Want To Improve Teacher Training? Stop Playing Games With Teacher Standards

Two U.S. senators plan to revise the federal Higher Education Act to make it ready for re-authorization. Should we find that reassuring?

The senators, Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee) and Patti Murray (D-Washington), don’t tell us who will be writing or paying for the drafting of this mammoth bill — just as they didn’t tell us who wrote or paid for the 1,000-page re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

That newer law is best known as Every Student Succeeds Act, which Senators Alexander and Murray co-sponsored, making sure it got a unanimous vote in Congress in December 2015. The Every Student Succeeds Act dangled Title I federal money to state boards and departments of education eager to draft four-year education plans for their state without the approval of parents, state legislators, local school boards, or even the governor of the state. The only approval required by the new law for a four-year “state plan” was from the United States Department of Education — and that was likely necessary according to whoever authored and paid for the new law in order to ensure that all states were locked into Common Core-compliant standards and tests, no matter what they were called.

I do have several suggestions about the Higher Education Act for Senators Alexander and Murray, knowing full-well they will get no more attention than was accorded comments from parents of school children for the Every Student Succeeds Act:

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