President Donald Trump has issued an executive order to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, or ED, and hand authority over education to the states and local communities. Earlier this month, Trump’s education secretary Linda McMahon took a big step toward that goal by firing 50 percent of ED staff.

Completely dismantling ED would require action by Congress. Until that happens, the administration has other means of diminishing the department’s role, including the authority to waive provisions in federal law about assessments and accountability, which are some of the most exacting in the entire Every Student Succeeds Act. Waiving ESSA’s assessment provisions carries a great deal of risk. When it comes to accountability, however, it’s at least worth discussing whether the current situation may offer less risk and more opportunity.

There is wide support among policy experts, advocates, and parents for federal guardrails around assessment: annual testing for all students in math and ELA in grades 3–8 and once in high school, with science being tested once in each grade span (elementary, middle, and high), and data disaggregated for students from historically disadvantaged groups. These form the basic framework for measuring students’ yearly progress, providing information on each child’s performance to parents, and identifying and remedying achievement and opportunity gaps in a way that is comparable across all schools in each state.

It’s not clear how many states would seek flexibilities under an assessment waiver program. But most advocates believe that the current assessment regime would be vulnerable in the absence of the federal backstop—and that this would have many policy downsides.

For example, eliminating the requirement that students be tested in grades 3–8 would thwart our ability to gauge students’ annual progress. Shifting from testing all students to a sampling model would mean that many parents would no longer get important information on their children’s achievement that serves as a check on grades and other local feedback. It would also mean that fewer schools would have enough students tested to allow reporting of results for demographic subgroups.

In contrast, hardly anyone thinks ESSA’s accountability provisions are doing much to drive school improvement. This is in part because the law isn’t working as intended.

A January 2024 GAO report cited failures at every level of government. At the federal level, ED was falling short on monitoring and oversight. States were found to be out of compliance with key requirements of the law, including that school improvement plans be based on a needs assessment, identify resource inequities, and include evidence-based interventions. Only 42 percent of school improvement plans addressed all three of those ESSA-mandated elements, and there were few signs that many of those were doing them particularly well.

District and school leaders particularly seemed to be struggling to align school policies and practices with evidence of success. As stated in the GAO report:

All seven of the school officials we spoke with were unaware of [ED’s] [What Works] Clearinghouse. . . . [M]any school officials need help understanding why a new approach is needed as their default is to continue with the status quo. . . . [T]wo district officials and one school official stated that they turned to educational product vendors or paid consultants for assistance in selecting interventions.

It’s clear that there is a need for a more robust federal role here in monitoring and enforcing the law, especially when it comes to evidence-based decisions and resource allocation. States hardly seem ready to have all decision making turned over to them given that they are falling woefully short on even the basics. With half of ED’s workforce eliminated—including, ominously, most of the staff at the National Center for Education Statistics, which uses data to improve school quality—and an administration determined to scale back ED’s influence even further, a stronger federal role seems significantly less likely.

Even if the accountability provisions in current law were working exactly as intended, however, they would not represent a promising model for boosting student achievement. The law only requires the most intensive interventions for schools in need of Comprehensive Support and Improvement, or CSI, meaning those ranked in the bottom 5 percent based on a mix of test scores and other quality indicators that varies by state, plus high schools with graduation rates below 67 percent.

One problem is that the CSI designation only encompasses a small fraction of schools and does not include many where student achievement is lowest. An Institute of Education Sciences study published late last year found that “less than half of the lowest achieving 5 percent of schools in each state are identified as CSI. Because ESSA requires states to identify schools that are lowest performing on a wide set of several indicators, and not just proficiency in ELA and mathematics, schools with very low average achievement might not be identified if they are not significantly underperforming in other ways” (emphases added).

Moreover, low-performing schools enter and exit CSI status and other lower-intensity identification categories spelled out in the law without being required to demonstrate clear evidence of improvement. In a recent report, the Education Trust concluded that “no state has set exit criteria for identified schools that ensure that schools are effectively making meaningful and sustainable progress toward improved student outcomes. Most states set low performance bars for exiting school identification status and don’t require schools to raise the performance of their lowest performing students and/or fail to ensure schools make sustainable changes to school policies and practices that can be sustained over time.”

What we seem to have now under the current federal accountability regime is a series of revolving doors where struggling schools cycle in and out of CSI status and other identification categories but never make it very far out of the doldrums, while many schools with low-achieving students are never identified for intervention. In other words, there is a lot of movement back and forth but little in the way of tangible forward progress or systemic change.

