education system and larger health care system, is inadequate to deal with the crisis.

“Kids are literally refusing to go [to school]. That is a major issue that I hear from parents every day. ‘I can’t get my kid up. They do not want to go.’”

For many students, school has lost its value, she said, “because there’s not a lot of meat on the bone,” either because instruction has worsened or because many students feel they can do what’s required from home. 

2. Death of caregivers

As many as in the U.S. have lost one or both parents to the pandemic, researchers now estimate, with about 359,000 losing a primary or secondary caregiver, including a grandparent.

Those losses hit hardest in multigenerational, low-income households, since many grandparents and other relatives were playing caregiving roles, said , a research professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. “It now falls to the teenagers,” he said. Even those who don’t care for younger siblings may now need to do so for surviving parents or even grandparents, making school less of a priority.

3. Teacher absences 

Among the most politically charged storylines to emerge from the pandemic was the that of teachers and other school staff pushing to ensure their safety, often by keeping schools operating remotely or demanding generous COVID-related sick-day policies.

The result has been an explosion of teacher absenteeism alongside that of students. In Illinois, just 66% of teachers had fewer than 10 absences in 2022. In west of Chicago, it was even lower at just 54% of teachers.

A May 2022 found that chronic teacher absenteeism during the 2021-22 school year had increased in 72% of schools, compared to a typical pre-pandemic school year. In 37% of schools, teacher absenteeism increased “a lot.”  

Simultaneously, it found, 60% of schools nationwide found it harder to find substitute teachers. And when subs couldn’t be found, 73% of schools brought in administrators to cover classes.

That makes school a lot less valuable for students, said Rodrigues. “What we saw in COVID is how little instruction many of our kids are actually getting,” she said. “And so it’s very hard as a parent to make the argument: ‘No, you’ve got to go. This is important for your future,’ when all you’re doing there is sitting and watching a movie because you have a sub again and again and again.”

4. Remote assignments

While many students struggled to keep up with schoolwork during the pandemic, the experience revolutionized schools’ thinking about remote learning. Most significantly, it gave students the ability to complete classwork entirely at home, without stepping into the school building. In many districts, schools have continued to allow students to, in essence, work from home like their parents.

Combined with looser rules around sick-day attendance, observers say, this has resulted in millions of students — and their parents — deciding that five-day-a-week school attendance is no longer mandatory. 

“Kids don’t see why they can’t ,” said Tim Daly, former president of TNTP and co-founder of the consulting firm . In a recent issue of his newsletter, Daly noted that when students miss a day of school, “all the work is available online in real-time, making it simple for a student to complete it all from home before the day is even done.”

Given the low quality of instruction that many parents saw during the pandemic, he said, parents now are less likely to worry if their child is missing a day. “Sitting in a desk for six hours a day,” he wrote, “is for suckers.”

Student testimonials bear that out, said Montgomery County’s Neff.

Students in focus groups now tell administrators that five-day-a-week attendance now seems optional, he said. “They’ve told us repeatedly, ‘We got so used to a year-and-a-half or more taking classes, sitting on our bed in our pajamas on our computer.’ And many of them are continuing a struggle to get back into school regularly.”

Students who learned reasonably well at home, he said, now wonder, “‘Why are you telling me now I have to sit in seven periods a day for five days a week?’ 

At one of the nation’s most renowned suburban high schools, New Trier High School near Chicago, the percentage of chronically absent students rose to more than 25% last winter, the Chicago Tribune . Absenteeism rose as students got older, officials noted, with rates of just over 14% for freshmen but nearly 38% for seniors.

By late May, even the student editors of the school newspaper declared that they : “While this trend isn’t unique to New Trier,” they wrote in an editorial, “it’s also not acceptable. We believe that both the school and students need to do more.”

Jean Hahn, a New Trier board member, last spring pointed out that many adults now work remotely. “So many of us don’t have to be at our desk 9-5 Monday through Friday anymore,” Hahn told attendees at a board meeting. “It’s challenging for parents to explain to our young people why they do.”

5. A higher minimum wage

Over the past few years, more than half of the 50 states have been in a kind of arms race to raise their minimum wage, tempting teens to trim their school hours or drop out altogether to help their families get by.

While the federal minimum wage since 2009 has remained $7.25, 30 states have set theirs higher, according to the left-leaning . While just four states and the District of Columbia now guarantee a minimum wage at or above $15, eight states are on pace to get there by 2026 or sooner.

In states offering $15 an hour, said Hopkins’ Balfanz, this likely made the absentee problem worse. 

“That’s real money to a 17-year-old,” he said, offering them both a bit of personal agency and the opportunity to help out their families. “Things that did not make sense at $6 an hour do make sense, then, at $15.”

Steven Neff, director of pupil personnel and attendance services for Montgomery County Public Schools, the suburban D.C. district, said students “are telling us that there is great value in being able to have a job that is paying reasonably well.” Minimum wage work, he said, now “has even greater financial enticements than when I think about minimum wage when I was their age.” 

6. Better record-keeping

One reason why chronic absenteeism seems to be spreading may have less to do with actual attendance and more with better record-keeping by districts and states.

Until recently, researchers found that the problem was often confined mostly to high-poverty neighborhoods. 

But here’s the thing: A decade ago, few schools even kept track of chronic absenteeism. Most states didn’t actively track it until 2016, when new flexibility under the federal allowed them to choose indicators of school quality according to their own desired outcomes. That’s when about 30 states made it an indicator in their accountability systems — and on school report cards.

Before that, Balfanz said, school districts typically measured average daily attendance, which could actually mask high chronic absenteeism that lurked around the edges. It’s mathematically possible, he said, to have an average daily attendance of 92% “but still have a fifth of your kids missing a month of school. Different kids on different days are making up that 92%.”

So by 2020, when the pandemic hit, schools had only been tracking it for a few years and had few good strategies to address it, Balfanz said. “It’s relatively new. And then the pandemic spread it everywhere.”

Where do we go from here?

At New Trier, student pressure eventually paid off, resulting in a new plan this fall: In preparation for the 2023-24 school year, a school committee recommended for absences, including just five “mental health days” per year. It also bans students from participating in extracurriculars if they’re not in class that day. They’ll get an email by 3:15 p.m. notifying them not to show up to sports or other activities.

Simple interventions can also help: A found that offering parents personalized nudges by mail about their kids’ absences reduced chronic absenteeism by 10% or more, partly by correcting parents’ incorrect beliefs that their kids hadn’t missed as much school as they actually had — research shows that both parents and students underestimate it by nearly 50%.

That’s probably preferable to how many schools attack the problem, via “supportive” phone calls home, said Hopkins’ Balfanz. “Who’s going to make 150 phone calls a day in a school?” he said. “If you have that one person assigned to it, they literally would be spending the whole day calling.”

EdNavigator’s Daly says schools should reset the discussion around attendance, urging parents to let their kids miss school as rarely as possible and communicate honestly about absentee rates.

Neff, the Montgomery County attendance services director, said transparency “increases the urgency in all of us” and is essential if schools want to get parents on board.

“In order to fully have them understand the gravity of the situation, we needed to show them: ‘Here is our data. Here is where it was, here is where it is and where it is for certain groups. We need your help to fix this.’ ”

The school choice advocate and Republican mega-donor has kept a relatively low profile since leaving Washington last January, mostly attending to policy developments in her home state of Michigan. Her call to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, unveiled at , represented a return to the national spotlight — not just for DeVos, but for an idea that has hung around Republican politics for decades. 

Even more remarkably, DeVos’s sentiments were echoed a few weeks later by her former boss. Denouncing what he described as the politicized teaching of subjects like race and sexuality before a joyful crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference, that if the federal government promoted “radicalism” in academic instruction, “we should abolish the Department of Education.”

Conservatives have sought to scrap the department, and dramatically reduce Washington’s K-12 footprint, since it was created in 1979. Those efforts, including that would take effect by the end of this year, have generally been seen as quixotic; even when they held unified control over Congress and the White House, Trump and DeVos floated, but never came close to pursuing, the Departments of Education and Labor.

The political fallout of that kind of reshuffle would be hard to predict, but potentially severe. According to , over half of Americans view the Department of Education favorably. The department collects and disseminates scientific evidence on schooling through the Institute of Education Sciences, plays a public watchdog role through its Office of Civil Rights, and helps equalize school funding with the tens of billions of dollars provided by Title I. All of these purposes are served with of any cabinet department. 

