The Every Student Succeeds Act Turns 10 This Year. Why I Won’t Be Celebrating

By Chad Aldeman, April 14,2025

This year marks the 10-year anniversary of the Every Student Succeeds Act. I predict there won’t be any grand celebrations.

That’s because ESSA is proving to be a weak law. Although it was hailed at the time for its bipartisan nature and called “the largest devolution of federal control to the states in a quarter-century,” student achievement has fallen dramatically, especially for the lowest-performing youngsters.

Part of the problem is that ESSA doesn’t have the same muscular elements as its predecessor, the No Child Left Behind Act. It’s a pretty damning comparison: NCLB required states to hold districts accountable for their results; it paid close attention to low-performing student subgroups; and it included other improvement efforts like school choice, tutoring and a $1 billion reading program. ESSA has none of those things. This lack of ambition probably helped it win widespread bipartisan support when it passed, and also why it has led to student achievement declines.  

Admittedly, this is an awkward point to be making at the current moment. At the national level, the Trump administration is doing everything in its power to kill the U.S. Department of Education and hand full control of education back to the states. Meanwhile, Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren are responding by defending the status quo with chants like “Save our Schools.”

But history suggests neither deregulation nor blind support for the current federal-state relationship is the right approach. And with state leaders seeking waivers for even less oversight over their use of federal funds, now is the time to start thinking about what a better accountability framework might look like. Here are five places to start:  

1. Trust states, but verify

The Trump administration wants to send even more control back to the states with “no-strings-attached formula block grants.” But that seems unwise, given the achievement declines most states have experienced over the last decade (many of which preceded COVID). More importantly, it wouldn’t make sense to offer the same flexibilities to, say, Maine or Oregon, where scores have declined rapidly over the last decade, as to Mississippi, which has dramatically improved outcomes for kids. Different states deserve different levels of earned autonomy.

Andy Smarick, Kelly Robson and I outlined this approach in a 2015 report we called “Pacts Americana.” We envisioned a set of federal-state compacts where each state established ambitious student performance goals and developed a comprehensive plan for reaching them. In exchange, states would be freed from strict federal rules on how to identify low-performing schools and the specific steps for improvement those schools must take, and the government would monitor the results. The feds could then extend the length of compacts with states that make progress and ask those where performance has stalled to revisit their plans.

ESSA has some elements of this framework. Nominally, states are in charge of writing their own plans and the feds are responsible for oversight. But the states would tell you the feds are too strict on what’s allowable and what’s not. More importantly, that process ignores student results, and performance can — and has — stalled without any impetus for change.

2. Focus on districts, not schools

Whereas NCLB had both school and district accountability components, ESSA focuses solely on schools. That turned out to be a huge mistake.

The school-level emphasis was fundamentally flawed. After all, district leaders control the budget, adopt the school calendar, negotiate major contracts and determine pay schedules. In other words, district leaders should be blamed if a school doesn’t have the resources it needs to succeed.

The nation saw this play out during COVID. It wasn’t teachers or principals who set COVID policies, yet the national education law ignored the district role and instead required states to focus on individual schools.

That made no sense — and it was borne out in the data. The latest Education Recovery Scorecard report found achievement gaps within the same districts stayed about the same during the course of the pandemic. Meanwhile, achievement gaps between districts grew substantially.

Why? Because the districts were making different decisions. As a research team led by Dan Goldhaber found, “In districts that went remote, achievement growth was lower for all subgroups, but especially for students attending high-poverty schools. In areas that remained in person, there were still modest losses in achievement, but there was no widening of gaps between high and low-poverty schools.”

That is, district decisions over how to handle COVID, not COVID itself, were what caused gaps to grow. Going forward, districts, not schools should be the primary unit of accountability.

3. Hold states and districts accountable for the performance of low-performing students

American society is becoming more diverse, and old categories of race and ethnicity are becoming harder to neatly measure and define. It’s not that the U.S. has suddenly become colorblind or that race doesn’t matter, but policies haven’t caught up to the fact that people who identify as multiracial are the fastest-growing group in the country. Moreover, there’s wide variation in which children are identified as having disabilities.

These categories are also less salient in education than they once were. While there’s been tremendous growth in the gap between the highest- and lowest-achieving students, who those students are has changed. Yes, the bottom has fallen out for children in traditionally low-performing subgroups, but it has fallen even faster for native English speakers, students without disabilities and those who do not live in poverty.

As such, policymakers should follow the lead of states like Florida and Mississippi, which specifically look at how the bottom 25% of students are doing, regardless of their race, ethnicity or disability status. Those kids rely on public schools the most, they’re struggling right now and it’s where the policy focus should be going forward.

4. Give parents information

ESSA requires states to share results with families “as soon as is practicable” after standardized tests are administered. But reporting has actually gotten slower over time. Even with the shift to digital exams, states take longer to process the scores than they did two decades ago.

That’s inexcusable. States could speed this up on their own, or the feds could step in and define “as soon as practicable” to be no more than, say, two weeks after the test. That’s the standard in the private sector, and there’s no reason it can’t be met in public education.

5. Give parents options

Did you know that all students in low-performing public schools once had access to free after-school tutoring? Or that all families in low-performing schools once had the right to transfer to another public school of their choice?

Both these programs existed under NCLB. They had flaws, for sure, and school districts tended to hate them, but they pressured schools to improve, and thousands of families took advantage of them each year. Congress should consider bringing back these other forms of accountability too.

This is far from a comprehensive list of all the things that need to improve with current accountability systems, but it’s not enough to shout “local control” or defend the status quo.Policymakers from both sides of the aisle need to reckon with the current state of public education and articulate a vision for the future that matches that reality.

Read this on The 74 website here.