The Every Student Succeeds Act and What States Control Now

The bill Barack Obama signed on December 10, 2015, was late by about eight years. No Child Left Behind had been due for reauthorization in 2007, and Congress had spent most of the time since failing to agree on anything to replace it. What finally broke the logjam was an unlikely pair of senators: Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican who had been education secretary under the first President Bush, and Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat who had started in politics as a parent fighting cuts to a preschool program and liked to call herself a mom in tennis shoes. Their committee produced a bill that passed the House 359 to 64 and the Senate 85 to 12. At the signing in the White House, Obama called it a Christmas miracle, which was a joke, and also the most accurate description of a bipartisan education law that Washington had produced in a decade.

In short: The Every Student Succeeds Act kept annual testing and reporting by student group, but ended federal deadlines and penalties and let each state decide how to rate schools and which ones need help. That makes your state's education department and legislature the place where the rules are written now. Parents and advocates who know which knobs the law left to states can turn them.

Why the old law had to go

By 2015 nearly everyone agreed No Child Left Behind was broken, even people who still defended its goals. Its requirement that every student be proficient in reading and math by 2014 had passed without coming true, as everyone knew it would. Most states were operating under waivers the Obama administration had granted in exchange for adopting its own priorities, such as evaluating teachers partly on student test growth. That arrangement satisfied almost no one. Governors resented federal conditions that Congress never voted on. Teachers' unions hated the evaluation requirement. Conservatives saw the waivers as a back door to a national curriculum.

So the coalition that formed behind the new law was a coalition of the annoyed. Republicans wanted power back in state capitals. Unions wanted test-based teacher evaluation out of federal law. Civil rights groups wanted to protect the one thing they thought No Child Left Behind had done right: forcing schools to report results for poor children, students of color, English learners and students with disabilities. The deal that emerged gave each group something it cared about.

One more piece of the bargain is easy to miss. The law kept the federal government from conditioning its money on things Congress had not written into the statute, a direct answer to the waiver years. The education secretary can still approve or reject a state plan, but cannot demand that a state adopt particular standards, tests, teacher evaluations or school improvement models as the price of approval. Lawmakers from both parties wanted that limit, for different reasons, and it has held across three administrations.

What stayed federal

The new law kept more of the old one than its name suggests. These requirements still apply in every state that takes Title I money, which is all of them:

1. Annual tests. Reading and math every year in grades three through eight and once in high school; science once in each of three grade spans.
2. Reporting by group. Results must be broken out by income, race and ethnicity, disability and English-learner status, and published on state and local report cards.
3. Participation. States must test at least 95 percent of students and must factor low participation into their systems, a rule written partly in response to the opt-out movement.
4. Identifying schools. Each state must name at least the lowest-performing 5 percent of Title I schools, plus any high school graduating fewer than two-thirds of its students, for "comprehensive support and improvement."
5. Watching subgroups. Schools where a particular group of students is consistently underperforming must be identified for "targeted support and improvement," even if the school's overall numbers look fine.
6. A cap on alternate tests. Only about 1 percent of all students, those with the most significant cognitive disabilities, can take an alternate assessment, so districts can't quietly move large numbers of students with disabilities out of the regular system.

That list is the civil rights floor. A state can build on top of it but cannot dig under it.

What moved to the states

Almost everything else did. Under the 2015 law, each state writes its own plan and submits it to the U.S. Department of Education for approval. Inside a few broad requirements, the state decides:

• Its long-term goals. The 2014 universal-proficiency deadline is gone. States set their own targets and timelines, which must be "ambitious," a word the law left undefined.
• What counts. Accountability systems must include test scores, a measure of growth or another academic indicator for elementary and middle schools, graduation rates for high schools, progress for English learners, and at least one indicator of "school quality or student success." That last slot is where many states chose chronic absenteeism; others picked measures of college and career readiness or school climate.
• How much each piece weighs. Academic measures must carry "much greater" weight in total than the school quality indicators, but states set the exact weights.
• How schools are labelled. Letter grades, star ratings, dashboards with color codes: the law permits all of them.
• What happens to struggling schools. The district, not Washington, designs the improvement plan, which must be based on evidence. States decide what happens if a school doesn't improve after several years.
• Teacher evaluation. The federal requirement is gone entirely. States can keep test-based evaluations or drop them.
• Standards. The law forbids the federal government from requiring or incentivizing any particular set of academic standards, a provision aimed at the Common Core fights.

State plans took effect beginning with the 2017-18 school year, after a round of federal review. The pandemic upended the schedule: testing was cancelled nationwide in spring 2020, and the following years brought flexibility on how results were used. Many states have since revised their plans, and some are still in the middle of doing so.

The case that this went too far, and the case that it didn't go far enough

Two serious criticisms of the 2015 law come from opposite directions, and each has a point.

