WASHINGTON — For this first time in 14 years, the Senate on Thursday approved a revised version of No Child Left Behind, the signature Bush-era education law that ushered in an era of broadly reviled, high-stakes standardized testing. ADVERTISING WASHINGTON
WASHINGTON — For this first time in 14 years, the Senate on Thursday approved a revised version of No Child Left Behind, the signature Bush-era education law that ushered in an era of broadly reviled, high-stakes standardized testing.
But the passage of the bill on an 81-17 vote, coming just a week after the House narrowly passed its own version, sets up a showdown between the two chambers, and leaves the fate of a final measure in doubt.
Both bills return some key power to local governments but differ over the role of the federal government and funding allocations.
Congress has repeatedly failed in its efforts to rewrite the law over the last several years.
At the heart of the debate between Democrats and Republicans is the appropriate role for the federal government in education programs, which are largely a function of state and local governments.
Leaders from both sides insist they can come to an agreement that can make it to President Barack Obama’s desk.
“There are some important differences, and we’ll have to work this out,” Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said on the Senate floor Thursday.
But he added, “I believe the president also sees the need to fix No Child Left Behind. He knows that there is confusion and anxiety in most of our 100,000 public schools that needs to be settled.”
In the House, final passage of a bill last week came only after it was amended to include provisions that would decrease the role of the federal government in education — a central goal of many Republican lawmakers — and without the support of Democrats.
The Senate bill, a product of intense negotiations between the parties with a slew of amendment votes to please both sides, is less expansive in its scope and prescriptions.
While both bills retain the annual reading and math tests required under current law, states would be given latitude to decide how those assessment tests are used to measure school and teacher performance.
The Senate version would require states to continue to use the tests as a significant accountability factor; the House measure does not.Both versions would prohibit the federal government from requiring any specific set of academic standards, like the Common Core provisions deplored by many conservatives who see them as a powerful marker of federal intrusion.
A central point of contention, sure to stoke negotiations between the House and Senate this fall, involves a provision in the House bill that would permit low-income students to transfer federal dollars between districts.
An attempt to add that to the Senate bill failed, and the Obama administration strongly opposes such a provision for fear it might drain needed funds from districts in need.
Two other amendments — one that would let parents opt out of federal testing requirements, and another that would do the same with Common Core — were among those added at the last minute to get Republican support for the House version; the House bill passed on a 218-213 vote with almost no Democratic backing.
Republicans, increasingly angered by the creep of the Common Core state standards, want to greatly reduce the federal footprint in classrooms.
Democrats, while in accord that states need more power to decide how test results and other measures of success are used, still want schools to be accountable to some form of government, if for no other reason than to keep tabs on districts that primarily serve the poor.
The Obama administration, while largely supportive of the Senate’s efforts, does not see it as going far enough. (The White House vowed to veto the House bill.) Senate Democrats attempted to set new standards for accountability through an amendment that failed, which they hope to leverage in a conference committee with House Republicans.
“The president has made clear he can only sign a bill into law that strengthens the accountability measures” in the bill, said Sen. Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the committee, on the Senate floor. “And that addresses inequality, where some schools are unable to offer the same opportunities as other schools do. And I agree this is a must.”
Democrats and Republicans are also far apart on how the education funding is to be spent. The House version of the bill caps annual spending, while the Senate bill is silent on funding, leaving that crucial discussion — which is likely to be caught up in a broader government spending debate — for conference committee deliberations.
Unlike the Senate bill, the House version does not include provisions requiring states to match certain levels of federal funding, allowing states and localities to possibly cut education funding and supplant it with federal dollars.
Some lawmakers are hoping that a compromise can be found like the one reach in passing the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, a job training program that Obama signed into law last year.
The same committee, grappling with similar political dynamics, found bipartisan ground, albeit on a far less controversial policy issue.
“Every student in America will be better off under this legislation than the generation of students wronged by ‘No Child Left Untested,’” Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, said in a prepared statement.
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