WASHINGTON—The 860 pages of the bill that would completely revamp No Child Left Behind have given lawmakers on Capitol Hill a lot to talk about.
But at the core of every debate is the battle over how much of a hand federal, state and local governments should have in public education — a balance that some Waterloo educators say is essential for Iowa’s academic success.
“Iowa is the poster child for local control going amuck,” said Waterloo Community Schools Superintendent Gary Norris. “We’ve gotta have common high standards that we all agree to as a country, but then the classroom teacher and the local school building ought to decide how to get there.”
The bipartisan bill known as the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, is waiting in the pipeline to hit the full Senate floor. It passed through the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions subcommittee last month, with the support of only three Republican members.
“No bill has everything everybody wants. This bill is not [Senator] Enzi’s bill, and it ain’t mine either,” Iowa’s Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin said during a recent hearing. But the central question lawmakers have to answer, Harkin said, is: “Does it advance the causes of finding the proper balance between federal state and local?”
As written, the bill would eliminate major pieces of the former No Child legislation that was passed in 2001 as the centerpiece of President George W. Bush’s national education policy. For example, adequate yearly progress benchmarks would be wiped away, leaving only yearly reading and math tests for 3rd to 8th graders. Only the worst performing 5 percent of schools would face federal oversight, and the 5 percent of schools with the widest achievement gap between minority and white students could lose federal funding.
Yet the bipartisan bill hasn’t been getting real support from both sides of the isle. Ranking member of the HELP Committee Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., did vote for the bill, but said at a hearing Tuesday that he couldn’t wholeheartedly support it.
“I’ll continue to support a lessened federal role in schools, fewer federal programs, and greater transparency to parents,” he said. “But I was disappointed that the markup moved in the opposite direction than those three goals.”
Back in Waterloo, Norris said a federal role is necessary for Iowa public school students. Iowa was ranked at the top of national education assessments in the 1990s, he said, but without a general accountability system, they lost steam—no one was pushing them to be better.
If the federal government set national standards and goals, he said, states like Iowa who have struggled in the past have a benchmark they can focus on.
“I don’t think federal government should tell teachers how to teach, and I don’t think they should tell districts how to accomplish that,” he said. “But I do think they should say your kids need to be able to do this.”
Norris said Iowa did make gains a few years ago with the creation of the Iowa Core: a statewide system that provides academic expectations for all students from kindergarten to 12th grade. While the Core is helpful, if Iowa had a “high target to shoot at” Norris said, they wouldn’t have fallen behind in the first place.
The current Senate bill would devolve some power to the states to create accountability measures like the Core.
Experts speculate that this bill won’t even pass the Senate.
Russ Whitehurst, Director of Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, said the infighting over state versus federal government intervention could keep the measure from passing in its entirety.
The bill also faces some logistical obstacles—the Senate legislative schedule is packed tightly as the session winds down, so the ESEA bill might not even see the floor.
Not to mention, Whitehurst said, with elections coming up, partisan politics are as tense as ever.
“I don’t think the Republicans have the incentive to provide the Obama administration with a bipartisan bill they can brag about going into presidential election,” he said. “They’re reasonably confident they will regain the Senate, so why not wait until you don’t have to bargain?”
But Norris said big businesses in Iowa like John Deere are knocking on his door, wondering how the newest workforce will shape up. The department of education in Iowa has said it will apply for the Obama administration’s waiver program to get out from under the current NCLB. And Norris said administrators on the local level are constantly trying to better their schools in their own capacity.
But lawmakers just can’t waste any more time.
“They’ve gotta get together and say hey, the old bickering of the past no longer matters, there are countries that are blowing us away –we’ve gotta get busy,” Norris said.