Three years after the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Patrick McGuinn reviews how the U.S. Department of Education has managed the approval process for state accountability plans, how state plans are shaping up as a result of their newfound flexibility, and what implementation challenges have emerged. States have required…

This article analyzes the messages and strategies of a sample of education interest groups, and assesses their interpretations of the political context to understand how the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) lost both political and public support during the crucial period of 2013-2014. Based on interviews with representatives of 19 interest…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) was originally promoted in 2010 by a centrist bi-partisan coalition that included Democrats interested in leveraging more rigorous academic standards to improve educational opportunity and moderate probusiness Republicans concerned about workforce development. As states moved to implement the new Standards…

This article reports on why states are quitting the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). The two consortia sought to develop state-of-the-art assessments that focused on problem solving and the application of knowledge, and that moved away from former tests'…

Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), federal education mandates will be decreasing, which means states will have more flexibility and authority than they've had in decades. State education agency (SEA) leaders are confronting great change and great opportunity as many agencies move away from a focus on compliance with federal regulations,…

It has been three years since Race to the Top grant-winning states piloted new teacher evaluation systems and many of them have made considerable progress, yet according to media coverage and a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published in April 2015, struggles remain and most grantees have asked to extend the timetables for…

The Obama administration's Race to the Top competitive grant program initiated an unprecedented wave of state teacher-evaluation reform across the country. To date, most of the scholarly analysis of this activity has focused on the design of the evaluation instruments or the implementation of the new evaluations by districts and schools. But…

People dislike the Common Core for several different reasons, and so it is important to disaggregate the sources of opposition and to assess and then to dispel some of the myths that have built up around it. It also is important to understand the unusual political alliances that have emerged in opposition to Common Core implementation and how they…

The "Race to the Top" competitive grant program initiated a wave of teacher evaluation reform, which scholars and policymakers have long identified as critical to improving teacher quality and student performance. State boards of education (SBEs) and state education agencies (SEAs) took different approaches to these reforms, and as a…

In a 2012 paper for the Center for American Progress, "The State of Evaluation Reform," Patrick McGuinn (Drew University) identified the opportunities and challenges facing education agencies in Race to the Top (RTTT) grant-winning states as they prepared for the implementation of new teacher evaluation systems. The 2012 study undertook…

This article offers an analysis of the origins, evolution, and impact of the Obama administration's Race to the Top (RTTT) competitive grant program and places it in the broader context of the debate over the No Child Left Behind Act and the shifting intergovernmental relations around education. RTTT is fundamentally about two things: creating…