Lawmakers came to a surprisingly swift agreement Thursday on a plan to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the main federal law that subsidizes school programs. A House-Senate conference left a bipartisan compromise largely untouched, providing a rare moment of harmony for Congress.
“We have shown that not only is there consensus on the need to fix the education bill, this vote showed that there is a consensus on how to fix it,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
The legislation will likely be voted on by Congress after it returns from its Thanksgiving recess.
The approval was a triumph for Alexander and the other architects of the bill, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., Rep. John Kline, R-Min., and Bobby Scott, R-Va. The bill is a highly politicized issue, with several groups, most notably teachers unions, civil rights groups and conservative activists expressing strong concerns over it.
It still faces a rocky road. The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union and a major contributor to Democratic campaigns, said the bill needs to go further in rolling back provisions that held poor-performing teachers and schools accountable.
Congress must ensure that “educators’ voices are part of the decision-making process at all levels: federal, state and local,” the union said Thursday.
Meanwhile, the Leadership Conference of Civil Rights has urged Congress not to soften the accountability provisions, saying they have benefited minority students.
Scott argued he and his co-authors found the right balance by turning over more authority to the states while still keeping broader guidelines. “The House and Senate versions did not have sufficient accountability provisions. Our version makes clear that you have to calculate and address minority student performance,” Scott told the Washington Examiner.
The last version of the bill, called the “No Child Left Behind Act,” became intensely controversial due to its emphasis on rigorous testing of students and penalizing schools that did not show improvement. The law officially lapsed eight years ago, but lawmakers have struggled to agree on a replacement.
Wildly different reauthorization bills passed in the Senate and — barely — in the House earlier this year but reaching a consensus on the two seemed elusive until a compromise was announced late last week. On Thursday, House and Senate conferees almost unanimously adopted that version.
Only a handful of amendments were offered Thursday, with even conferees such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., one of the Senate’s leading liberal voices, taking a pass on trying to alter it.
Conservative Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., led a brief effort to limit the appropriations level in the bill. Most Republicans backed it, but moderate GOP members joined with the Democrats to vote it down. After that, even the conservative conferees voted to approve the compromise.
The proposed replacement bill would loosen the prior law’s testing standards but not remove them entirely. A key provision of No Child Left Behind called “Adequate Yearly Progress” that measured school progress and publicly announced which ones didn’t match up, would be dropped. States still would have to test students in reading and math but would have leeway in determining how much the tests would count. They would also be required to take action at the schools that scored in the bottom 5 percent of schools as well as ones where a third or more of students do not graduate, although the states would have discretion in determining what action to take.
Under an amendment adopted Thursday, states also would be allowed to set a limit on the amount of testing.
