President Obama would veto the House Republican plan to overhaul the controversial No Child Left Behind law, his administration said Wednesday.
The GOP plan, known as the Student Success Act, “represents a significant step backwards in the efforts to help all of the nation’s children and their families prepare for their futures,” said the Office of Management and Budget in a statement of administration policy.
The bill “abdicates the historic federal role in elementary and secondary education of ensuring the educational progress of all of America’s students, including students from low-income families, students with disabilities, English learners and students of color,” the administration added.
House Republicans would like more flexibility for federal dollars allocated for poor students, arguing that the students who live in poverty but attend schools in more affluent districts are often neglected. Democrats say the GOP plan would take money away from the neediest school districts.
Both Republicans and Democrats would like to replace George W. Bush’s signature education law — they just vastly disagree over how to do it.
Conservatives say the Obama White House has wielded too much control over education policy, while the president wants to maintain a vast federal footprint in the nation’s classrooms.
Throughout his tenure, Obama has failed to replace No Child Left Behind, which greatly expanded the reliance on federal benchmarks to identify underperforming schools. The president has instead granted waivers to dozens of states in an attempt to water down the law.
The Student Success Act has already passed out of committee and is expected to clear the lower chamber on Friday.
But the Obama veto threat basically means both camps will have to return to the negotiating table.
“Rather than investing more in schools, [the Republican bill] would allow states to divert education funding away from the schools and students who need it the most through the so-called ‘portability’ provision,” said the OMB statement. “The bill’s caps on federal education spending would lock in recent federal budget cuts for the rest of the decade, and the bill would allow funds currently required to be used for education to be used for other purposes, such as spending on sports stadiums or tax cuts for the wealthy.”
The veto threat comes a day after Obama formally blocked the authorization of the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. That was just Obama’s third veto since entering office, but he is expected to use the power to resist a slate of GOP prescriptions in coming months.
