Will they ever agree on a new, No Child Left Behind bill?
Anyone in education, including parents, are familiar with the law called No Child Left Behind. It’s the law that introduced teacher accountability, assessment, and school grading to the landscape. It’s important for parents to follow the possible changes in the law because it can affect your child’s school environment and how they will learn.
The original version, signed by President Bush in 2002, expired in 2007. Since then, both branches of government have floated ideas about the next version, but they never got any steam behind them because there was always another election coming down the road.
What the new law might look like
The new law might actually be coming this time, not because there isn’t another election (there’s always another election), but because the lack of a new NCLB has left the executive branch, namely the Department of Education, with new powers that Congressional Republicans don’t like.
The current proposal from House Republicans, rebranding the law as the “Student Success Act”, includes language for what is being called “Title I Portability”. This can drastically affect how your child’s school is funded. Instead of Title I money (extra money for poor and underserved schools provided by the federal government and distributed by the state) being allocated based on the proportion of kids who are on free/reduced lunch at a particular school, each poor student will have an amount that follows them to any school—including affluent schools.
This is a non-starter for Democrats. They see Title I portability as the first step toward a national voucher system that could be used to pay for private schools.
It might get done this time
On the other hand, Democrats and Republicans in the Senate are working together on a bipartisan bill that has a chance to get more traction than the House bill. Title I portability was dropped in their bill by the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee’s chairman Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-TN. That bill could reach the Senate floor later this month.
The other sticking point in a new law would be just how much assessment can our kids stand? Parents are becoming increasingly outraged at how much class time is used in testing and are voicing their opinions loudly to their elected leaders at both the state and federal levels.
The Obama administration actually likes most of what is in the current version of No Child Left Behind—including its assessment mandates—but Congress wants states to have more control over how much testing goes on during the school year. There’s room for compromise there.
It’s a good bet that something will get done this time. Republicans don’t like the power the Department of Education currently has and would rather some of that power be passed down to the states. The Obama administration wants a workable bill that continues many of the reforms that have occurred over the last decade or so. Chances are, the new law looks a lot like the old one.