Education Waivers as Reform Leverage in the Obama Administration: State Implementation of ESEA Flexibility Waiver Request.

Seeing a dim possibility of ESEA reauthorization in the near future, the Obama Administration invited state applications for waivers in meeting the original No Child Left Behind goals of attaining 100% student proficiency by 2014. Waiver applications were also required to meet the federal assurances on state and local education reform. By June 2014, about 80% of all states received federal approval on their NCLB/ESEA waivers. As the ESEA flexibility waiver has been in placed in many states for 2-3 years, this paper aims at understanding the state implementation of ESEA flexibility waiver requests. First, we discuss the ESEA waiver in the context of the Obama Administration's education reform agenda. We argue that ESEA flexibility waiver, as a policy design, aligns with the administration's efforts to incentivize state agencies to meet federal expectations on systemic improvement, including the implementation of evaluation systems on teachers and principals and a differentiated approach to support low performing schools. Second, the paper highlights the 18 key elements that the federal government requires states to demonstrate progress in exchange for ESEA flexibility. We then examine the extent to which these federal expectations are met by the state, using data from the U.S. Department of Education's state-by-state reports on "ESEA Flexibility Part B Monitoring Report" for a sample of 16 states. In addition to the overall patterns, our sample of 16 states offers an opportunity to consider interstate variation in their waiver implementation. In particular, we are interested in the extent to which state governance (divided versus unified) and academic performance may have affected the degree of waiver implementation. The concluding section provides several observations on the policy and politics of ESEA flexibility waiver. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]