ENID — Janet Barresi, state superintendent of public instruction, is hoping the federal government will allow Oklahoma to opt out of some of the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, and give the state more flexibility in how it measures students’ growth and success.

Barresi held her first quarterly media conference call Friday to discuss a “flexibility request” she has filed with the U.S. Department of Education that would allow the state to enact a long list of education reforms in place of federal mandates.

Oklahoma joined 10 other states last month in filing the waiver requests, which currently are under review by the U. S. Department of Education.

Barresi said the waiver, if approved, will allow the state to move forward with “Focus for the Future” education reforms approved by the Oklahoma Legislature in the 2011 session.

Those reforms, known collectively as C3 2020, promise to make the state’s high school graduates “college, career and citizenship ready by the year 2020.”

The more than 300-page waiver request includes a long list of reforms to be enacted over the next two years, including assigning A through F letter grades to schools, a third-grade reading level graduation requirement, common core curricula standards, Achieving Classroom Excellence (ACE) graduation criteria and new standards for measuring the effectiveness of teachers and administrators.

Barresi said the reforms will move the state toward a “growth model” of measuring students’ success, relying more on year-to-year improvement than on isolated test scores.

“One of the keys we need is to focus on the individual student and their growth as an individual student and their potential for the future,” Barresi said.

She said she has been on a statewide “listening tour” and has heard repeated complaints from teachers and administrators concerning No Child Left Behind testing requirements, and the time testing takes away from individual instruction.

“A consistent theme of comments I hear is their concern over No Child Left Behind,” Barresi said. “They feel they’re doing a lot of drill work before state tests, and that causes a lot of stress ... and that really this is no measure of how students learn and their opportunities.”

She wants schools to focus more on “how much each child has improved through the year,” and each school’s aggregate student performance will be “compiled to show overall performance of that school.”

Barresi said the waiver does not represent “backsliding or an easing of our education requirements,” and in fact would require more of both students and teachers.

“We are really going to be challenging students to achieve higher levels, and to be college- and citizen-ready when they graduate,” Barresi said.

Rules for the third-grade graduation requirements and the school grading system currently are being developed. The State Department of Education plans to post those programs on its website at www.sde.state.ok.us on Dec. 19, and to make them available for public comment for 60 days.

The state also will be challenging its teachers and administrators under the proposed reforms with the Teacher and Leader Effectiveness Evaluation (TLE), currently being developed by an OSDE commission. The TLE program aims to develop measurable benchmarks with which to evaluate teachers’ and administrators’ effectiveness.

“Our goal is to have an effective teacher in every classroom and an effective leader in each school,” Barresi said. “All of the research is pointing to the fact that having an effective teacher in each classroom is the most important thing you can do to ensure student success.”

The TLE program is slated for pilot implementation during the 2012-13 school year, and full implementation in 2013-14.

Barresi expects the reform package to place more emphasis on critical thinking skills in public education, and make Oklahoma’s graduates more competitive in the world market.

“The currency of the 21st century is the ability to develop students’ ability to think critically and analytically,” Barresi said. “It’s not just ideas and theories, it’s also application of that knowledge to develop career skills ... we’re developing children to be not only competitive against other children in Oklahoma, but also to be competitive against the rest of the nation as well as the world.”

If approved, the No Child Left Behind waiver would take effect immediately. Barresi said she expects to receive an answer from the federal government on the request by the end of this month or next.

It is not clear what fate the waiver request will face at the federal level, but Barresi is confident about support for the reform measures among the state’s teachers and administrators.

“I have yet to meet an educator who is the least bit opposed to this plan,” Barresi said. “I think educators across the state are looking forward to implementation of this waiver.”

Local school administrators still have questions about how the reforms will be implemented, but are looking forward to more flexibility in evaluating individual students’ progress.

“We are spending an enormous amount of school resources and instruction time on testing,” said Chisholm Public Schools Superintendent Roydon Tilley. “I think this will give us more flexibility on meeting the testing requirements associated with No Child Left Behind and how we measure each individual student’s progress.”

“The big picture is we’re all excited about making our evaluations measure more of a student’s growth from year to year,” said Shawn Hime, superintendent of Enid Public Schools. “The ultimate measure is when our students graduate they are ready to be successful in college or a career.

“There’s still some work to be done on ironing out the details of how these plans will be implemented,” Hime said, “and we look forward to being at the table and collaborating in that process.”

If approved, the state’s No Child Left Behind flexibility waiver would remain in place for three years.