WASHINGTON — The Republican chairman of the House education
committee said Wednesday he was blindsided by conservative opposition to his
rewrite of the No Child Left Behind education law and will take the next week
to try to clear up misconceptions.
GOP House leaders late last week abruptly canceled a
scheduled vote on the bill when it became uncertain whether it would pass given
conservative concern about the federal role in education. House Democrats
widely opposed the bill, but a similar one had passed in 2013 with much less
consternation by rank and file Republicans.
The bill by Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., chairman of the House
Committee on Education and the Workforce, would keep annual testing
requirements in schools, but it gives states and districts more freedom in the
way they spend federal money and set rules to identify and fix failing schools.
It prohibits the federal education secretary from demanding changes to state
standards or imposing conditions on states in exchange for a waiver around
federal law — a provision that shows opposition to the Obama administration’s
encouragement of the Common Core education standards that spell out what
reading and math skills students should master at each grade.
It also eliminates many federal programs, creates a single
local grant program and allows public money to follow low-income children to
different public schools.
Kline said he was taken by surprise by the opposition he
says appears to have been fueled largely by a blog that said the bill would
solidify the use of the standards and insert government control into private
schools. Kline said the bill would do neither. He said opposition from the
Heritage Action for America and Club for Growth also contributed to members’
concerns.
In the chaos last week surrounding funding the Department of
Homeland Security, Kline said the priority was rightly placed on getting the
department funded over the education bill.
Kline said he’s hopeful the bill will come up for a House
vote the week of March 16 after a House recess, and he still hopes Congress
will be able to send a bill to President Barack Obama this year.
“I think that we’ve come a long way,” Kline said. “I’ve
talked to a number of our members who didn’t understand what the bill did and
were responding to some really bad misinformation that had been coming out.”
In the Senate, Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the chairman
of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and Patty
Murray, D-Wash., the committee’s senior Democrat, have been working to carve
out a bipartisan proposal to update the law.
The bipartisan, President George W. Bush-era law signed in
2002 sought to close significant gaps in the performance of poor and minority
students and their more affluent peers. It mandated annual testing in reading
and math for students in grades three to eight and again in high school.
Schools that didn’t show growth faced consequences.
Under it, all students were to be on grade level in reading
and math by 2014.
Recognizing that wasn’t doable, the Obama administration in
2012 began allowing waivers around some of the law’s more stringent
requirements if schools agreed to certain conditions, like using college- and
career-ready standards such as Common Core. The standards are a political issue
in many states, because they are viewed by critics as a federal effort even
though they were developed by U.S. governors.
Democrats say Kline’s bill would abdicate the federal
government’s responsibility to ensure that poor, minority, disabled and
non-English speaking students go to good schools and that billions of federal
education dollars are spent wisely. The White House threatened to veto the bill,
calling it “a significant step backwards.”
Conservatives were upset that amendments weren’t allowed on
provisions their group supported that included eliminating federal testing
mandates, allowing states to opt out of the law and allowing public money to
follow low-income students to private school, said Dan Holler, a spokesman for
Heritage Action for America.
Comments
This Bill doesn’t go far enough. Killing this
Bill would help get the federal government out of the Education business. No
Child Left Behind was a failure.
Education is not one of the federal government’s enumerated powers.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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