This is, at best, an inefficient strategy for improving student outcomes at any level—school, district, or state. We shouldn’t give up on identifying the lowest performing schools for support and improvement, and the Education Trust offers some sound ideas to make the ESSA accountability system work better. But even if that system were working as intended, it would fall short of sparking transformative change at the state and district level. It may be necessary, but it is far from sufficient.

As other observers have pointed out, the states that demonstrated the most progress on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress did not do so by improving one school at a time. While attributing causation is somewhat tricky, it seems that those states instead mounted statewide, evidence-based reforms. As Karen Vaites concluded regarding the NAEP reading success of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee: “The memo to states is to channel dollars towards specific and proven initiatives, not just district budgets.” A similar argument could be made for Alabama’s gains in math.

This pattern suggests that a strategy that has been shown to be effective in driving improvement within individual schools, known as Response to Intervention or multi-tiered systems of support, may present a model for doing accountability better across the broader ecosystem. The approach involves three tiers of intervention. Tier 1 comprises practices to support all students, such as high-quality instructional materials. Tier 2 encompasses targeted support for students who need more help than is offered through Tier 1, such as small-group learning. Tier 3 constitutes the most intensive supports, such as high-impact tutoring, for students who are furthest behind.

How might the idea of tiers inform the design of state accountability systems? Right now, Tier 1 accountability is thought of mainly in terms of what is needed at a particular school or district. But what if, as states like Louisiana and Mississippi have effectively done, we were to extend Tier 1 to an entire state? What if we made evidence-based policies and practices such as access to high-quality instructional materials a top priority statewide instead of trying to improve, one by one, a rotating subset of the lowest achieving schools? What if we returned to a more outcomes-focused framework for education reform, with states setting clear goals and annual measurable objectives for all students, including but not limited to achievement? After all, research shows that our nation’s most marked progress, particularly in math, occurred under the No Child Left Behind Act, when accountability policies were focused on high expectations, clearer and escalating improvement strategies, and a wider swath of schools.

Extending the analogy, Tier 2 interventions would involve states playing a more active role in ensuring that districts undertake equitable and evidence-based policies and practices along the lines of what we are seeing in states that are making impressive gains in student achievement. This could include: ensuring that districts use real-time data tracking to identify schools and students at risk of falling behind and compelling them to step in early with small-group interventions; dedicated funding for reading and math coaches, especially in schools with the greatest needs; targeted training for teachers and administrators in evidence-based instructional practices; and incentives to adopt school models that provide principals and educators more autonomy and parents with more choice—such as through charter schools or innovation zones—in exchange for greater accountability.

Under this model, Tier 3 would ensure that districts and schools provide intensive services to the schools and students who are furthest behind. This could involve: training for principals and other school leaders or, in extreme cases, replacing those leaders; high-intensity tutoring; intensive intervention or retention efforts for students at key junctures such as 3rd grade when it pertains to literacy; and the basic school-improvement model laid out in ESSA of identifying schools in need of comprehensive support but with a clearer and more concerted focus on needs assessments, resource equity, and evidence-based practices.

In other words, let’s retain our focus on intervening in the lowest-performing schools but admit that doing so is essentially a Tier 3 intervention that does not offer a credible pathway to systemic change unless it is coupled with stepped-up state and district efforts. Right now, many advocates are spending an inordinate amount of time trying to prop up what is essentially a Tier 3 system under ESSA and not attending to broader policies that evidence shows would have a much broader chance of success.

President Trump and many Republicans in Congress want to give more power and authority over education to the states. But as researcher Dale Chu recently pointed out, “Simply pushing more responsibility onto [state education agencies] without redefining their role would be a mistake.” Most reformers agree that ED should continue bright-line assessment policies like statewide testing in grades 3–8 and the disaggregation of data. But when it comes to accountability, reimagining what we expect from each level of government and being strategic about which policy levers we pull could be a game-changer in dramatically improving outcomes for our nation’s students.

A decision to simply waive federal accountability requirements would not on its own ensure that all states take advantage of the opportunity to adopt a more comprehensive approach. There are provisions in the waiver authority under law, for example, that require states to show how greater flexibility “will advance student academic achievement,” but it seems doubtful this administration would leverage these provisions to ensure states do more rather than less than they are doing now. Experts and advocates would therefore do well to turn their attention to convincing state leaders that the school-by-school approach to accountability required under ESSA is inadequate.

Charles Barone is senior director of the Center for Innovation at the National Parents Union.