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Today, the United States Department of Education (ED) will release the long-awaited waiver guidance for the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). What are the key issues to monitor?

First, the waiver package is, as I have stated before, a regulatory approach to advance the administration’s Race to the Top priorities. Instead of offering a competitive grant to advance the four core for priorities of the Recovery Act, the waiver package offer the states relief from the pressures of NCLB’s current federal accountability system. Both actions — providing funds and providing relief — clearly benefit the states and shift the center of reform activity to the states. (The four reform priorities include common standards and assessments, State longitudinal data systems, teacher and principal evaluation systems, and aggressive intervention in persistently lowest achieving schools.)

Second, verbs are important. The administration is eager to aggressively advance its education reform priorities, but that has cost them political points with their traditional allies – the teacher unions. In particular, its focus on promoting teacher and principal evaluation systems that emphasize student academic progress is creating a divide between the administration and the unions. It will be interesting to see how they pursue this priority through the waivers. There are three conditions to receive waivers.  One of them is "evaluating and supporting teacher and principal effectiveness." These verbs – evaluating and supporting – appear to be intentionally malleable. Keep an eye on that

Third, the waivers should be interpreted along with today's proposed requirements in the Federal Register, see here and here. Department proposed additional time to spend some Recovery Act dollars and additional time to collect and publicly report on information pertaining to the administration's reform priorities. While doing so, ED stated that, for any future discretionary grant competition, it would give priority to states that had developed and implemented statewide longitudinal data systems and that ED may identify states as "high risk" and impose sanctions for failing to meet the programmatic requirements of the Recovery Act.  These are, of course, advancement of the four core reform priorities. In other words, ED is giving itself legal authority to be tough and enforce its reform priorities on the same day that it's trumpeting regulatory flexibility.  It will be interesting to see how all this plays out in the coming years.

Keep an eye on those three issues. There will be plenty to analyze in the coming months. That much is certain.