El Paso ISD Superintendent Juan Cabrera reacts to “Every Child Succeeds” Act

President Obama signed the Every Child Succeeds Act into law Thursday, replacing No Child Left Behind (NCLB). ABC-7 is looking at the big changes of the law that attracted bipartisan support in Washington.

The key word is flexibility. Under NCLB, students were tested, and schools with low scores were penalized. The Every Student Succeeds Act takes the power from Washington D.C. and gives it to the states to decide their own rules.

Rewriting NCLB has been on El Paso ISD Superintendent Juan Cabrera’s mind since March. That’s when he met with President Obama to discuss possible changes.

“The early bird gets the worm,” said Cabrera. “i’ve been telling everyone at EPISD to get your hands on the act and lets get on the phone and call Austin and call Washington.”

Before the changes, students in third through eighth grade tested in math and reading every year, high school students were tested once. If a school scored poorly, they were penalized.

“The new law says you have to have a dashboard of indicators that look at that whole child,” said National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen Garca. “Mind, body and character.”

Now, Texas will judge its own schools. In 2012, Bowie high’s low-performance on 10th grade standardized tests lead then-Superintendent Lorenzo Garcia to cheat. Although legally, school boards can still tie bonuses to good test scores, many around the country have dropped that, including EPISD.

But now, if a school tests poorly, “the punitive measures are not going to be there,” Cabrera said, such as tying teacher’s jobs to how well their students tested.

“Congress decided in 2002 to become our super-school board and its become a disaster,” Garcia said.

While the federal government is still involved, satisfying Democrats, more control goes to the state, schools and parents, a change Republicans were pushing for.

“you will have a bigger voice because as you get more freedom from the states, that means Texans can go talk to our state legislators and control the regulations, the rules and accountability that will apply to our local schools,” Cabrera said.

The big take away is now States get to set their own academic goals. Under NCLB, there was one goal for the entire nation, 100 percent proficiency in math and reading.
Now each state gets to measure its students progress toward its own objective.