Eight years after the law technically expired, the controversial No Child Left Behind education reforms are about to improve.
The Senate approved the Every Student Succeeds Act Wednesday. Eighty-five senators voted in favor of the bill, with 12 opposed. All 12 of the senators in opposition are Republicans. The House of Representatives approved the bill last week. There the bill had support from every Democrat and 178 Republicans, with 64 Republicans dissenting.
Presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., voted against the bill, while Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., voted in favor. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, all were absent for the final vote. Cruz voted against cloture Tuesday, in an attempt to keep the bill from advancing.
The bill would give states more power over what to do with failing schools, although it requires the creation of some state-designed plans to identify and reform failing schools. There would be less federally-mandated testing in schools, and the remaining tests would not be tied to any federal consequences. The bill also prohibits the Department of Education from giving states special positive or negative incentives to adopt specific academic standards, as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been doing with Common Core using waivers from No Child Left Behind.
Senate approval means the bill is finally ready for President Obama’s desk. The administration signalled Monday that he will sign the legislation.
“Both parties have long agreed that No Child Left Behind is broken,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday before the cloture vote. “In short, the Every Student Succeeds Act would put education back in the hands of those who know our kids best.”
“Governors, teachers, superintendents, parents, Republicans, Democrats and students all want to see this law fixed,” Senate education committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said Tuesday. “It moves decisions about whether schools and teachers and students are succeeding or failing out of Washington, D.C., and back to states and communities and classroom teachers where those decisions belong.”
Alexander was responsible for shepherding the bill through the Senate.
“If I were to vote no, I would be voting to leave in place the federal Common Core mandate and voting to leave in place the waivers that permit the U.S. Department of Education to act as a national school board for 80,000 schools in 42 states — and voting against the largest step toward local control of schools in 25 years,” Alexander said to several conservative colleagues who oppose the bill.
Both Alexander and McConnell cited a Wall Street Journal editorial calling the bill the “the largest devolution of federal control to the states in a quarter-century.”
The legislative process has been remarkably bipartisan. A bipartisan conference committee of representatives and senators approved the bill with only one vote against, from presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. When an earlier version of the bill came up in the Senate education committee, all 22 members voted for the bill. During that process, several senators agreed to offer controversial amendments on the Senate floor. There, the amendments would face a higher threshold to be adopted, making it less likely that an amendment would kill the bill.
“We demonstrated how a functioning committee process and a functioning Senate could help break through the gridlock,” McConnell said.
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Congress has spent years debating a fix to No Child Left Behind to no avail. In the current session, hearings to replace the bill started back in January. Replacing No Child Left Behind was the topic of the first Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing under Alexander’s chairmanship.
Alexander initially wrote draft legislation to reform No Child Left Behind. Patty Murray, D-Wash., told Alexander that Democrats would oppose his draft. Rather than let efforts to reform No Child Left Behind die, Alexander worked with Murray to design bipartisan legislation with better odds of passing.
“[Alexander] had an opportunity to go down a partisan road, but instead he committed to work with me earlier this year to get this important bill done,” Murray said Tuesday. “I was very proud to work with him and many of our colleagues to break through the gridlock and keep this bill moving forward.”
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
