Congress set to dump No Child Left Behind

By MAGGIE SEVERNS

 

The House is expected to pass a bill that would dismantle key elements of the Bush-era law.

 

Thirteen years after President George W. Bush and Congress embarked on the country's biggest-ever education experiment to help the poorest and most vulnerable students — casting the federal government as enforcer — lawmakers are poised to step it back.

 

The House is expected to pass a bipartisan bill later this week that would dismantle key elements of No Child Left Behind, the sweeping law that became synonymous with one-size-fits-all testing and a punitive approach to failing schools — and which is reviled almost equally on the left and right.

 

NCLB's replacement, which the Senate is expected to vote on next week, returns significant power over public education to the states and in some respects, repudiates both the Bush and Obama administrations, which gave huge power to Education secretaries.

 

The Every Student Succeeds Act, as the bill is called, would get rid of the unpopular requirement that schools must get all children reading at their grade level or face consequences, significantly diminish the power of the Education secretary and prevent the federal government from using its money and influence to promote national standards like the Common Core.

 

The agreement to toss whole chunks of the landmark law reflects a rare political convergence, uniting liberals who decried rote testing regimes, conservatives who wanted the federal government out of education, state officials angry about unfunded mandates and powerful teachers unions who said NCLB punished them, rather than giving them needed assistance.

 

"This will be a really good step forward for all of our parents and our teachers and our students across the country, because it will provide certainty that has been missing for a long time now," said Sen. Patty Murray, a chief Democratic negotiator on the bill.

 

The Obama administration's waiver system, put in place after NCLB's escalating sanctions became increasingly common, has led to uncertainty in many states, including Murray's home state of Washington, she said.

 

"Today, we have a system ... where the secretary of Education gives waivers to schools that are not meeting the requirements, or tells them they are not getting a waiver and they lose federal money. That's not getting a good education for anyone," Murray said.

 

The White House is expected to sign the measure, potentially teeing up a new law by the end of the year.

 

While almost everyone agrees NCLB was a deeply flawed law, some critics fear the new approach will leave poor and minority students with fewer protections.

 

No Child Left Behind was "very assertive and interventionist," said Gary Orfield, education and law professor at the University of California-Los Angeles. He added that the Obama administration "doubled down the bets" by aggressively using its influence to get states to adopt favored policies, even after No Child Left Behind expired in 2007.

 

"Now we're going to get something that's much worse — a lot of federal money going out for almost no leverage for any national purpose," Orfield said.

 

Proponents of the new bill, however, say it would keep enough federal safeguards in place by having the education department act as an "umpire." Students would continue to take standardized tests annually in grades three through eight, and then, once in high school. The federal government would have to sign off on states' plans for closing achievement gaps.

 

States and localities would be responsible for improving schools with low test scores, and they would still have to break out testing data to show how poor, minority and disabled students are performing — a provision in NCLB that the majority of lawmakers still believes is necessary.

 

Because of these safeguards, the bill has the backing of many Democrats, including the three members of the Congressional Black Caucus who served on the conference committee. Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), ranking member of the House education committee and one of the bill's chief negotiators, said he fully supports the compromise. So did every other Democrat on the conference committee when they voted on the bill in November.

 

But there has been hesitation among some in the civil rights community, and there were several minor, last-minute changes to beef up some provisions.

 

"I heard loud and clear from teachers and parents and kids in Connecticut that they wanted the federal government to take a big step back in terms of the role it has played over the last 10 years in the details of local education policy," said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who voted against an earlier Senate bill because he thought it reduced the federal role too much.

 

But Murphy said he supports the final bill, which includes accountability provisions not in the Senate bill that are designed to help poor and minority kids.

 

"I was not willing to support a federal education law that didn't continue to monitor and oversee the progress that minority kids and disabled kids and poor kids are making," he said.

