But seriously: Conservatives should oppose this bill. They should protest its bizarre, unclear federal accountability mandates. It would put them under uncertain pressure from the Department of Education, since it leaves much up to federal interpretation.
States would be stuck in a dance with whoever happens to be running the Department at any given moment. Progressives should also run from this bill as if it were a Ted Cruz creation. In fact, is there any reason to believe that states are willing to design accountability systems that actually require them to focus on schools with lots of underprivileged and underserved kids? Why are some so-called progressives ready to give states more flexibility around educational equity? And look, should Congress pass a bill based on this framework, President Obama should veto it.
Historically, this means that states ignore these kids, particularly students of color. Shoot, Obama should veto it with a neon Sharpie, rip it up, and hold a press conference where he lights the shreds on fire.
No one gets what they want! On Capitol Hill, House Republicans had calculated that with a Republican Senate they could gain back their concessions in conference, but now that chance was gone. Language providing additional targeting of compensatory education funds to poor districts was approved. Announced last, or nearly so, were the adequate yearly progress requirements.
The final language required all students, in all groups, to reach proficiency within 12 years. However, it allowed districts to average results across three years.
No punishment would be imposed on states for low test scores. These changes, though hardly satisfying all critics, made the final version more workable than either the House or Senate versions. At once numbingly detailed and comfortably vague, the conference report was adopted by the House and Senate in December, with opposition again limited to an odd amalgam of the discontented far Left and far Right.
It served as a way for Democrats to talk about reform without simply talking about increased spending; it was also a selling point for additional resources, since ordinarily skeptical Republicans could console themselves that the new funds went to a system newly worthy of investment. While accountability was unproved as a reform tool, there was also no conclusive evidence that it did not work.
The latter could be compromised or, as often happened, deferred from campaign to committee to floor to conference to implementation. But when the bill became law in , it could be deferred no longer. The compromises of No Child Left Behind avoided both extremes of the policy spectrum. Democrats, for example, resisted granting wide discretion to local districts on the one hand and to parents on the other.
The number of categorical programs did not diminish significantly. In principle, public school choice has been greatly expanded, but it is not clear how well this will serve students in far-flung rural districts or in urban systems where most or all of the public schools are identified as needing improvement.
Meanwhile, Republicans resisted efforts to require strong state accountability to the federal government. The text of the law left the states to set their definition of proficiency and to use their own assessments to measure it, leaving open the possibility that states will lower their expectations.
This limits the degree of change the federal government can leverage. Even if it were willing to use its sticks, the Department of Education has small sticks to brandish. During the next reauthorization, scheduled for , a lower figure 90 percent? Of course, the passage of legislation does not end the story. The political compromises written into No Child Left Behind make the regulatory process crucial, even determinative, and here the secretary and the department are key actors.
In a series of congressional hearings in , the department touted its progress and promised to hold firm on enforcement in the face of skeptical Democratic questioning. State flexibility has been granted in some areas.
Draft rules on testing released in March indicated that states would be allowed to use different tests in different areas, potentially undercutting their comparability.
The department also signaled a hands-off stance on judging the quality of state standards and assessments. The rules released in July allowed states to use either criterion-referenced tests linked to state standards or norm-referenced tests that measure how students perform compared with their peers, modified somewhat to reflect state standards.
In July , for example, the department listed some 8, schools that had failed to meet state standards for two consecutive years.
Under No Child Left Behind, students in those schools were to be offered the chance to attend a better-performing school in the district starting in September. The final regulations were not released until late November in advance of a January 31, , deadline for the submission of preliminary state plans to achieve adequate yearly progress toward full proficiency. While states remained worried that too many schools would be identified as failing and asked for additional leeway, the department continued to take a tough line.
The first round of state plans produced on time, though some were incomplete varied wildly. Their specifics depended in large part on how stringently states defined proficiency and how closely the new law tracked existing requirements. Some states proposed complicated statistical techniques for gauging school progress; others backloaded their predicted progress, with far greater gains toward the end of the year timeline. Most states, noted a January report by the Education Commission of the States, had a long way to go.
The early outcomes of the rulemaking process seemed to indicate the Bush administration was holding the line on its substantive priorities such as choice and assessments, giving the president a clearer legislative victory than it initially appeared.
This opening chasm means many questions remain as the story continues. How will the secretary balance state experimentation and national rigor? Budget issues are a prominent part of the equation: while Democrats were satisfied with the funding levels provided in fiscal year , this was not true for fiscal or Furthermore, as the scene shifts to the states and the bureaucracies, interest groups—surprisingly dormant in the narrative above—may reassert themselves.
One target may be the testing regime itself, if states and key suburban voters continue to gripe. Andrew Rudalevige is assistant professor of political science at Dickinson College. This essay is adapted from Paul E. Peterson and Martin R. West, eds. Sign in. Edited by Paul E. Peterson and Martin R.
Sawhill The third section explains empirical methods employed to analyze state reactions. I devised a scale to reflect the magnitude of state rebellion against the act. On one end of the scale are states that have taken legislative or legal action against NCLB. On the other end of the scale are states that have either taken no action against the act or have defeated legislative efforts to circumvent NCLB.
The fourth section describes the findings of the analysis. What obstacles must NCLB overcome to survive? Has that changed? Has opposition to NCLB undermined the view that the law represents a legitimate means of improving the education of poor and minority students? Related Books. Shep Melnick. No Child Left Behind? Related Topics Education K Education. More on Education.
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