What the New Senate Education Chair Thinks About No Child Left Behind
Sen. Lamar Alexander, the new chairman of the Senate committee on education, walked into Congress this month with guns a-blazin’.
What exactly that makeover will look like is now the subject of hot debate on Capitol Hill.
The primary issue at stake is testing. Under No Child Left Behind, students are required to take a raft of standardized exams, each of which are used to assess whether schools are succeeding or failing, and, increasingly, to hold individual teachers accountable for their performance in the classroom.
Critics of No Child Left Behind—and there are lots and lots of them—generally hate the testing mandate. Conservatives and Tea Party activists decry it as “government overreach,” while liberals, local teachers unions and parents lament the reliance on “high-stakes testing.” Even Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that too much testing can “rob school buildings of joy.”
So far, Alexander says that while he sees the benefits of aggregating and breaking down federal testing results, “the jury is still out” on whether an updated No Child Left Behind should require federal standardized tests at all, and if they do, whether the government should be barred from imposing consequences on schools with bad test scores.
How Alexander and the Senate education committee ultimately come down on this issue could fundamentally alter the way that public education works in this country.
In a conversation with TIME last week, Alexander offered a peek into what he thinks might come next.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve said you’re not sure how you stand on the testing issue, but what is your thinking at the moment?
The thing that worked with No Child Left Behind is to take tests results, break them down and aggregate them so that we know that children really aren’t being left behind—so you can’t have an overall average for a school that’s pretty good, but still leave all the Latino kids in a ditch somewhere. But what’s increasingly obvious to me is that the biggest failure of No Child Left Behind has been the federal accountability system—the effort to decide in Washington whether What the New Senate Education Chair Thinks About No Child Left Behind | TIME: