President Donald Trump has issued an executive order to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, or ED, and hand authority over education to the states and local communities. Earlier this month, Trump’s education secretary Linda McMahon took a big step toward that goal by firing 50 percent of ED staff.
Completely dismantling ED would require action by Congress. Until that happens, the administration has other means of diminishing the department’s role, including the authority to waive provisions in federal law about assessments and accountability, which are some of the most exacting in the entire Every Student Succeeds Act. Waiving ESSA’s assessment provisions carries a great deal of risk. When it comes to accountability, however, it’s at least worth discussing whether the current situation may offer less risk and more opportunity.
There is wide support among policy experts, advocates, and parents for federal guardrails around assessment: annual testing for all students in math and ELA in grades 3–8 and once in high school, with science being tested once in each grade span (elementary, middle, and high), and data disaggregated for students from historically disadvantaged groups. These form the basic framework for measuring students’ yearly progress, providing information on each child’s performance to parents, and identifying and remedying achievement and opportunity gaps in a way that is comparable across all schools in each state.
It’s not clear how many states would seek flexibilities under an assessment waiver program. But most advocates believe that the current assessment regime would be vulnerable in the absence of the federal backstop—and that this would have many policy downsides.
For example, eliminating the requirement that students be tested in grades 3–8 would thwart our ability to gauge students’ annual progress. Shifting from testing all students to a sampling model would mean that many parents would no longer get important information on their children’s achievement that serves as a check on grades and other local feedback. It would also mean that fewer schools would have enough students tested to allow reporting of results for demographic subgroups.
In contrast, hardly anyone thinks ESSA’s accountability provisions are doing much to drive school improvement. This is in part because the law isn’t working as intended.
A January 2024 GAO report cited failures at every level of government. At the federal level, ED was falling short on monitoring and oversight. States were found to be out of compliance with key requirements of the law, including that school improvement plans be based on a needs assessment, identify resource inequities, and include evidence-based interventions. Only 42 percent of school improvement plans addressed all three of those ESSA-mandated elements, and there were few signs that many of those were doing them particularly well.
District and school leaders particularly seemed to be struggling to align school policies and practices with evidence of success. As stated in the GAO report:
All seven of the school officials we spoke with were unaware of [ED’s] [What Works] Clearinghouse. . . . [M]any school officials need help understanding why a new approach is needed as their default is to continue with the status quo. . . . [T]wo district officials and one school official stated that they turned to educational product vendors or paid consultants for assistance in selecting interventions.
It’s clear that there is a need for a more robust federal role here in monitoring and enforcing the law, especially when it comes to evidence-based decisions and resource allocation. States hardly seem ready to have all decision making turned over to them given that they are falling woefully short on even the basics. With half of ED’s workforce eliminated—including, ominously, most of the staff at the National Center for Education Statistics, which uses data to improve school quality—and an administration determined to scale back ED’s influence even further, a stronger federal role seems significantly less likely.
Even if the accountability provisions in current law were working exactly as intended, however, they would not represent a promising model for boosting student achievement. The law only requires the most intensive interventions for schools in need of Comprehensive Support and Improvement, or CSI, meaning those ranked in the bottom 5 percent based on a mix of test scores and other quality indicators that varies by state, plus high schools with graduation rates below 67 percent.
One problem is that the CSI designation only encompasses a small fraction of schools and does not include many where student achievement is lowest. An Institute of Education Sciences study published late last year found that “less than half of the lowest achieving 5 percent of schools in each state are identified as CSI. Because ESSA requires states to identify schools that are lowest performing on a wide set of several indicators, and not just proficiency in ELA and mathematics, schools with very low average achievement might not be identified if they are not significantly underperforming in other ways” (emphases added).
Moreover, low-performing schools enter and exit CSI status and other lower-intensity identification categories spelled out in the law without being required to demonstrate clear evidence of improvement. In a recent report, the Education Trust concluded that “no state has set exit criteria for identified schools that ensure that schools are effectively making meaningful and sustainable progress toward improved student outcomes. Most states set low performance bars for exiting school identification status and don’t require schools to raise the performance of their lowest performing students and/or fail to ensure schools make sustainable changes to school policies and practices that can be sustained over time.”
What we seem to have now under the current federal accountability regime is a series of revolving doors where struggling schools cycle in and out of CSI status and other identification categories but never make it very far out of the doldrums, while many schools with low-achieving students are never identified for intervention. In other words, there is a lot of movement back and forth but little in the way of tangible forward progress or systemic change.
This is, at best, an inefficient strategy for improving student outcomes at any level—school, district, or state. We shouldn’t give up on identifying the lowest performing schools for support and improvement, and the Education Trust offers some sound ideas to make the ESSA accountability system work better. But even if that system were working as intended, it would fall short of sparking transformative change at the state and district level. It may be necessary, but it is far from sufficient.
