Minnesota proceeds with caution — and questions — as it complies with federal education law under DeVos

Apr 19, 2017

MinnPost, Sam Brodey

A little over a year ago, Barack Obama signed into law the biggest K-12 education reform in over a decade: the Every Student Succeeds Act, a product of years-long compromise in Congress, was intended to smooth over the shortcomings of the previous education law of the land, No Child Left Behind.

The bill, informally called ESSA, aims to lighten the footprint of the federal government in K-12 education policy. Democrats and Republicans in Congress agreed to give local education policymakers greater authority to decide how schools and students were performing, and to decide how to allocate federal education dollars.

Minnesota and other states are currently working on their plans for complying with ESSA, and they will ultimately require approval from the U.S. Department of Education. Those plans, however, will arrive in a Washington under much different leadership than the one that signed ESSA into law.

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