On November 19, 2015, the bipartisan conference committee approved a compromise bill to overhaul the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, also referred to as No Child Left Behind. New media sources reported the following:
The New York Times (11/20, Rich, Subscription Publication) reported that after “years of partisan bickering over the federal government’s role in public education…A conference committee of members from the House and the Senate voted, 39 to 1, to approve the agreement on Thursday. The full bill will be made public within a week, and the House could consider it on the floor as early as the first week of December, with the Senate following.” The conference committee bill approved “…on Thursday preserves the federal requirement that public schools administer annual standardized tests in reading and math from third through eighth grade and once in high school... But it frees states and districts from the prescriptive sanctions....”
The Washington Post (11/19, Lyndsey Layton) reported that “A conference committee of Democratic and Republican lawmakers from the House and Senate worked out their differences Thursday and overwhelmingly endorsed legislation to replace No Child Behind, the main federal education law.” The Post also reported the bill allows States to “…design their own accountability systems, deciding for themselves how to evaluate school progress, how much weight to devote to standardized test scores, and whether or how to evaluate teachers.” In distributing federal funds the bill “leaves in place the complicated funding formulas” but the conference committee agreement removed provisions that would have allowed “Title 1 funds to ‘follow the student’ when a low-income student transfers to a different school. The deal also does not allow federal dollars to be used as vouchers for private school tuition.”
The AP (11/20, Jennifer C. Kerr) reported that the bill allows states to “decide whether or how to use student test performance to assess teachers and students, ending federal efforts to tie the scores to teacher evaluations, something teachers’ unions have railed against.” Also, the bipartisan agreement prohibits the U.S. Department of Education from “mandating or giving states incentives to adopt or maintain any particular set of standards” including the Common Core Standards. It was also reported that the bill retains “accountability measures that would require states to intervene in the nation’s lowest-performing 5 percent of schools, high school dropout factories and schools with persistent achievement gaps.”
USA Today (11/19, Mary Troyan) reported that the White House has yet to comment on the compromise. According to USA, committee members stated they hope “state and local school officials…” will be encouraged “…to abandon the extra tests they say were added during a federal overemphasis on test scores.” Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate education committee and a former U.S. Education secretary, stated “The real winners are the 100,000 public schools, 50 million schoolchildren, and 3.5 million teachers who are eager to bring some sort of certainty to federal education policy.”
Education Week (11/19, Alyson Klein) in the “Politics K-12” blog reported that the compromise bill would “scale back the federal role in education in the underlying Elementary and Secondary Education Act for the first time since the early 1980s.” Ms. Klein summarized States’ flexibility under the bill as providing “acres of new running room on accountability, while holding firm on the NCLB law’s requirement for annual testing and data that shows