Negotiators Come to Agreement on Revising No Child Left Behind Law
Students taking part in a trial run of a new state assessment in Annapolis, Md., in February. The new test is linked to the Common Core standards, which Maryland adopted in 2010 under the federal No Child Left Behind law. Credit Patrick Semansky/Associated Press
Overcoming years of partisan bickering over the federal government’s role in public education, congressional negotiators came to an agreement on Thursday to revise the No Child Left Behind law for the first time since it was signed by President George W. Bush 14 years ago.
Although Democrats and Republicans agreed that the law — passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2001 — had become an albatross on schools that led to overly punitive stakes for standardized testing, Congress has for eight years been unable to come to an accord on replacing it.
A conference committee of members from the House and the Senate voted, 39 to 1, to approve the agreement on Thursday. The full bill will be made public within a week, and the House could consider it on the floor as early as the first week of December, with the Senate following.
As recently as last summer, the House and the Senate remained far apart, with the House passing a conservative version that President Obama promised to veto. Although the Senate brought forth a bill with bipartisan support, the White House and some Democratic senators, along with civil rights groups, opposed some of its provisions.
“This is a difficult subject,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, who worked with Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, to write the Senate’s bill. “It’s like being at a football game with 100,000 people in the stands, and every one of them knows what play to call next — and usually says so.”
The agreement on Thursday preserves the federal requirement that public schools administer annual standardized tests in reading and math from third through eighth grade and once in high school. It also requires schools to make the scores public and to break them down by students’ race, income and disability status.
But it frees states and districts from the prescriptive sanctions — ranging from mandatory tutoring up to school closings in extreme cases — that No Child Left Behind imposed on schools that persistently failed to raise test scores. The new agreement allows states and local school districts to determine how to define and respond to poor performance. And unlike the No Child law, the new bill would not require that all children reach proficiency in reading and math by a certain date.
Although the most conservative House members wanted the bill to give states and districts more freedom from federal oversight, Democratic negotiators and officials from the White House insisted that states be required to intervene in the bottom 5 percent of schools based on a range of metrics including test scores, graduation rates and other measures of performance. The agreement also requires states to develop plans for high schools that graduate fewer than two-thirds of their students and schools where certain groups of students consistently underperform academically.
But the secretary of education cannot dictate how states rate schools or what weight they give to measures like test scores in such ratings. The agreement also prohibits the education secretary from mandating academic standards such as the Common Core, guidelines that have prompted enormous political backlash. States are required only to set “challenging” academic standards that will prepare students to enter universities or career and technical colleges.
In many ways, the compromise on a replacement of the federal education law stemmed from shared discontent with some of the Obama administration’s education policies. As the No Child law gradually identified nearly every school in the country as failing, Arne Duncan, the education secretary, used financial incentives and relief from the most onerous provisions of the law to require that states develop rigorous Negotiators Come to Agreement on Revising No Child Left Behind Law - The New York Times: