Most WA state public schools will show as failing. They did not do as Arne Duncan dictated.

I say good for them for standing their ground. I say Arne Duncan is way overstepping his bounds. He is getting into territory that should not be his to control.

The two main reasons Arne Duncan is taking back the NCLB waiver he gave the state.....the state refused to link teacher scores to the test results and refused to pass laws to expand charter schools.

Arne Duncan brings hammer down on Washington state, pulling its ‘No Child’ waiver

The Education Department is for the first time yanking one of the waivers it gave to states that exempts them the most onerous parts of the flawed No Child Left Behind law.

As a result, Washington state will now have to comply with all parts of No Child Left Behind. Because of the peculiarities of the law, this means that virtually all of the state’s public schools will be seen as failing because they didn’t not meet set performance goals.

It has been universally acknowledged that the performance goals — which called for nearly all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014 — were impossible to achieve and even the authors called them “aspirational.” The law was supposed to have been rewritten seven years ago, but it has remained in force as Congress has been unable to craft a new K-12 education bill.

Washington state has carried out a number of the Duncan-approved school reforms, but the education secretary apparently wanted to send a message about how important he views the linking of evaluations to standardized test scores. When Washington’s waiver is gone, it will leave 42 states with waivers, along with the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and eight school districts in California that applied on their own without state approval.