TFA endorses Murphy’s Law
Murphy’s Law can be summarized as “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” Murphy’s Amendment was a proposed amendment to the recently reauthorized version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The last reauthorization of ESEA in 2002 was known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and is generally considered a fiasco by both Democrats and Republicans.
The Murphy Amendment is sometimes called the ‘Murphy-Booker ESEA Accountability Amendment’ after Chris Murphy and Cory Booker, two of the six Democratic co-sponsors of the amendment.
I never thought I’d say this, but thank goodness the Republicans won the majority in the Senate in the last election. The Murphy Amendment which failed by a vote of 43 to 54. And the 43 ‘yea’ votes were 41 Democrats, 1 Republican, and 1 Independent. The 54 ‘nay’ votes were 51 Republicans, 2 Democrats, and 1 Independent.
The reason I’m thankful that the Murphy Amendment did not pass is that Murphy’s Amendment was highly susceptible to Murphy’s Law. A ‘close reading’ (thank you common core standards for language arts!) of the amendment reveals that people concerned about what it could lead to were very justified in those concerns. In a reauthorization that was intended, as a starting point, to recognize why NCLB was such a disaster, the Murphy Amendment would have maintained some of the worst parts about NCLB.
I have the text from the amendment at the end of the post, but I’ll summarize what I understand of it here from reading it myself. It says that the states must identify the schools most in need of intervention, which must be at least the bottom 5%. It seems that the Democrats did not learn the lessons from NCLB about the danger of putting specific numerical targets into federal law and how those numerical targets can be abused. The fact that there is always a bottom 5% no matter how good the schools are in a state. Also, schools where the graduation rate is less than 67%, a magic number for ‘failing school’ that is not grounded in any real research (not to mention one that is easy to game with TFA endorses Murphy’s Law | Gary Rubinstein's Blog:
