With no imminent rewrite and reauthorization of the abomination known as No Child Left Behind, the Obama administration plans to grant
waivers to states not meeting NCLB's requirements. That's pretty much necessary, because while Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was making a wildly overblown claim when he suggested that
82 percent of schools would be judged as failing, nonetheless a significant number of schools are falling short of NCLB's requirements.
The waivers themselves will have requirements, though, for some as-yet-unspecified set of reforms:
Although the administration does not intend to announce the final details until September, sources who have been briefed on the plans already have helped fill in the blanks. The waiver plan will be an all-or-nothing, take-it-or-leave-it package—no a la carte picking-and-choosing allowed. In exchange for a waiver from the 2014 deadline and more funding flexibility, states would have to adopt college- or career-ready standards, propose their own differentiated accountability systems, and adopt teacher evaluation systems based in part on student growth on state tests.
The problem here is that as much as No Child Left Behind sucks, Arne Duncan's preferred policies ... also suck. And as terrible as any rewritten education bill to come out of this Congress would be, do we really want the Obama administration setting the precedent that when Congress doesn't pass a needed bill, the president and his appointees can not only ameliorate the immediate effects of non-passage but attach their own agenda as a requirement for amelioration? Because I'm sure the next Republican administration (in 2017 or 2025 or whenever it may come) will have a motherlode of ideas for using that maneuver.