Before George W. Bush became the war president, he was the education president. His crowning achievement was the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, which set minimum standards for all public school students to reach, required widespread testing, and imposed penalties for schools where children failed to meet benchmarks.
It was a noble purpose. In action, there were many problems, including overemphasis on high-stakes testing, loss of local control, and mounds of paperwork. Soon it became painfully evident that only in fictional Lake Wobegon are all of the children strictly above average. This hard fact eventually triggered declarations that individual schools, including many in Clark County, are failing. Yet a look inside the buildings suggests that while some students are in trouble, in most failing schools failure is far from epidemic.
Now comes a chance for Congress to improve No Child Left Behind in the form of a new bill called Every Child Achieves. The bipartisan(!) bill is the handiwork of our own Democratic Sen. Patty Murray and GOP Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. It recently passed the Senate 81-17, and will now have to be reconciled with a House bill that contains several major differences.
We hope a finished product emerges that is close to the Senate’s bipartisan proposal. It continues to set a high standard and requires annual testing in third through eighth grades and once in high school, plus science tests three times in a student’s public school career. At the same time, it dials back on federal control, which under the current law too often seems unrealistic and punitive.
Instead it would be up to the states to interpret the test results, identify struggling schools and come up with plans to improve them. States would be able to take federal education dollars and spend them where they could best benefit students, and not have to follow some national school improvement formula.
There are concerns, of course. Civil rights groups say Every Child Achieves lacks safeguards for disadvantaged students, a view echoed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Some advocates still chiefly lobby for just throwing money at the problem, with very little accountability. And still unsettled is the question of what happens when a child moves from a disadvantaged school to a better one. Should his special education dollars follow him?
Last week, 10 national education groups endorsed Every Child Achieves, urging Congress to move quickly. Sen. Alexander says he will work with House Education Chairman John Kline, R-Minn., to hammer out a final version of the bill that can win enough support to be enacted. But an aide told The Washington Post that it won’t be easy and it won’t be quick. The optimistic scenario is for a bill to emerge by the end of the year.
“It’s certainly not the bill that (President Obama) would write if he were writing it,” Alexander said, according to The Washington Post. “It’s certainly not the bill that Sen. Murray would write if she were writing it, and it certainly would not be the bill I would write if I were writing it. But we have a consensus that we need to come to. And why do you need a consensus? Because that’s how you govern a complex country.”
That sounds like the kind of lesson that could lead to greater achievement, for Congress and schoolchildren alike.
