Iowa may not pursue No Child Left Behind waiver

DES MOINES - The director of the Iowa Department of Education says he's unsure whether the state will pursue its waiver request to the U.S. Department of Education to free Iowa from some of the requirements of No Child Left Behind.

“What the Legislature approved makes it very difficult in some instances to meet the U.S. Department of Education requirements,” Jason Glass said Tuesday. “We spent more than 3,000 hours on (the waiver request). It gives me a lot to think about if we want to put more staff time to it.”

Glass said staff members at the Iowa Department of Education are working through the Legislature's education reform package - which hasn't yet been signed by Gov. Terry Branstad - to determine how it can be implemented. At the same time, they are working with the U.S. Department of Education on how the new reforms apply to the waiver request.

No Child Left Behind is a 2001 law that required states to develop standardized basic skills tests for their students. The law also required that the percentage of students who meet or exceed the standards set on the test increase each year until 2014, when 100 percent of students are expected to reach the benchmark.

The U.S. Department of Education granted waivers to some of the requirements of No Child Left Behind to 11 states in February. That same month, officials at the Iowa Department of Education announced their plans to be included in the second round of waivers.

The plans included some provisions that lawmakers dropped from their education reform agreement this year.

For example, lawmakers struck a provision that would have made all 11th-graders take a college entrance exam and did not redesign teacher and administrator evaluations to the extent that the governor proposed.

Glass said the federal waiver requires states to be able to evaluate teachers into at least three categories; not effective, effective and highly effective. That's not yet possible under the reform package approved by the Legislature, which calls for a commission to study teacher evaluations and then report with a recommendation in 2013.

“Looking ahead, I don't know if we will be able to get what need in for this round of waivers or if we're even going to be ready for September for the next round,” Glass said.

Ron Zimmer, associate professor of public policy and education in the Peabody College at Vanderbilt University, said it's difficult to tell how lenient the U.S. Department of Education will be with its waiver process.

“Everyone is going into this blindly,” Zimmer said. “There are a lot of states that are going back and forth on the waivers because they are so recent. No one really knows how it will play out.”

He does, however, see a scenario where Congress could make changes to No Child Left Behind, making the waivers less necessary.

“There's pressure building to do something because it reaches a critical stage at the 2014 deadline,” he said. “But this has been going on for a while, and there always seems to be an election that gets in the way or budget issues that supersede (addressing No Child Left Behind), so it has never reached the high priority of bills that need to be changed.”

The Iowa Department of Education's waiver request can be found here:

http://bit.ly/KkN8gk