WASHINGTON - House Republicans passed a bill Friday to reduce the federal role in public education and return to states decisions about how to deal with failing schools, how and whether to evaluate teachers, and how to spend much of the money sent by Washington to educate poor, disabled and non-English-speaking students.
It marks a significant departure from No Child Left Behind, the 2002 law that set federal goals for academic achievement and penalties for schools that fall short of those goals, as well as prescriptions for steps that states must take to improve failing schools.
No Democrats supported the bill, which passed 221-207, with 12 Republicans voting with the Democrats. It marked the first time in a dozen years that either chamber of Congress approved a comprehensive bill to update federal education law. The four members of Arkansas’ House delegation - all Republicans - voted for the bill.
Republicans argued that states and local school districts are in the best position to decide how to educate children and that a decade of federal control has hamstrung teachers and school leaders.
“States and school districts have been clamoring, clamoring for less federal mandates,” said Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., the lead sponsor of the bill. “We should not tie the hands of teachers and school officials.”
But without federal oversight, Democrats said, some states will return to a time when they failed to do much to educate poor, disabled and non-English speaking students.
The bill would freeze education spending at sequestration rates, instead of restoring federal dollars to pre-sequestration levels, which means public schools would receive $1 billion less next year. Sequestration was automatic federal budget cuts that took effect earlier this year.
While the bill’s passage marked a victory for Republican leaders, its future is cloudy. President Barack Obama has threatened to veto it, and Senate Democrats have crafted their own version that retains much of the federal oversight of public education for kindergarten-12th grade. Public education has largely been a bipartisan issue in Congress; Friday’s vote was the first time that major legislation was moved on a party-line vote.
Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, who led opposition to the GOP bill, argued the bill would harm the country’s most vulnerable children.
When Miller was advised “the gentleman’s time has run out,” he shouted back, “No! You know whose time is running out? Children’s time!”, which sparked a slow clap in the chamber.
The GOP bill would update the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, created by Congress in 1965 to distribute federal dollars primarily to help children who are poor, disabled or English-language learners. Those funds represent about 10 percent of funding for public schools. Local communities and states provide the rest.
The current version of the law, known as No Child Left Behind, expired in 2007, and Congress has struggled to agree on an update.
Several Republicans said they would have liked to delete the federal government’s involvement altogether. “ Many of my Republican colleagues and I feel the federal government should be out of education,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., adding that the bill was “a step in the right direction.”
No Child Left Behind sets conditions and requirements for every public school that receives federal funds to educate poor students and those with special needs. The law defines academic progress and stipulates sanctions for schools that don’t meet that progress. It also dictates specific improvement strategies that the states must adopt for their weakest schools.
Underpinning the law is a belief that states that receive billions of federal dollars each year must be made accountable to Washington.
The GOP bill takes a different tack, returning power to the states. It would retain the No Child Left Behind requirements that schools test students annually in math and reading from third eighth grades and once in high school.
But states would set their own academic standards, decide whether schools are meeting them and determine what - if anything - to do about underperforming schools. The bill would delete a provision known as “maintenance of effort,” which ensures that states use federal dollars in addition to, and not as a replacement for, state and local dollars to help low-income, minority, disabled students and English learners.
The bill eliminates the current accountability system, called adequate yearly progress, which requires all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014.
Democrats say Kline’s bill would gut education dollars for poor students at a time when a record number of U.S. children are living in poverty, weaken the accountability of schools serving low-income, minority and special-education students, and allow states to ignore their worst schools instead of improve them.
“This bill has an accountability hole so big, in most districts, an entire school bus of kids will fall through it,” said Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo.
An unusual coalition of business groups, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, have joined teachers unions, civil-rights groups and advocates for the disabled to oppose the GOP bill.
Republican lawmakers railed against waivers that the Obama administration issued to 39 states and the District of Columbia that exempts them from some of the most punitive aspects of No Child Left Behind. The administration began issuing the waivers in 2011, after mounting complaints from governors and school boards that No Child Left Behind was unrealistic and that schools would not be able to meet one requirement in particular - that all students be proficient in math and reading by 2014.
In the absence of an updated law, Education Secretary Arne Duncan began giving states waivers in exchange for their agreement to embrace certain education policy changes favored by Obama, including new academic standards known as the Common Core.
The GOP bill forbids the Education Department from using waivers or grants to influence state education policy.
“This bill makes certain the secretary of education does not have the power to force, in a dictatorial way, the Common Core,” said Rep. Aaron Schock, R- Ill.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/20/2013