With Friends Like These...redux
By Ken Derstine @ Defend Public Education!
August 4, 2015
Leaders of the U. S. Congress are beginning meetings of a Conference Committee to reconcile differences in the Senate and House versions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. They are hoping to revise the 1965 ESEA that was reauthorized as No Child Left Behind in 2001. If they can reconcile the drastically differing Senate and House versions, after a five-week summer vacation, the plan is to send it to President Obama for his signature or veto by the fall. Who sits on the committee is a controversy in itself.
On July 28, 2015, the Network for Public Education issued an analysis of the two versions being debated in the ESEA Conference: ESEA Conference: Accountabilty vs. Title I Portability. While it contains some good description of the contrasts in the two versions, it does not explain what is behind the conflicts in Congress over federal education policy. This article will go into what is behind these disagreements and what they portend for the future of education, and the struggle for an equitable education for all, in the United States.
The House vs. Senate version of the ESEA rewrite
The House version of the bill, known as the Student Success Act, mainly focuses on reducing the role of the federal government in education making education policy an issue of states rights. Being reintroduced in the Conference Committee, after being rejected in its original bill, is the allowance of the use of Title I funding to be used by parents from low-income families for vouchers to private and parochial schools.
The Senate version of the bill, known as the Every Child Achieves Act, is a bipartisan piece of legislation that focuses on accountability. Neoliberal Democrats hope to restore a form of the amendment of Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) that would require states to establish state designed goals based on standardized testing. It would require states to intervene in the lowest scoring 5 percent of schools and those that graduate less than 67 percent of their students. It was voted down in the Senate by 43-54. Only two Democrats rejected this corporate education reform measure that is being used to close public schools and reauthorized them as charters in low-income communities. It was voted down because a majority of Republicans saw it as a violation of their ultimate goal of reducing the federal role in education.
Teacher educator Deborah Duncan Owens says this of the Senate version, that besides continuing standardized testing,
“Second, nearly 10% of the bill is devoted to the expansion of charter schools. The entire bill is 601 pages. The first 11 + pages consist of a table of contents. That leaves 590 pages of text. Fifty-five of those pages — nearly 10% — outline a plan to expand charter schools. I think the record is clear that charter schools are problematic. Remember — the charter school movement emerged from the voucher and choice movement. Milton Friedman’s own Schools Matter: With Friends Like These...redux: