Trying to Leave Behind 'No Child Left Behind'
When it comes to public education in America, 2002 now seems light years in the past — a simpler time, where politicians like George W. Bush, John Boehner and Ted Kennedy could stand together on a stage and applaud the same law. President Bush declared at the time, with the naive confidence of a man who’d been in the White House only a year, “As of this hour, America’s schools will be on a new path of reform and a new path of results.”
Hardly. Instead, education has become a progressively more vicious policy battleground that cuts across partisan lines. And nothing has been the subject of more ire than No Child Left Behind, the law that the then president, future Speaker of the House and liberal Lion of the Senate all cheered. In the years since its passage, the law has prompted a right-wing revolt against federal meddling in public schools, even if that means sacrificing other school reforms Republicans hold dear. It’s also polarized the two parties to such a degree that few hold out hope a replacement currently being drafted by Congress will pass. Ironically, that will leave America with education regulations almost nobody likes.
This isn’t the first time Washington has attempted to rein in the Frankenstein it created in 2002. No Child Left Behind expired in 2007, and lawmakers proposed revisions in 2009, 2011 and 2013. Catherine Brown, vice president for education policy at the liberal Center for American Progress, says “a lot of people thought it was for real” this time, given an “increasing urgency in the country.” With veteran senators in both parties working to reform the law, backers were hopeful. But then the House of Representatives, as it is wont to do these days, threw a wrench in those plans.
Boehner and his Republican majority were all set to vote on, and pass, a new law earlier this year when GOP leaders surprised everyone by suddenly yanking it. The reason: A band of conservatives were refusing to vote for it. “It’s a tough sell with a lot of our base,” explains one conservative congressman, who declined to be identified. “In the last year and a half, education has become a huge issue.” Never mind that President Obama had threatened to veto the bill for going too far in conservatives’ direction. To those House Republicans, it didn’t roll back No Child Left Behind sufficiently. The Senate has since introduced a bipartisan consensus bill, which conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation have likewise panned. With the House revolt, the path to a new law “narrowed considerably,” concedes Brown.
“How can you find a place in the center where you can get enough votes and you can get a signature by the president?”Michael Petrilli, president of the center-right Fordham Institute
States’ rights are at the heart of conservatives’ push to gut No Child Left Behind. The law created a web of requirements for public schools, things that had never been governed by the feds before, like how frequently to conduct standardized testing and how to measure student progress. The federal government was supposed to provide new funding pots to help schools meet these new requirements. It hasn’t. And some of the bars the law set for school achievement were far too ambitious, policymakers Trying to Leave Behind 'No Child Left Behind' | Fast Forward | OZY: