US President Barack Obama on Thursday signed [press release] the Every Student Succeeds Act [text, PDF] into law. The new measures hand much of the power over education success monitoring back to the states and allow them to make the decisions on how to do so. The Every Student Succeeds Act revises the controversial 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) [materials] and removes the accountability measures for standardized test scores that had been set by the federal government. The bill passed in the House [JURIST report] last week by a margin 359 to 64, with Republicans comprising all nay votes on the grounds that the legislation does not go far enough in reducing federal oversight. It was approved in the Senate Wednesday. The bill seeks [WP report] to reduce the power of the education secretary and ban the office from influencing state academic benchmarks. States must still intervene for schools with the lowest 5 percent of standardized test scores and for schools where less than two-thirds of students graduate, but states will have the authority to choose which actions to take.

In July the Senate and House of Representatives passed their own versions [JURIST report] of the Student Success Act revising NCLB, and the current measure is a combined single proposal seeking to reach the president’s approval. Education related issues have continued to generate controversy in the US in recent years. In June the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled [JURIST report] in favor of tight regulations pointed at the for-profit college industry. The court ruled that the Education Department has the right to demand that schools show that their graduates are financially dependent enough to repay their student loans. In January Arizona Governor Doug Ducey signed legislation [JURIST report] that will require all Arizona High School students to take and pass the US Citizenship test before they are able to graduate, beginning in the 2016-17 school year. In August 2014 a judge for a Travis County Civil Court in Texas ruled [JURIST report] that the Texas legislature failed to meet its constitutional duty to provide for Texas public schools because the school finance system is structured, operated, and funded so that it cannot provide a constitutionally reasonable education for all Texas schoolchildren.