Bill's passage hikes hopes for education change

The bill, the Every Student Succeeds Act, dismantles George W. Bush's signature No Child Left Behind Act and shifts authority over the nation's public schools from the federal government back to states and local school districts.

Not only does it let states to decide whether student test scores are an appropriate way to evaluate teachers or assess schools, but it also prohibits the federal government from mandating or even incentivizing states to adopt learning standards like the Common Core.

Education policy experts and lawmakers say the federal reset on education policy could pave the way for New York to abandon the controversial components of its own education policy, like Common Core and the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers.

"There's not going to be this kind of federal coercion we saw under No Child Left Behind, and that opens the doors for states to roll back teacher evaluation systems and other policies that were unpopular," said Michael Hansen, senior fellow and deputy director at the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings in Washington, D.C.

Ten months after he called for increasing the weight of student test scores in teacher evaluations from 20 percent to 50 percent, Cuomo is reportedly considering scaling back the role of test scores in evaluations down to zero.

No Child Left Behind expired in 2007, and until lawmakers could agree on a replacement, Education Secretary Arne Duncan began granting waivers that exempted states from the most onerous of its provisions, so long as they tied teacher ratings to student test scores and adopted rigorous learning standards.