RD186 - The Federal No Child Left Behind Act Waiver Requests Made by the Virginia Board of Education (SB 1212 and HB 2542)


Executive Summary:
Through a focused statewide educational reform effort, Virginia has had a rigorous set of content standards in the Standards of Learning (SOL) program and accompanying assessment system for over ten years. As a result, Virginia supports the primary goal and basic tenets of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) since they are in direct alignment with the system of standards and accountability already established in Virginia. The following list shows the components of NCLB that are in direct alignment with Virginia’s established system of standards and accountability:

• A statewide goal of requiring all students to achieve proficiency in academic content standards and graduate from high school.
• Rigorous academic content standards and assessments.
• A statewide system of support for low-performing divisions and schools.
• Rigorous teacher licensing requirements to ensure highly qualified teachers.
• Reporting of state, school, and division academic achievement through a Web-based report card.

The challenges Virginia faces in meeting the requirements of NCLB relate to the policies and procedures required by the United States Department of Education (USED) in implementing the components of the law. Virginia believes that certain policies and procedures have resulted in unintended consequences and are not representative of sound educational practice. These unintended consequences have served as the foundation for Virginia’s requests for flexibility to USED on an annual basis. Additionally, Virginia has worked collaboratively with other states through the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) to develop position papers related to these unintended consequences for the purpose of influencing USED’s interpretation of the statute as well as the scheduled 2007 reauthorization of the law.

NCLB is not a new federal program; rather, it is the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that has provided federal funds to states and localities since the 1960s. However, the 2001 reauthorization known as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 imposed additional requirements on state and local programs. In an effort to assist states in meeting new requirements, additional federal funds were allocated to help states expand student achievement testing and invoke sanctions if benchmarks were not achieved.

NCLB requires each state that accepts the federal funds to implement a single statewide accountability system. In Virginia, the requirements of NCLB have been aligned with the state’s well-established system of assessment, accountability, and support. One of the major challenges in aligning the two systems has been addressing the differences between the existing state accreditation procedures and the federal measure of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). As a result, since the passage of NCLB, Virginia has been blending the requirements of NCLB with its accountability system. This alignment has created confusion among state and local administrators as well as the public. Schools that meet one accountability rating may not meet the other, leading to misperceptions about the quality of educational programs in Virginia’s schools.

The overall challenges Virginia has faced in implementation of the legislation and submitted as waiver requests for 2007 fall into the following two categories.

• Submissions to satisfy the USED requests as a result of the peer review of the standards and assessment system.

• Submissions to minimize unintended consequences in implementation of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) policies.