My outrageously prolific friend Rick Hess has another new book out, this time co-edited with Max Eden, formerly of AEI and now the Manhattan Institute’s resident D.C. education policy stalwart. It’s all about the Every Student Succeeds Act, which as you know is the latest incarnation of ESEA and such an elusive, ever-changing creature that they were brave to undertake something as long-fused, durable, and static as an actual hard-copy book.
Yes, ESSA’s interpretation and application are in flux, because the federal regulations are in flux, both because the DeVos team is re-examining them at the Education Department and because Congress is on the verge of voiding the whole lot of them, at least those pertaining to accountability, data, and state plans. Publishing an actual book on this topic took chutzpah, as it looks from afar a bit like writing a book about the February weather or the waves at Ocean City.
Yet it turns out that The Every Student Succeeds Act: What It Means for Schools, Systems and States was well worth publishing at this time. Setting aside my own memoir-ish chapter (about a half-century love-hate relationship with ESEA in its many incarnations), I can say with confidence that Hess and Eden rounded up a bunch of very smart and deeply knowledgeable people and that team produced a thoroughly worthy volume about the law itself, where it came from and how it came to be, many of its strengths and shortcomings, and—as the subtitle promises—its complicated implications for states, districts, and schools.
Like any collection of individually-authored essays, it has no single point of view. Indeed, several chapter pairings are intended to present a sort of yin-yang take on ESSA, most conspicuously in Marty West’s thoughtful argument in favor of it combined with Chad Aldeman’s slightly feverish depiction of its wrong-headedness. (Cindy Brown and I also duel a bit about ESEA’s history.) Yet almost every one of the individual chapters supplies important insights and perspectives, and the co-editors do a fine job with a concluding chapter that doesn’t exactly drip with optimism about the law’s prospects but that did add to my own understanding of the “new left-right alliance between teacher unions and small-government conservatives” that lubricated the political compromises that made it possible to get this bill enacted—albeit fourteen long years after NCLB and about seven very long years later than it should have been done.
Several chapters are deeply informative about recent history, both about the rise and fall of NCLB and the sausage-making involved in ESSA. (Alyson Klein’s “inside scoop” is catnip for political junkies.) Going forward, however, perhaps the most useful chapters are Arnold Shober’s, Ashley Jochim’s, and Mike Casserly’s perceptive thoughts on what ESSA portends for states and districts.
For all the talk about how this law restores authority to the states and, in a burst of subsidiarity, empowers practicing educators and real schools to decide what’s best for their pupils, ESSA in fact makes many demands of states (particularly when it comes to reporting), contains more rigidities than its fans have likely spotted, takes for granted many capacities (data, experience, wisdom, courage, horsepower, travel dollars, etc.) that those who are supposed to exercise them may not possess, and empowers them to make decisions that they may not actually want to be responsible for. (For a very long time they’ve been able to say “Uncle Sam makes us do it this way.”)
Shober’s superb analysis of “state capacity and ESSA” deserves special attention (at least by me, perhaps because the state whose school board I’m on is currently struggling with its ESSA plan). After smartly elucidating some ways in which fifty years of being pushed and tugged and directed by Washington have helped prepare states for these newfound flexibilities, he then focuses on the constraints—both political and technical—that will make it hard for many of them to do this well, and he identifies features of the law itself, several of which were news to me) that may frustrate states’ ability to be boldly creative even if they want to be.
For all the appearance of momentary consensus and old-fashioned bipartisanship that accompanied ESSA’s passage, and all the praise lavished upon Senators Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray for getting this ball across the goal line, in truth what they produced is more compromise than consensus, which means it contains much horse-trading and tons of giving and taking, which also means many things were glossed over, intentionally blurred, or entrusted (for clarity) to the regulatory process—the very process that the Obama team overreached in a leftward direction and that the GOP Congress may now overreach toward the right.
The book, on balance, is a fine piece of work. ESSA, however, is precariously balanced between give and take, between Washington and the statehouse, between freedom and constraint. Indeed, it recalls Samuel Johnson’s famous (and sexist) epigram about female preachers: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."
SOURCE: Frederick M. Hess and Max Eden, eds., The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA): What It Means for Schools, Systems, and States (Harvard Education Press, 2017).