The first is the civil rights critique. Several national civil rights organizations warned during the debate that handing accountability back to the states repeated the history that made federal involvement necessary in the first place. States had once been the authors of segregated school funding. Without federal deadlines, they argued, a state could set goals so modest that whole groups of students would be left behind on paper as well as in fact. Early reviews of the state plans gave that worry some support: some states set weak expectations for subgroup performance or designed systems in which a school could earn a decent rating while one group of its students was failing.

The second critique comes from people who think the federal role is still too big. Annual testing in every grade from three to eight, they argue, is a heavier testing calendar than most high-performing countries use, and the 95 percent participation rule tells parents what to do with their own children. Some conservatives argue the law should have converted federal money into flexible block grants with no accountability strings at all.

Here's how this site reads it. The floor in the law is worth defending, because without consistent data the conversation about equity becomes a conversation about anecdotes. But the floor is not the house. A law that leaves most of the design to states is only as good as the state policies built on it, and those policies are made in rooms where few parents are present. The fault, where there is fault, is often not in the statute but in how little public attention state accountability systems receive.

What states did with the "student success" slot

The fifth indicator, the one meant to capture school quality or student success, was the law's most interesting experiment, and it shows both the promise and the limits of state control.

Chronic absenteeism became the most common choice by far. Usually defined as missing at least 10 percent of school days for any reason, it has advantages as a measure: it's countable, it's tied to learning, and it points schools toward problems they can do something about, from asthma and transportation to bullying and family crises. When absenteeism rose sharply after the pandemic, states that already tracked it had a ready tool to see where the problem was worst.

Other states chose measures of college and career readiness for high schools, such as participation in Advanced Placement courses, dual enrollment or industry credentials. A few experimented with surveys of students and staff about school climate, though most kept those out of formal ratings because survey answers can be gamed when stakes are attached.

The limit is weight. Because the law requires academic indicators to count for "much greater" weight overall, the student-success measures often move ratings only slightly. A school that cuts chronic absence in half may still get a low grade if test scores lag. Some advocates see that as appropriate; others think it keeps the system as test-centered as the one it replaced. Either way, the choices were made state by state, often in meetings few parents knew about.

Where the money and the power sit in 2026

It helps to remember how much of a school's budget comes from Washington: roughly a tenth, depending on the district and the year. The rest comes from states and local property taxes. Federal law has outsized influence because Title I and special education dollars arrive with conditions, not because they are most of the money.

That balance matters more now. In 2025 the Trump administration laid off a large share of the Education Department's staff and moved to shift some of its program work to other agencies, and it has pressed states to seek waivers from federal requirements. The Every Student Succeeds Act itself has not been repealed or rewritten; the annual testing and reporting requirements remain law. But enforcement depends on the people who review state plans, monitor compliance and answer questions from districts. When fewer of those people exist, the practical meaning of a federal requirement depends even more on the state's own will.

There is a version of this story that progressives should find uncomfortable. Plenty of blue states have strong reputations on education and middling records on the specific things this law measures, such as gaps between groups of students and chronic absence. A state does not need federal pressure to publish clear data, to direct extra money to schools with the most need, or to make sure the lowest-performing schools get real help instead of a new plan every three years. Several states led by Republicans and Democrats alike have done some of these things well. Others haven't bothered. With Democrats set to control Congress beginning in January 2027, there will be pressure to restore federal capacity. Some of the most important work, though, will stay in state capitals regardless.

How to read your state's system

If you want to know what your state did with the power the law gave it, three documents will tell you most of what you need.

1. The state's consolidated plan. Every state's approved plan is public, usually on the state education department's website. Look for the section on long-term goals and the list of indicators with their weights.
2. The state report card. Find your school and look past the overall rating to the subgroup tables. Note which groups are large enough to be reported; states set a minimum group size, and a high minimum can make small groups of students disappear from the data.
3. The list of identified schools. States publish which schools are in comprehensive or targeted support. If your school is on it, the district must have a plan, developed with parents, and you have a right to see it.

The minimum group size, often called the "n-size," deserves special attention. It sounds technical. It determines whether the twelve Native students or the fifteen English learners in a school are counted at all. Advocates in several states have won lower n-sizes by showing up at the state board of education and asking.

What you can do

The 2015 law handed power to state agencies that hold public hearings few people attend. Showing up there is unusually effective.

• Find your state senator and representative and ask them one specific question: what is the state's minimum group size for reporting, and has it been reviewed? Contact details, along with their recent votes, are at the representatives lookup.
• When the federal Education Department proposes rules or guidance changes, they often open for public comment. Watch the comment page, which lists federal rules open for comment, closing soonest first, with guidance on writing one.
• Keep up with the department's restructuring and the state response on the topic page for the federal government's cuts.
• Connect with groups that track your state's accountability plan, often parent coalitions or disability and English-learner advocates, through the organizations directory.
• If your school is identified for improvement, ask the principal for the improvement plan and the date of the next meeting where parents can weigh in. The law says families should be part of writing it. Take it at its word.