How Congress finally killed No Child Left Behind
‘I said, “We’ve got a bill for you,” ’ Sen. Lamar Alexander told Speaker Paul Ryan.
House Speaker Paul Ryan holds a bipartisan, bicameral enrollment ceremony for the Every Student Succeeds Act on Thursday at the U.S. Capitol. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO
Speaker John Boehner's September announcement about leaving Congress was a shock to lawmakers who had been deep in painstaking negotiations for months on a bill to replace No Child Left Behind, which President Barack Obama signed into law this week. Getting a new federal education law was hard enough, given the many warring constituencies involved. With the exit of the speaker — a key supporter — lawmakers' plans were again jeopardized.
But then came Paul Ryan.
The new speaker wanted to bring more old-fashioned legislating to the House. So Sen. Lamar Alexander, an old-fashioned lawmaker, sat next to Ryan during a visit to the senators' weekly Tuesday lunch, just days after Ryan was sworn in. He pitched him on the bill, which would replace the central federal law governing public schools.
“I said, ‘We’ve got a bill for you,’” said Alexander, chairman of the Senate education committee. “Here’s an opportunity for you to do something big and bipartisan and successful — and do it in regular order.”
Rep. John Kline, education chairman in the House, also spoke with Ryan about the merits of the bill — which had drawn major opposition from the same conservatives who had pushed Boehner to resign. Weeks earlier, friends Ryan and Kline had each been trying to edge the other toward taking the speaker’s gavel. Now, Ryan agreed to support Kline’s bill. They’d bring it to the House floor for a vote soon, when Ryan was still new to the speakership and the bill could arguably pass off as part of Boehner’s legacy, according to Alexander.
The No Child Left Behind bill, momentarily lost in the scramble, was charging forward again.
The uncertainty in Alexander’s parlance had looked like yet another alligator that was “lurking at every corner” for the education bill over the course of 2015. There were many: opposition from House conservatives that led leadership to pull an earlier version of the bill from the House floor; union-backed calls for less testing that could have killed support from the Obama administration; a three-hour break from Senate debate to settle a dispute between Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) over school funding that could have sunk a Senate vote on the bill. At the same time, constituents and teachers unions were increasingly frustrated with the state of federal education policy, as evidenced by massive protests against testing and the Common Core across the country.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/paul-ryan-congress-no-child-left-behind-216696#ixzz3u7eyyj5Z
