Boehner’s Exit and the ESEA Reauthorization: What Next?
On Friday morning, September 25, 2015, Speaker of the House, John Boehner (R-OH) announced that he would be retiring at the end of October.
My first thought was about the fate of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), the latest version of which is the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB).
NCLB was supposed to be reauthorized in 2007. It never happened. The passage of NCLB required both major political parties to work together in a way that is relatively unheard of in Washington.
That should have been a clue in 2001. How would both parties manage to reauthorize the bill six years later? It wouldn’t happen, and hasn’t happened, and we are nearing the close of 2015.
But it did look like both House and Senate would manage to work together to arrive at a compromise bill based upon the House ESEA reauthorization version, Rep. John Kline’s (R-MN) Student Success Act (SSA), and the Senate ESEA reauthorization version, Sens. Lamar Alexander’s (R-TN) and Patty Murray’s (D-WA) Every Child Achieves Act of 2015 (ECAA).
Both SSA and ECAA passed their respective houses in July 2015. Then Congress took a break in August and was supposed to form a conference committee to work Boehner’s Exit and the ESEA Reauthorization: What Next? | deutsch29: