Some Details on the Senate-proposed ESEA Reauthorization
On April 7, 2015, the Senate education committee announced the following as part of a press release:
WASHINGTON, D.C., April 7 – Senate education committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Ranking Member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) today announced a bipartisan agreement on fixing “No Child Left Behind.” They scheduled committee action on their agreement and any amendments to begin at 10 a.m. Tuesday, April 14.
The result of the Lamar-Murray collaboration on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization (the latest version of which is renamed No Child Left Behind) is this 600-page document entitled, The Every Child Achieves Act of 2015.
I read the first 136 pages of the act, which I refer to below as the Alexander-Murray reauthorization.
I am aware that when the document goes before the Senate education committee, it could well be amended. But for now, in this post, I offer my observations on key points in those first 136 pages as they appear in the draft version of Alexander’s and Murray’s draft as linked above.
The first construction I noticed was that the Alexander-Murray reauthorization document does not include the controversial name, No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) (pg. 4). Yes, the table of contents to be revised is the NCLB table of contents. (To view the complete NCLB document, click here.) However, the original name of the legislation, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, is the name that Alexander and Murray use.
I will still use NCLB for the sake of clarity.
Section 1001 of NCLB (“statement of purpose”) is lengthy and included details such as, “holding schools, local educational agencies, and States accountable for improving the academic achievement of all students, and identifying and turning around low-performing schools that have failed to provide a high-quality education to their students…” and “providing greater decision making authority and flexibility to schools and teachers in exchange for greater responsibility for student performance.”
The Alexander-Murray reauthorization “statement of purpose” is not nearly so detailed:
The purpose of this title is to ensure that all children have a fair, equitable, and significant opportunity to receive a high-quality education that prepares them for postsecondary education or the workforce, without the need for postsecondary remediation, and to close educational achievement gaps.
The Alexander-Murray reauthorization deletes NCLB Section 1003– the one about “school improvement” and which includes language such as, “the State educational agency shall allocate not less than 95 percent of that amount directly to local educational agencies for schools identified for school improvement, corrective action, and restructuring.”
The Alexander-Murray reauthorization also removes NCLB Sections 1111 through Some Details on the Senate-proposed ESEA Reauthorization | deutsch29:
Big Education Ape: The Every Child Achieves Act of 2015 (Summary of the Bill) Fixing “No Child Left Behind” http://bit.ly/1GlmiDp
Big Education Ape: Bipartisan Agreement on Fixing “No Child Left Behind” Sch Committee Action for 10 a.m. Tuesday, ... http://bit.ly/1Glj4jn
For more details on the bill:
Click here for the legislation.
Big Education Ape: National Day of Action April 8 Overhaul ESEA/NCLB: Less Testing More Learning FairTest http://bit.ly/1P8A9PZ
Big Education Ape: Join April 8 national call-in day to #CutFedTests | Parents Across America http://bit.ly/1GV0xtf
Big Education Ape: NEA - Educators to spring into Wave of Action on eve of 50th anniversary of ESEA http://bit.ly/1ah1ore
Big Education Ape: Get Out The Pitchforks - The Every Child Achieves Act of 2015 #ESEA http://bit.ly/1y1ZLZs