Senate ESEA Reauthorization Bill Passes: Congress Fails to Replace Test & Punish with Support & Improve
Yesterday, by a margin of 81-17, the U.S. Senate passed a bill to reauthorize the federal education law, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), whose most recent 2002 version we call No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The House of Representatives passed a highly partisan and very conservative Republican reauthorization bill last week. This means the bills will now move to a conference committee to see if the two versions can be reconciled. It is intended that the ESEA is to be reauthorized every five years, and Congress tried in 2007 and at least one other time since then but failed to agree on a new law.
Today the federal education law is especially important because No Child Left Behind inserted the federal government into the operation of all public schools across the country. NCLB is responsible for the vast wave of high stakes standardized testing; it has blamed teachers and imposed sanctions on them; it insists that schools be ranked and that the schools unable quickly to raise test scores be punished. While the original, 1965 ESEA operated on a theory of injecting extra federal funding into the schools nationwide that served a high number or high percentage of children in poverty, the 2002 NCLB version sought to punish schools that were said not to be expecting enough of the students whose scores were low. Raising test scores, not investment for equity, became its purpose.
In January of 2002, when No Child Left Behind was signed, I was staffing public education advocacy at the United Church of Christ’s Justice and Witness Ministries. To track the implementation of the new federal law, I set up a loose-leaf binder for reports and clippings that would clarify the law’s impact. I placed the binder at the end of a long counter in my office. The law was based on sanctions for school districts that could not raise scores, and I planned to look at how these punishments were going to work. I soon discovered there was also a lot of collateral damage that members of Congress seemed never to have considered as they debated the law in the months right after the airplanes struck the World Trade Center. Over the years my reports and clippings filled more and more binders. They cover topics like Adequate Yearly Progress, High Stakes Testing, Standards, NCLB: Teachers, NCLB: Legal and Legislative Challenges, NCLB: Lack of Funding and Capacity, Sanctions: Supplemental Education Services, Sanctions: Transfers Out, Sanctions: Restructure, Sanctions: Turnaround, Sanctions: Closure, Narrowing Curriculum, NCLB and English Language Learners, NCLB and Students with Special Needs, NCLB: Test Cheating, and NCLB: Waivers. When I retired, I brought my NCLB reports and clippings files home. Today they take up seven and a half feet of shelf space. I had hoped to move them to the attic if Congress succeeded with a reauthorization this year, but sadly, even if Congress reconciles House and Senate versions, the new law will not go far enough to undo the damage wrought by NCLB. It looks as though I’ll have to keep these files active by adding the new reports and clippings that will continue to show that a sanctions-based education philosophy is inadequate for serving our nation’s poorest children and their schools.
It would appear that, if a reauthorization can be agreed on in conference committee, the Republican dominated Congress will soften what has been widely perceived as intrusive federal implementation of the law. Both House and Senate versions require that states Senate ESEA Reauthorization Bill Passes: Congress Fails to Replace Test & Punish with Support & Improve | janresseger:
