WA loses Waiver, forced back to old NCLB

Washington state will once again have to comply with a long list of provisions in No Child Left Behind, now that the Education Department has revoked its NCLB waiver, Education Secretary Arne Duncan wrote state officials.
“I appreciate that transitioning back to NCLB is not desirable, and will not be simple,” Duncan wrote. To aid in the transition, he attached an 11-page document of NCLB rules that will take effect in the state starting with the coming school year.
Among the most significant: Washington state will lose flexibility in how it spends much of its federal Title I money. Significant chunks of that funding will now have to be dispersed to private vendors to tutor struggling students. The state will also have to notify parents in low-performing schools that they have the right to transfer their children to stronger schools — and it will have to provide those children with transportation, again using federal funds. The waiver revocation will also hamper the state’s efforts to direct funding toward the schools it deems most in need of a boost. Instead, it will have to follow federal guidelines for which schools merit priority status.

The loss of the waiver also means that Washington will be required to resume measuring schools’ progress using the old AYP measuring sticks. NCLB also requires the state to have 100 percent of students proficient in math and reading by this year; by that metric, nearly every school in the state will be labeled a failure.