Boehner's Resignation Could Upend NCLB Rewrite
The House speaker was a principal architect of the No Child Left Behind Act.
Congress is closer than it's ever been to overhauling the No Child Left Behind Act, the much-maligned and latest iteration of the federal K-12 law. But the announcement made last week by House Speaker John Boehner that he plans to resign at the end of October, could disrupt those efforts.
The Ohio Republican was a principal architect of NCLB, the 2002 law that's now widely criticized for giving the federal government too much control over education. And for that reason, he's taken a personal interest in getting a reauthorization of the law to the president's desk, even rebuffing powerful special interest groups to do so.
But now, as the House and Senate are conferencing to reconcile the NCLB reauthorization bills passed in each chamber, it's unclear whether a new speaker will continue to prioritize the legislation, especially given how difficult it was to shepherd a Republican-backed version through the House.
"I’m not saying it’s going to be impossible, but I do think it makes getting a conference report that [President] Obama could sign a lot less likely," said Charles Barone, director of policy at Democrats for Education Reform and formerly an aide to former Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., during NCLB negotiations.
Boehner's announcement put the education community on high alert Friday, prompting responses from some of the most powerful education groups about the need to broker a final version of the rewrite, especially since so many states are currently operating under NCLB waivers from the Department of Education.
"We need to reauthorize the law because students and educators across the country need a stable long-term federal policy," says Chris Minnich, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers. "Living waiver to waiver each year is not the way to run the country's education system."
In particular, Boehner has supported the House version of the NCLB rewrite, the Student Success Act, authored by Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., the chairman of the House education committee who had a difficult time pushing the proposal through the House. NCLB is the latest iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
Amid waning support for the bill from Republicans who didn't think it went far enough in limiting the role of the federal government, leadership yanked it off the floor after two days of debate. What followed was months of aggressive whipping to educate Republicans about what the bill would do and how it would be better than current law.
The bill would, for example, prevent the Secretary of Education from coercing or in any way incentivizing states to adopt certain academic standards, including the Common Core State Standards – a major Republican priority.
Still, there were a lot of folks who didn't want the measure back on the floor, including Heritage Action, the policy arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, and the right-wing Club for Growth. But with Boehner's nudging, they brought it up again. As the clock ran out on final passage, Republicans still didn't have enough support, but scrambled to garner the additional votes needed.
The measure ended up passing, 218-213.
The Senate, on the other hand, passed a bipartisan rewrite with broad support from both parties. The two bills are now being conferenced, but the expectation is that the final version will look much more like the Senate bill than the House's. And it's unclear if a new speaker would prioritize a conferenced ESEA bill the way Boehner would.
"I think it cannot go unnoticed that speaker Boehner is the last of the big four, as they were called back then, who negotiated NCLB in Congress," says Mary Kusler, director of government relations for the 3 million-member National Education Association. "Now we're closer than we've ever been in a rewrite of this law while Boehner is speaker of the House, and he has been very close and supportive of the efforts that Chairman Kline has been going through in this process."
But instead of derailing the effort, Kusler sees Boehner's resignation as a "shot in the arm" for beginning the conference process in earnest and having the tough conversations about the major policy gaps that exist between the House and Senate bills. Chief among those differences is how to hold states accountable for disadvantaged students while also limiting the role of the federal government.
"Certainly the outcome of the leadership race will impact the ability of the caucus to operate and how the floor will run," Kusler says. "But we knew going into conference, especially given the House vote this summer, that we would need a combination of Republicans and Democrats to pass [a final bill].
Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think-tank, says Boehner's forthcoming resignation won't impact the reauthorization process, which he predicts is unlikely to happen at all.
"It's not like he was going to woo any votes," Hess says of Boehner's relationship with those on the far-right of his caucus. "Some of them were so frustrated with him they were just going to cross their arms at anything he brought to the floor."
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who is the front-runner to be the next speaker, has a What Boehner's Resignation Means for NCLB Rewrite - US News:
