Congress Is Finally Changing No Child Left Behind, But How?
No Child Left Behind, the federal law that created the current testing climate and accountability systems in schools, looks like it will finally get the overhaul federal lawmakers have been discussing for years.
Right now, the new version of the law, called the Every Student Succeeds Act, easily survived a conference committee this month and is expected on the House floor next week.
Education Week reports the bill is expected to do well in the Senate but will likely hit snags once House Republicans get a hold of it. Here is how reporter Alyson Klein explains some of the proposed changes:
The bipartisan agreement seeks to give states miles of new running room on accountability, school turnarounds, teacher evaluation, and more, while maintaining No Child Left Behind’s signature transparency provisions, such as annual testing in reading and math in grades 3-8 and once in high school.
And it calls for states to incorporate new measures into their accountability systems that get at students’ opportunity to learn and postsecondary readiness. States could choose to include school climate, student engagement, and teacher engagement, for example.
“This agreement, in my opinion, is the most significant step towards local control in 25 years,” Sen. Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the Senate education committee, told House and Senate conferees.
The Senate panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, said that the framework includes “strong federal guardrails … so that students don’t get left behind.”
(Check out Education Week’s extensive breakdown of the changes that affect everything from testing to school choice to funding.)
A major takeaway of the bill is that states would have control over most parts of education, including how standardized assessments fit into accountability and how to help low-performing schools.
And this flexibility for how states keep their schools accountable is what is raising concerns from Democrats in Congress, according to NPR:
Under NCLB, the federal government has had a big role in all of that, and some lawmakers and advocates worry that this overhaul could move too far in the opposite direction, dramatically weakening the law’s protection of poor and minority students. At a recent meeting with civil rights groups on Capitol Hill, Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts sounded anxious.
“The idea that we would pass a major piece of legislation about education and, in effect, shovel money into states and say, ‘Do with it what you want’, and not have some accountability for how that money is spent, I think, is appalling,” Warren said.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee and one of the architects of the law’s rewrite, has dismissed this concern. He declined to be interviewed for this story but sent NPR a statement saying he disagrees with groups “who believe that the path to higher standards, better teaching and real accountability is through Washington instead of states.”
But Daria Hall, with the advocacy group The Education Trust, says that, historically, “states have not made decisions with the best interest of vulnerable kids in mind.”
Hall says, when given the opportunity, states still find ways to camouflage the fact that most of their low-income, black and Latino students don’t get a quality education. As evidence, she points to the most recent reading and math scores from the so-called “Nation’s Report Card.”
“Those kids are losing ground,” Hall says. “And yet, we’re telling parents and the public this is an A school when the reality is it’s doing C work or maybe D work. That’s why we need a continued federal role in education.”
Lawmakers will have the final draft of the bill by Nov. 30, and the House is expected to vote that week, meaning we could see progress on this update by the new year.