The U.S. secretary of education would be legally barred from influencing state decisions about academic standards, teacher evaluations and other education policies.
The law's failure has helped make Duncan an unusually powerful education secretary: With the promise of waivers from the most onerous provisions of No Child Left Behind, he has been able to push states to make rapid and sweeping changes to their academic standards, teacher evaluations and other key policies.
States could receive part of that money in exchange for promising to do favored reforms, including expanding charter schools, adopting a new, common set of academic standards, and revamping educator evaluation with systems that would include standardized test scores.
The result has been three decades of increasingly high-stakes "standards-and-accountability" reforms, which rely on rigorous academic standards and test-based evaluation systems to hold schools and teachers accountable for student progress.
There has been speculation that the Trump administration could seek to promote vouchers through a competitive grant program similar to Obama's Race to the Top, which helped persuade states to adopt Common Core academic standards and new teacher evaluations in return for a better shot at federal dollars.
While the $4.35 billion in prizes represented a tiny fraction of overall educational spending, the competition led most states to encourage greater use of test scores in teacher evaluations, raise academic standards, eliminate caps on charter schools and make it easier to fire poor teachers, changes that enraged teachers' unions and some parents.
Consider two areas of current and escalating controversy: educator evaluation and common academic standards.
Mr. Obama has focused on improving teacher evaluations, promoting common academic standards, turning around failing schools and increasing charter schools.
The most polarized debates about education have centered on higher academic standards and laws mandating that teacher evaluations incorporate student test scores.
So, what's a principal--whose duties as an instructional leader continue to ratchet up with the colliding rollouts of new academic standards, new assessments, and new teacher-evaluation systems--to do?
Bill Gates, whose foundation has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into K-12 education and influenced state and federal policy to embrace charter schools, teacher evaluation and the Common Core academic standards, said Thursday that trying to improve education is harder than work on global health.
