After months of work, lawmakers began the final preparations this week to reauthorize the long-expired Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the main federal education funding bill.
The House-Senate conference to create a merged bill began Wednesday and is expected to be completed by Friday. Congress is expected to vote on the results when it returns from its Thanksgiving Day recess.
The frantic pace is to prevent a fragile bipartisan compromise from disintegrating by giving critics and stakeholders little time to pick it apart. Conservative activists, civil rights groups and teachers unions would like to see the legislation tilt more in their direction, but none has annnounced full opposition, hoping they can still sway the conference process.
The architects of the deal, Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Reps. John Kline, R-Minn., and Bobby Scott, D-Va., are hoping that nobody wants to be the one that torpedoes it so close to the finish line. Alexander stressed during a House-Senate conference meeting Wednesday that the compromise was the best deal that could actually get signed into law.
“I have decided like a president named Reagan once advised, that I will take 80 percent of what I want and fight for the other 20 percent on another day,” he said. “Besides, if I were to vote no, I would be voting to leave in place the federal Common Core mandate, the national school board and the waivers in 42 states.”
Alexander was referring to widely disliked parts of the previous bill, better known as the “No Child Left Behind Act,” which was widely panned by the Republican and Democratic conferees.
A major criticism of that bill was that it set strict federal testing and accountability standards and punished states for not meeting them. Conservatives dislike that the federal government set the standards over local school boards. Teachers unions disliked the bill for labeling so many schools as failing, making it easier for administrators to fire poorly rated teachers.
However, the act has fans among civil rights groups. Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, has argued the tougher accountability standards have made measurable improvements for minority students and urged Congress not to gut them.
The proposed replacement bill would loosen the 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 leeway in determining what action to take.
The compromise would allow some states to receive federal waivers. It also would consolidate several education funding programs into state block grants and would include a new childhood education program President Obama has requested.
The conservative activist group Heritage Action has complained that the legislation doesn’t reduce spending and roll back mandates enough and has called for states to be allowed to completely opt out of testing. The latter demand has ironically put the group on the same page with teachers unions, who have decried the testing and accountability provisions for their own reasons. The unions have sounded more open to the compromise, though, issuing cautiously optimistic statements regarding it.
The Leadership Conference, on the other hand, has called for tougher accountability and stricter federal oversight, with its members lobbying lawmakers Wednesday.
The underlying tension was evident at the House-Senate conference. Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, stressed that the education bill dated to the civil rights era of the 1960s. “Our goal in this conference should be to reinforce ESEA’s original intent” as civil rights legistion, she said.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., echoed her point. “We have to get this right because the accountability framework will serve as a fail-safe for how millions of historically marginalized children are treated.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a labor ally, countered Murphy’s remarks, praising that the bill “relieves some of the pressure caused by standardized tests and respects the vital work that teachers do every day” but making clear that fewer strings should be attached to federal dollars.
Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., on the other hand, bristled at claims that parents are counting on Congress to fix public education. “The only parents back home counting on us to improve schools are the ones that flunked civics. It is up to the state legislatures and school boards to improve schools, not us.”
