18 years ago, Mike Pence voted against No Child Left Behind. So did Bernie Sanders. Their reasons weren’t the same. - The Washington Post

18 years ago, Mike Pence voted against No Child Left Behind. So did Bernie Sanders. Their reasons weren’t the same. - The Washington Post

18 years ago, Mike Pence voted against No Child Left Behind. So did Bernie Sanders. Their reasons weren’t the same.

On Jan. 8, 2002, President George W. Bush signed into law the K-12 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. It was hailed as a civil rights law that would help historically marginalized students but is better known for ushering in the high-stakes standardized testing era.

The law — a compromise version was approved by the House and Senate in December 2001 — had bipartisan support. In fact, it was crafted with the help of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a liberal Democrat who did not often embrace Republican legislation. The votes in the House and the Senate were lopsided, with the House voting 381 to 41 and the Senate 87 to 10.

Two of the leading candidates for this year’s Democratic presidential nomination were in Congress at the time: former vice president Joe Biden, then a senator from Delaware, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I), then a member of the House from Vermont.

Vice President Pence was a Republican House member from Indiana.

How did the three vote? Biden voted in favor of the final legislation. Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, did not. Neither did the very conservative Pence, but their reasons were far from the same.

Pence viewed the measure as a federal intrusion into education policy he believed rested with the states.

Sanders has said, including in a USA Today opinion piece published Wednesday, that he opposed it because he knew then that “so-called choice and high-stakes standardized testing would not improve our schools or enhance our children’s ability to learn.” The long-term effects of NCLB, he said, “have been disastrous.”

NCLB’s chief mechanism required all public schools to give students standardized tests in most grades every year and use the results to determine how well schools were helping students achieve. Schools were supposed to review the scores of certain groups of students, aiming to show how historically CONTINUE READING: 18 years ago, Mike Pence voted against No Child Left Behind. So did Bernie Sanders. Their reasons weren’t the same. - The Washington Post