Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Republicans are committed to continuing to overturn “unsustainable” regulations for students and educators that the Obama administration imposed during its last several months in office.
Congress in late 2015 passed a bill that President Obama signed into law that shifted decisions about local public education requirements from the Department of Education to the states.
Shortly afterward, Obama’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, openly derided the bill, arguing that lawyers in his department could easily work around it.
The lawyers went to work on an “accountability regulation” that would gut the law Congress passed returning the power to decide how its teachers are trained to the states.
“The Obama administration’s so-called ‘Accountability Regulation’ was written in direct contradiction to the law that passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support and is a prime example of the executive overreach we in Congress are working to overturn,” McConnell, R-Ky., said on the Senate floor.
Later Wednesday, the Senate will use the Congressional Review Act, or CRA, to overturn the Department of Education mandates, something McConnell said “would empower parents, teachers and schools at the expense of Washington bureaucrats.”
“Today … we have the opportunity to move past this overreaching regulation and empower those closest to our kids once again to ensure our schools are held to high standards,” he said.
The Senate also plans to use the CRA, which only requires a simple 51-vote majority, to overturn another Obama-era regulation imposing federal requirements on public teacher education and training.
McConnell argued that the additional federal teacher-training requirements are hurting students and those seeking to go into the teaching profession.
McConnell cited the Kentucky Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, which has argued that the state’s preparation programs have limited and shrinking resources.
“[Our] members want to spend those resources on developing exemplary teachers rather than working on compliance regulations that have not been shown to result in better prepared and higher quality teachers,” the organization wrote in a recent letter to McConnell.
