From No Child Left behind to the Every Student Succeeds Act: Federalism and the Education Legacy of the Obama Administration Patrick McGuinn * *Drew University; pmcguinn@drew.edu This article offers an analysis of the legacy of the Obama Administration’s education agenda, focusing on implications for American federalism. Faced with partisan gridlock in Congressç which was not able to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) until the last year in officeçthe Obama Administration opted to make education policy through creative, expansive, and controversial uses of executive power that changed the national political discourse around education and pushed states to enact important policy changes regarding charter schools, common core standards and assessments, and teacher evaluation.The administration’s aggressive efforts on school reform, however, eventually led to a political backlash against those same reforms and federal involvement in education more generally and resulted in an ESEA reauthoriza- tion (the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act) that rolls back the federal role in K-12 schooling in important ways. One of the enduring legacies of the Obama presidency may well be the invigo- ration and expansion of the state role in education. This article offers an analysis of the legacy of the Obama Administration’s education agenda, with a particular focus on its implications for American federalism. The election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 gave the Democratic Party an opportunity to assert a new vision of education reform. His Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, had built a K-12 schooling agenda around the passage and rigorous implementation of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001. NCLB, which was a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), required states to create academic standards, annually test children in reading and math in grades three through eight (and once in high school) and hold districts and schools accountable for the results. States had to determine which students were proficient, identify schools where an insufficient number of students were proficient, ensure that specified measures were taken with regards to schools that failed to make ‘‘adequate yearly progress,’’ and set targets Publius:TheJournal of Federalism, pp.1^24 doi:10.1093/publius/pjw014 ß The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of CSF Associates: Publius, Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Publius: The Journal of Federalism Advance Access published June 5, 2016 at Drew University Library on June 6, 2016 http://publius.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from