Congress is finally moving this week on revising No Child Left Behind, former President George W. Bush's bipartisan education policy that was signed in 2002 with Sen. Edward Kennedy by Bush's side. NCLB, most observers agree, turned out to be too rigid and too demanding, and proved so unworkable that most states now operate under extralegal waivers issued by the Department of Education.
On Wednesday the House narrowly passed a revision that would roll back federal control over education, including giving states more control over how they assess schools and evaluate teachers. The bill passed with a bare majority, with no Democrats supporting and losing 27 Republicans.
But the bill still is not everything conservatives would like. "A major amendment that failed to pass," The Daily Caller notes, "was one by Republican Reps. Mark Walker and Ron DeSantis that would have allowed states to opt out of federal requirements entirely without losing federal funds. This amendment was a favorite of conservative advocacy groups such as Heritage Action, but failed when more than 40 moderate Republicans joined Democrats to kill it."
Meanwhile, the Senate has been moving on a more bipartisan bill co-authored by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee).
On Wednesday, the Senate defeated an amendment by Alexander that would have given large voucher subsidies to low-income K-12 students that would be similar to the Pell grants given to college students.
“Last year, $31 billion in federal Pell grants followed students to public and private colleges,” Alexander said, according to a Washington Post report. "Our elementary and secondary education system is not the best in the world. U.S. 15-year-olds rank 28th in science and 36th in math. I believe one reason for this is that while more than 93 percent of federal dollars spent for higher education follow students to colleges of their choice, federal dollars do not automatically follow K-12 students to schools of their choice.”
Opponents argued the move would eviscerate funding for public schools and that vouchers have not been shown to improve educational outcomes.
The White House could well refuse to sign either bill, as it might prefer to continue freelancing. When NCLB became unworkable in recent years, the Obama administration began granting waivers to states that conformed to certain administration demands, such as using standardized tests in teacher evaluations. Washington State refused, and lost its waiver.
As the Washington Post notes, the status quo has empowered the administration, which, faced with a broken statute, has freely enacted policy without statutory support.
Another waiver requirement was that the states adopt curriculum standards that lead students to college or career readiness. "Many states have satisfied this waiver requirement by adopting the Common Core State Standards, a controversial set of learning standards that formally define what students need to know in English language arts and math by the end of each academic year," Huffington Post noted last year. "Oklahoma dropped Common Core earlier this year, and lost its waiver in August as a result."
Email: eschulzke@desnews.com