By Chris Hofmann President Obama last week signed the most important education legislation in over a decade, the long-awaited reauthorization of ESEA and No Child Left Behind. The provisions of the law will have a profound effect on what school is like for my class of 26 fourth graders and will reverberate throughout the everyday...

LA Unified Superintendent Ramon Cortines and board President Steve Zimmer joined a chorus of praise today from state education leaders as the Senate passed a rewrite of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, which is now known as the Every Student Succeeds Act. The bill now awaiting the signature of President Obama cuts back on...

LA Unified’s chief lobbyist, Edgar Zazueta, told the school board last week that the House of Representatives version of the revised No Child Left Behind bill could cost the district $78.7 million in Title I money for low income schools, which translates to 22.9 percent of its funding. The board has voted to protest the House...

The Senate passed a rewrite of the expired No Child Left Behind law yesterday with broad, bipartisan support. The George W. Bush-era law is controversial due to the high-stakes standardizing testing it ushered in, and the Senate’s bill would strip away much of the federal government’s test-and-punish powers. The bipartisan support it received is in...

Move over, No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. In an unusual show of bi-partisan support, the Senate Committee on Education this week approved the overhaul of the controversial Bush-era legislation, re-branding it ‘Every Child Achieves Act of 2015.’ The bill’s strong bipartisan support — it passed with a 22-0 vote — gives it some...

Via EdSource | By John Fensterwald Faced with intense opposition from teachers, Sacramento City Unified announced Wednesday it would not join other California districts in reapplying for a waiver from the federal No Child Left Behind law. Its defection leaves seven of eight districts seeking to extend a waiver from the federal accountability law through...

In granting eight CA school districts a No Child Left Behind waiver, the federal government is creating for the first time an oversight body to measure schools’ progress. Education Secretary Arne Duncan called the panel “unique” among the waivers granted to 39 states and the District of Columbia. “We went back and forth about how...

The U.S. Department of Education today approved a long-awaited federal waiver that allows LA Unified and seven other California districts to replace No Child Left Behind accountability rules with their own school improvement system. The waiver creates a unique 14-member oversight body to provide an “unbiased external compliance review” of each district’s progress after a...

Pressed for time, a small group of superintendents and officials from a coalition of nine California school districts, representing 1.1 million students, are on their way to D.C. to ensure that its No Child Left Behind waiver proposal is passed in time for the upcoming school year. Representatives from the California Office to Reform Education...