But while policy experts consider outright abolition a farfetched notion, they say it reflects a long-running contest between dueling urges in American education: a strong distrust of federal influence on one hand, and on the other, profound dissatisfaction with the status quo. During the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the second impulse was dominant, with massive new federal initiatives launched around school performance and accountability. But resistance to federal authority has been growing for a decade, and the renewed energy around abolition is breaking through just as the disgust of Republican voters — with perceived indoctrination in classrooms, federal recommendations on COVID safety, and much else — has crested. 

Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute who studies public administration, said that the government’s response to COVID had engendered “a clear backlash” among Republicans. Even as pandemic health measures were largely decided at the state level, he added, Washington’s guidelines on masking and vaccines in schools have fueled the party’s enmity toward federal interventions in education.

“The Right certainly doesn’t trust the federal government to lead some sort of learning recovery response,” Kosar said. “They would much rather pull the power back to local communities and have the feds stay as far away as possible.”

Jack Jennings, a retired policy maven who served as the Democrats’ top education aide in the House of Representatives, argued that shrinking the public sector is never as easy as it sounds. But he added that abolition is electorally potent with the Republican base before the 2022 midterm elections, likening it to a “red flag in front of a bull.” 

“It’s not an issue that’s going to come to fruition soon, but it’s one of those things that rattles the cages of conservatives,” Jennings said.

Unions divided

The department has always had its share of detractors. At its inception, that group even included many Democrats.

By the late 1970s, the federal government’s responsibilities over education — codified in landmark laws like the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 — were housed in the then-Department of Healthcare, Education, and Welfare. President Jimmy Carter’s insistence on carving out an entity devoted specifically to K-12 was borne of , the nation’s largest teachers’ union, which had helped Carter secure the Democratic nomination in 1976. Until that election, the NEA had never issued a presidential endorsement.

But according to Jennings, many in the president’s own party were leery of the idea. Even fervent liberals worried that a dedicated agency would induce untold “meddling” in the affairs of schools and districts. Albert Shanker, the influential president of the American Federation of Teachers, lobbied against the change out of concern that his own union would be put at a disadvantage.

“[Carter] was fulfilling a campaign promise by sending it to the Congress,” Jennings recalled. “But when the Congress received it, Democrats were not all in favor of it.”

In the end, necessary authorizing legislation passed in the perennially Democratic House . But Democratic resistance faded over time, as the government’s sizable outlays to educate poor and disabled students gelled easily with the party’s own priorities. Hostility among Republicans would be a feature of the policy landscape for years to come.

Ronald Reagan the newly created department while still a presidential candidate. That pledge years later, following the national alarm stoked by the release of the administration’s bombshell report, A Nation at Risk; after declaring a national education emergency in its first term, it would have appeared perverse for the administration to gut the nation’s foremost education authority in its second.

Still, Reagan later appointed as education secretary the public intellectual William Bennett, whose views were . And the Republican position remained clear for years afterward. Lamar Alexander, a former Tennessee governor who led the department under President George H.W. Bush and later served three terms in the U.S. Senate, his abortive 1996 presidential campaign. for eventual nominee Bob Dole included a promise to eliminate the Department of Education (along with the Departments of Energy, Commerce, and Housing and Urban Development).

David Cleary, a former senior aide to Alexander who now serves as the Republican staff director for the Senate’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, said his party’s enduring skepticism toward federal overreach explained its drive to abolish. Moreover, few of the department’s functions need to be administered nationally.

“The U.S. Department of Education doesn’t establish a curriculum — thank God — doesn’t establish education standards, doesn’t establish tests, and doesn’t establish criteria for institutions of higher education,” Cleary said. “So it really is just a grant-making entity with a huge bureaucracy.”

A short-lived honeymoon

Notwithstanding the Right’s philosophical objections, however, the last quarter-century has been a time of bipartisan acceptance for the department. The key figure in that detente was George W. Bush.