 

One reason Democrats and civil rights groups say they came to the table to hash out a deal in a Republican-controlled Congress was the fear of what might lie ahead. Some 2016 presidential candidates — for instance, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who voted against the earlier Senate bill in July — have called for getting rid of the federal Department of Education altogether. Even Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee and an ally of teachers unions, is not expected to be as strong a proponent of accountability as President Barack Obama, putting those who support such provisions in a weaker position.

 

Many Republicans clamoring for less federal involvement in education support the replacement bill for their own reasons. The compromise would restore more local control, albeit not enough for some House conservatives who have vehemently opposed it on those grounds. Nonetheless, House Republicans supporting the bill have said they think they will have sufficient votes to pass it.

 

Marty West, an education professor at Harvard who previously worked for Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), one of the bill's Republican architects, called it "an incredibly significant development."

 

"This is the first reauthorization since at least the 1980s — but arguably dating all the way back to its inception — where you see a rollback of federal involvement, as opposed to further extension," West said.

 

Back in 2000, a newly elected Bush sought greater federal involvement.

 

As the domestic centerpiece of his presidency, he proposed greater accountability from schools in exchange for federal dollars. Helped in part by a wave of bipartisanship that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the White House worked with Congress to pass a bill that laid out a much more muscular role for the federal government in education.

 

Within a year, though, it was drawing complaints that it was underfunded and overly prescriptive.

 

"A lot of people were upset with the idea that the federal government was going to tell you how you were going to cure your problems," said former Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), one of the original "big four" negotiators, along with retired Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), retired Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). "They said, ‘Wait, that's our job — that's the state's job, the district's job.'"

 

Miller said he is hopeful the new bill can be "the best of both worlds," giving states more power, but still protecting the civil rights of poor, mostly minority children.

 

Despite the bitter feuding over NCLB, many experts and some lawmakers say it had successes — for instance, spotlighting previously hidden racial achievement gaps by requiring schools to break out student data by race and other categories.

 

"There's much more awareness now in poor and minority communities that they don't want their children hidden from performance standards and accountability," Miller said.

 

The Obama administration allowed some states to combine those categories when reporting data, a practice criticized by Miller and some civil rights advocates. The new bill would eliminate use of that loophole.

 

A number of studies have credited No Child Left Behind with improving some test scores, especially for poor and minority students, in its early years. One influential 2009 paper found improvements in fourth- and eighth-grade math scores, but no evidence of a boost in reading achievement.

 

Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, tied those test scores to improved graduation rates, saying the law helped "millions of kids who would have been on a trajectory to drop out of high school, and instead, they made it."

 

Still, Petrilli, who thinks the Obama administration made a power grab with its education policies, called the new law "much, much better" than No Child Left Behind, since it returns more responsibility to the states.

 

"We need to be humble about how much we know about what works," he said. "Allowing another era for state experimentation makes a lot of sense."

 

Since NCLB expired in 2007, multiple attempts to rewrite the highly politicized law have failed even as frustrations among educators and parents escalated.

 

States were required to test students annually in math and reading, and occasionally in science. But in some cases, that federal requirement piled onto state and local testing rules, resulting in many more hours of preparation and test taking than No Child Left Behind mandated. The result: Students in urban districts typically take 112 standardized tests by the time they graduate from high school, a study by the Council of the Great City Schools found.

 

The Obama administration's waiver system further diminished the federal education brand, critics argue. Waivers were designed to give states a reprieve from the sanctions associated with No Child Left Behind, but they also pushed Obama education priorities that are unpopular with Republicans.

 

Most notoriously, the waivers pushed states to adopt rigorous standards for students — catalyzing the spread of Common Core math and English standards designed to promote critical thinking, which were adopted by more than 40 states.

 

Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), one of the few NCLB co-authors still on Capitol Hill, said he remembers celebrating with the Kennedy and Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) the night the final conference report was filed. But even then, they discussed how the law "was going to go from a positive to a negative" as sanctions for states ramped up, and how it would need to be rewritten.

 

Thirteen years later, that rewrite might finally get done. "We waited too long," Isakson said.

 

Marcella Bombardieri contributed to this report.