WASHINGTON – The chairman of the House subcommittee in charge of rewriting No Child Left Behind – the current version of the country’s main education law – said this week that lawmakers would be hard pressed to pass a bill this year, despite assurances from other top lawmakers and a push from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
“It will be difficult,” said Rep. Dale Kildee, D-Mich., head of the House panel on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education, the first checkpoint for any House version of a proposal. “Time is running out, and it’s an election year too. People are going back home for that.”
Observers and congressional staff have speculated as much for more than a month, and point to a crowded legislative calendar and a lack of consensus only magnified during a campaign season. But the representative’s comments are the clearest indication yet from congressional leadership that one of the president’s top domestic priorities of 2010 will have to wait at least a year.
The Obama administration unveiled a 41-page blueprint for the education overhaul in March, meant to jump start what lawmakers described as cordial early discussions. Still, there’s been very little agreement other than that something needs to be done.
The No Child Left Behind Act, heralded as a bipartisan breakthrough when signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, has since become the scorn of teachers, parents and state officials. Many complain the law relies too heavily on standardized tests and focuses on punishing schools rather than improving them.
“We’re moving. We have our schedule,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, chairman of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which has held at least a hearing a week on the unwritten bill this month. “If the floor get’s plugged up and stuff we’re going to see who’s plugging up the floor – who’s not allowing us to get to the floor.”
Harkin said he wants a bill through the Senate before Congress’s August break –similar to the window Senate leaders gave health care legislation this time last year. But in April 2010, most lawmakers are yet to turn their attention to education. That’s because committee leaders have settled few, if any, of the details, as numerous education aides said in interviews.
The sticking points: Republicans want any new law to give leeway to rural schools, which often don’t have the same resources as the nation’s larger school districts. There are also questions about charter schools (the administration loves them; Democrats are split), linking teacher pay to student test scores and how to enforce lesson standards without creating a national curriculum – something all sides said they oppose.
Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the full House Education and Labor Committee, said he still plans to tackle the measure before Labor Day. But when told of Kildee’s and other’s progress assessments, he quipped, “I wish they’d talk to me, because then I’d stop working on it.”
Miller’s committee holds a hearing on the matter April 30.
The unsettled tensions appear to have made their way back to the Education Department. When Duncan spoke to a group of Hispanic college administrators last week, he said that “it might not pass this year.”
For things to change, education experts said, there would need to be a huge push from the White House, which could include writing part of the bill.
The approach would be counterproductive, said Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., the ranking Republican on Miller’s panel.
“It might cause people to dig in,” Kline said, noting that even some Democrats disagree with the administration parts of the issue. “The potential is for this to be a bipartisan process.”
Kildee, for his part, said Congress needs to take its time. Congress took about nine months in 2001 to move No Child Left Behind from the House floor to Bush’s desk.
“Even though we haven’t accomplished a great deal, the process has been good,” he said. “It was a long time last time.”