By Evie Blad | Education Week
When the Trump administration urged states to use a little-known provision in federal education law to boost school choice, the congressman who helped author the language 24 years ago had an immediate reaction.
“It’s about time,” said former Congressman Bob Schaffer.
In a May 7 letter, Acting Assistant Education Secretary Hayley B. Sanon urged states to ease their criteria for labeling schools as “persistently dangerous”—a designation that legally comes with an obligation to offer families an option to transfer to another public school.
“The number of persistently dangerous schools reported nationwide appears low particularly given the number of violent offenses in schools reported” in federal data, she wrote.
It’s a message that Schaffer, a Republican from Colorado, has been trying to get across since he championed including the provision in a bill that eventually became known as No Child Left Behind 24 years ago, he told Education Week.
Congress retained the measure, formally called the “unsafe school choice option,” when it replaced NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. But the provision has rarely been used.
The issue: The law left it up to states to determine what counted as “persistently dangerous,” and the criteria states chose meant only a handful of schools ever qualifed.
That became clear shortly after No Child Left Behind first took effect. In 2003, 44 states plus the District of Columbia did not designate any schools as “persistently dangerous,” Education Week reported at the time. Among the remaining states, just 54 schools received the label.