It was the Texas governor’s wholesale embrace of education reform — part of a “compassionate conservative” push that helped Republicans recover from Dole’s landslide 1996 defeat — that set the stage for the No Child Left Behind Act. That law, the biggest expansion of the federal government’s educational powers since the Civil Rights era, was enacted through a generational compromise with Democrats: The Left would get more resources to improve chronically failing schools (which they later complained was short-changed), while the Right would get tighter accountability for academic results (which later trampled on local autonomy, they grumbled).

Both parties returned early from their political honeymoon, with Democrats and teachers’ unions against a law they helped shepherd into being. But it was Republicans, disenchanted with the department’s broader scope over local schools, that migrated further from the vision of a more muscular federal role.

Their distaste only grew as responsibility for implementing NCLB fell to the Obama administration. As Secretary of Education Arne Duncan backed ambitious policy initiatives like Race to the Top and Common Core, Tea Party conservatives — increasingly in concert with the leadership of both NEA and AFT — demanded a reversal of the department’s growing remit. 

Chester Finn, a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution and president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, compared the public’s attitude toward education reform to a pendulum that periodically swings toward greater federal involvement.

“But then we suddenly discover that that’s too pushy
and it’s embarrassing people, so there’s a backlash,” Finn remarked. “That’s what was beginning to happen in the late Bush and Obama years, and that’s when they started giving waivers and making exceptions so that the pushing wasn’t as hard or as uniform.”

The retreat from NCLB’s strictures in the mid-2010s was not total. The law that supplanted it, 2015’s Every Student Succeeds Act, left in place some Bush- and Obama-era accountability measures while granting states more freedom to chart their own course. But even the relaxation of regulations couldn’t shield the department from the dissatisfaction that would follow in the pandemic era.

“It still felt like there was a truce, fundamentally — that the federal role in education was legit,” said AEI’s Kosar. “Then we get some of the executive orders in the Obama administration that struck the right as ‘woke.’ And now we get schools being an epicenter for debates about how to respond to the coronavirus. That’s what sparked the most recent revolt against the feds.”

‘Anyone pushing this is going to be savaged’

If the intellectual history of abolition is well-documented, its potential as a governing proposal is hazy.

To put it simply, the Department of Education is a well-known entity with countless supportive constituencies. Eliminating its offices and employees would require relocating the trillion-dollar federal student loan program, which plays an integral role in sending millions of students to college. Title I, which dispenses billions to districts and schools that serve children facing academic and socioeconomic challenges, has its own army of defenders in both Congress and the states. Billions more go to special-education students.

“It’s going to be a heavy lift,” Kosar said. “Every interest group is going to come out and want to keep its programs alive. And of course, anyone pushing to do this is going to be savaged viciously as anti-education.”

Even if a future Republican administration were to keep the most popular initiatives intact, they would face two significant logistical hurdles. First, relocating those programs in other agencies — student loans at the Treasury, for instance, or the Office of Civil Rights at the Justice Department — would almost certainly require a statutory change that Democrats wouldn’t go along with. So full GOP control of government, plus filibuster-proof majorities, would be a necessity.

If this could be achieved, the federal role, however shrunken, would be scattered in pieces across the executive branch. Without the unified leadership provided by a secretary, their effectiveness could be severely hampered.

Jennings, the former longtime House staffer, said the end result would be a succession of functions “spun off into different areas of the federal government. And there would be no coordination among them because they would be answerable to different people.”

Cleary, the Senate HELP Committee aide, conceded that the political obstacles would be significant. But a more limited administrative campaign against the department, entailing the systematic elimination of Democratic regulations and mass block-granting of its various programs, could be achieved under a future Republican administration, he said.

“If I were the secretary of education, or advising one, I would do a hiring freeze and just not hire new people, and start to burn out the Deep State, if you will,” he said. “You don’t really need as many people as they have.”

Finn, a former department hand who openly desires a “serious rethinking” of the federal role in education, said that neither wholesale elimination nor reform was likely on any near-term timeframe. Entering an era of greater partisan divides on the Department of Education, he added, Republicans would be forced to offer greater specificity around their signature education promise.   

“The question’s always the same: Do [conservatives] just want to abolish the building with the name over it that says ‘Department of Education?’ Or do they want to abolish the federal functions that it contains? Because those are such different things.”

