Washington state schools chief Randy Dorn said his state’s waiver will lift the requirement that all students pass the state reading and math tests by 2014. It also will give Washington school districts more flexibility about how they spend some federal dollars.
In return, Washington will need to show improvement in test scores for subgroups of students who historically have had lower scores than average, such as those who qualify for free or reduced-price meals.
Wisconsin’s plan includes an innovative “red flag” system that is triggered when groups of students are failing in a variety of ways beyond test scores, including daily attendance. This system can be activated throughout the school year, to help kids when they need it most, not once a year like the testing requirements of No Child Left Behind.
The federal government also recognized Wisconsin for raising its math and science credit requirements and for shrinking the number of students in each testing subgroup so that the system does a better job of recognizing when disabled students or those in a minority group need extra help.
Other waiver applications are still pending in 10 states and the District of Columbia. Waivers were approved last month in Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, South Dakota, Utah, and Virginia.
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In order to get a waiver, each state had to promise to show in other ways that its students and schools are improving, and they were required to more closely link teacher evaluations to student test scores, among other requirements.
Washington’s waiver application emphasized its embrace of new national education standards, the state’s new teacher and principal evaluations, and its efforts to take a broader look at student achievement beyond reading and math by also testing for writing and science.
The waiver agreement requires that by 2018, Washington cut in half achievement gaps between various ethnic and economic groups, when compared with 100-percent passage rates. For example, if one group had 74 percent passing reading in 2011, that group would need to have 87 percent passing by 2018.
The agreement adds another requirement for Title I schools, which are high-poverty public schools that get extra money from the federal government to help students who are behind academically or at risk of falling behind.
It requires the state education office to annually identify priority schools, which are the 5 percent lowest-achieving of Title I schools; focus schools, which are the lowest 10 percent of Title I schools; and reward schools, the highest performing Title I schools or those making the most progress in a given year.
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