Maine has received a three-year extension of a waiver on some provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind law, allowing more flexibility in setting progress goals and benchmarking students’ achievement.
The waiver, originally granted to Maine in 2013, centered on the state’s plan to place Maine’s 380 Title I schools into five categories, based on students’ proficiency and progress. The categories are called: priority, focus, monitor, progressing and meeting.
“This renewal of the waiver required diligent, persistent work,” said Thomas Desjardin, Maine’s acting education commissioner. “We worked relentlessly with Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education and his staff as the federal government had exerted extreme authority over states in the past.”
The Obama administration announced in 2011 that it would give No Child Left Behind waivers to states that adopted certain education standards, such as teacher evaluations tied to students’ test scores. In exchange, states would get flexibility from some of the core tenets of the law, such as having 100 percent of students be proficient in math and reading by 2014.
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