Get together a bunch of policy researchers, though, and what do you have? It’s one of the less well-known ones. When we gather, we’re a “fracas” of policy wonks. Not an ounce of cohesion in the bunch. This is most fully true at the most focused levels: the more specific the topic, the more fractious the fracas. 

It’s certainly the case in my field, English learner policy, where years of serious research and debate have not yielded anything recently like a coherent manifesto or policy agenda to guide federal education leaders. Our work is too often vague and detached from English learners’ real needs. 

To that end, I spent much of the past year sharing a short draft of policy recommendations with more than 100 folks who know and care about English learners’ success — educators, researchers and advocates — to collect feedback and develop a slate of concrete reforms to significantly improve how the country and its schools serve these students. The result, , was published at The Century Foundation today. It provides a much-needed starting point for overhauling the Every Student Succeeds Act and other federal policies governing English learners’ education.

Above all, the report calls for a significant expansion in federal English learner investments. In the field of education policy, it’s not exactly fashionable to be direct about this. Policy wonks generally earn their way in this work by creatively reimagining existing systems, not simple, direct calls for resources. But in a moment when nearly one-quarter of U.S. children speak a non-English language at home, it’s clear that English learners deserve more federal funding. Much more.

, ESSA’s Title III, the core funding stream dedicated to English learners’ linguistic and academic development, was never sufficient to adequately support their success. It’s even failed at a more rudimentary level: since its inception in 2002, Title III funding hasn’t even kept pace with growth in the English learner population. The $664 million appropriated that year worked out to roughly $175 for each of the ~3.8 million English learners in U.S. schools in 2002. As of 2018 — — there were more than 5 million English learners, so the $737 million appropriated that year worked out to just $147 per child. What’s more, this analysis doesn’t take inflation into account. 

It’s not a complex situation: the United States is spending less per pupil on English learners now than we did in 2002, and that base amount was paltry to begin with. The solution should be commensurately simple: , Title III should at least triple in size, to roughly $2.2 billion per year (still just $440 in federal dollars per student). 

Atop this fundamentally critical funding increase, the report also calls for a series of targeted federal investments to shift how English learners are educated. Above all, these focus on rewiring the federal “English-only” approach to these students’ learning to instead support students’ English development and their emerging bilingualism. This tracks the suggesting that well-implemented bilingual education programs are the best means of supporting English learners’ linguistic and academic development. In particular, that integrate English learners and native English speakers in bilingual settings to be . 

Here’s the good news: public demand for bilingual education has grown in recent years. Here’s the bad news: every local and state effort to expand access to bilingual programs has been limited by the of the American teaching force. There simply bilingual teachers to go around. And, of course, scarcity almost inevitably produces inequity in public education — true to form, suggests that are increasingly slipping away from linguistic integration .

The project of expanding dual language programs in the United States is, at base, a subset of the broader goal of increasing teacher diversity. To that end, the report recommends two new federal grants programs: 1) a $200 million investment in creating and growing linguistically diverse teacher training pipelines, and 2) a smaller, $50 million funding pot for states willing to “pilot, redesign, and implement new bilingual teacher certification and licensure policies.”

As the country works to finally get the educational inputs right for English learners — more funding and better instructional programs — it’s also critical to update . At present, American schools only track the performance of linguistically diverse students up until the point when they reach their state’s definition of proficiency in English. After that, they are soon “reclassified” as former English learners and “exited” from that defined student group — meaning that their academic progress gets lumped in with the general student population. But this offers an incomplete picture, since former English learners’ performance in U.S. schools  tends to improve with their English abilities.

To address this challenge, the report recommends including “former English learners” in federal requirements for school transparency and accountability systems. That is, local and state leaders should be required to keep track of how English learners perform academically after they become proficient in English. This would provide a more complete picture of their linguistic and academic development — and how well schools are supporting each.

To be sure, today’s report doesn’t fully represent the views of any one of the scores of people who read and responded to it. Everyone suggested fixes, and no one person’s changes were wholly adopted — I even cut a few of my own favorite ideas. But the document does include a battery of ideas supported by most of the English learner stakeholders who engaged with the text. The ideas are as specific and actionable as we could keep them, and — if adopted by policymakers in Congress and the U.S. Department of Education — would make a real difference for millions of linguistically diverse children across the country.