Texas, the state that launched school accountability as an experiment, has applied to untangle itself from parts of the federal No Child Left Behind mandate, the same law that experiment eventually yielded, the Huffington Post reports. The deadline was Thursday for states to take President Barack Obama’s administration up on its offer to waive parts of the law in exchange for implementing elements of the White House’s education agenda. Texas announced that, like at least 40 other states, it wanted out, too.
“NCLB’s reauthorization in a timely manner has created an obsolete system that does not adequately reflect the accomplishments of the state’s schools,” the state’s education chief Michael Williams wrote in an open letter Thursday. By the law’s definition, in Texas 47.8 percent of schools — and 27.6 percent of its school districts — made “adequate yearly progress” this year. When campaigning in 2008, Obama promised to release states from the 2002 law, a signature initiative from President George W. Bush that requires standardized testing of students and a system of penalties for low test scores…
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