Never let it be said they didn’t take their time.
Lawmakers ended three months of panels on Tuesday about how to rewrite No Child Left Behind, the current version of the U.S.’s main public school law. It marks the end of a wonk-filled process that has revealed very little about what leadership hopes to include in a bill, much less when they plan to write one.
The problems are numerous: an already crowded legislative calendar, the specter known as midterm elections and the fact that lawmakers, both within and between political parties, still don’t agree on basic issues.
Democrats are split on how to measure teacher performance, Republicans, as usual, want the federal government out of classrooms and “college and career ready” standards, the latest buzzwords in high school reform, still need an accepted definition before legislators make them the basis for funding underprivileged schools, as the White House suggests.
Sen. Tom Harkin, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee, put it bluntly Tuesday.
“We’re going to change No Child Left Behind,” Harkin said. “We are going to change it. I think we have a consensus among all of us here to change it.”
In the mean time, here are five things gleaned from far too many hours of Congressional hearings and conversations with those in the know.
1. The race will likely go on
Nothing has loomed over the debate more than Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s national sweepstakes for school reform dollars, Race to the Top. The $4-billion stimulus program, which rewards states that adopt administration-approved reforms, has transformed state school chiefs’ relationship with the federal government, and not always for the better. Still, cash-strapped states have shown they’re willing to play along, and passed education reform laws at a record pace this spring. “I like the idea of rewarding success rather than punishing failure,” said Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., the No. 2 Democrat on Harkin’s committee. “We all like to be recognized.” Several top Democrats said they share the sentiment, including Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., head of the House’s committee on education. But Harkin, who also chairs the Senate appropriations subcommittee on education, said he’s opposed to extending Duncan’s “experiment.” The takeaway: look for a small, but permanent, competitive grant fund.
2. Not all districts are created equal
Republicans and Democrats actually seem to agree on this much. Under current Education Department regulations, states seeking federal funding have four options to turnaround their worse performing schools: firing staff, closing schools, opening charters or overhauling the curriculum with a new principal (known as “transformation” in Duncan-speak). But the models don’t work in rural districts, Sen. Michael Enzi, R-Wyo., has repeatedly said, where schools are scarce and qualified administrators are hard to find. Dan Domenech, head of the American Association of School Administrators said, “Those models that are models that will be effective in primarily urban areas. They do not apply to the majority in the country, where they have difficulty recruiting the staff.”
3. Moving upstream
Harkin has made pre-kindergarten education his pet project this session, often ending committee hearings with sermons on how the federal government tries to “fix” students after they’ve gone too far down the river. On Tuesday, Harkin, who will have huge influence on any final bill, said he plans to integrate early childhood learning into the next version of NCLB. “We’re always playing catch-up ball,” Harkin said in another education metaphor. “And one of the reasons we play so much catch-up is that we don’t put a lot of emphasis on the time when kids’ brains are developing the most, and that’s from birth to five.” If Miller and the administration hope to extend Race to the Top, this could be a way to keep Harkin happy.
4. Unions still matter
Duncan’s pro-charter school agenda has teachers unions, one of the most powerful forces in Democratic politics, on the retreat, several education reformers have pontificated. They’re wrong. Though it’s true many Democrats are now willing to discuss once-taboo subjects such as hanging teachers’ salaries on students’ test scores, education labor still holds considerable clout.
Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., with leadership from the two national teachers unions at her side, declared last week that lawmakers need to scrap the White House’s models for turning around the country’s worst schools. Rep. Dale Kildee, D-Mich., chairman of the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education, said Tuesday that he would be hard pressed to support a bill that lacked union support.
And on Wednesday, Duncan, Miller and Rep. Dave Obey, D-Wisc., chair of the House Appropriations Committee, clamored for a $23-billion education jobs bill at a National Education Association press conference. Obey said he attached the proposal to a war funding bill to prevent 100,000 to 300,000 teacher layoffs this summer.
“We are all trying to create and put our foot on the accelerator of reform, reforms that are not easy and that we struggle with but we want to do,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who was also in attendance. “This kind of layoff situation is a crashing, haunting break to it.”
Most on Capitol Hill said the measure is unlikely to pass, but the reformers can always say they tried.
5. No bill this year
Miller and Harkin both said they hope to get a bill out of committee by August, something that most observers and staff have acknowledged as improbable for months. President Barack Obama made no mention of education reform when he listed off the year’s legislative agenda at a Senate Republican caucus lunch Tuesday, according to GOP sources, and most staffers and observers said they see the bill coming up in early 2011. Even Harkin left the door open Tuesday.
“I’m going to see if I need to have some more hearings,” he said. “This was supposed to be the last one, but I may need a couple more.”