No Child Left Behind Faces Hurdles in Congress (US)
May 23, 2011
Minnesota Representative John Kline said that Congress will be unable to meet President Obama’s August deadline for the No Child Left Behind Act overhaul, the Boston Herald reports. While the U.S. House of Representatives is considering the first of a series of bills, each targeting a specific area of NCLB, the U.S. Senate favors a more comprehensive approach that will overhaul the act with one piece of legislation. Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, who leads the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, says that he hopes to have a draft ready before the July recess.
California Representative George Miller, the senior Democrat on the Education Committee, supports the piecemeal approach favored by the House, although he admits that it might create some problems down the line:
“We’re fully prepared to proceed in that fashion; it just makes it a little more difficult because you don’t have all the pieces on the table at the same time.”
Kline will soon be introducing a second bill that will allow school districts more flexibility in spending federal funds, and he hopes to introduce two more before the August break, one of which will create alternative school accountability standards. However, none of the four bills will address the issue cited by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan as the most pressing: his prediction that 82% of schools in the country could be classified as failing under NCLB next year.
Some educational experts take issue with Duncan’s numbers. A study by the Center on Education Policy found that 38% of schools didn’t make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in 2010, which means that the number of failing schools would have to more than double in 2011 in order to meet Duncan’s estimate.
The main issues, however, might arise during the reconciliation process between the two chambers. Although both parties agree that NCLB needs improvement, the two different approaches do not easily lend themselves to compromise. According to Sandy Kress, an education ad viser for President George W. Bush, the political stakes are just not high enough at the moment, so the two parties won’t be motivated to work towards an agreement.
Kress said that not passing a reauthorization isn’t as serious as the administration has suggested and that there are many policy fixes that can be done under the current law. The political consequences for not passing a reform might not be steep for either party, he said.
“I think it’s inconsequential,” Kress said. “The issues that separate them are so great. To come to an agreement on a modest bill that is restrained and modest, I don’t think anybody runs on that.”