Bush Pushes for NCLB Renewal

[Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>]

Note that all Education Week content, including its excellent archives, 
is available for free on-line at www.edweek.org through January 18, 2007

BUSH TO START NCLB PUSH IN CONGRESS

Education Week -- January 10, 2007
by David J. Hoff

Making college more affordable, raising the minimum wage, and other 
domestic items were at the top of Democrats’ agenda when they formally 
took control on Capitol Hill last week.

President Bush, meanwhile, made clear that another item was near the top 
of his list: reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act.

To mark the fifth anniversary of his signing the measure into law on 
Jan. 8, the president invited leading members of the new 110th Congress 
to the White House to discuss his goal of revising the law on schedule 
by the end of the year

“It’s a very high priority,” Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings 
said in an interview last week. “We’ve come a long way in five years. 
We’re in a place where we need to build on the core principles of the 
law and go to the next level.”

The possibility that the NCLB reauthorization will emerge as a top-tier 
issue this year upset the conventional wisdom in Washington that 
tackling the law would be too time-consuming and politically difficult 
in 2007, let alone during the presidential-campaign season next year

In a December survey of 12 Washington lobbyists and think tank 
researchers, all but one said they did not expect Congress to pass 
changes to the law until 2009, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation reported 
last week.

Even with Mr. Bush’s active involvement, it would be difficult to push 
an NCLB bill through Congress this year, said Michael J. Petrilli, the 
vice president of national programs and policy for the Washington-based 
think tank.

“It’s still unlikely because the calendar is so challenging,” he said. 
To meet the deadline, “they have to be putting pen to paper 
immediately,” said Mr. Petrilli, who served in the Department of 
Education during President Bush’s first term.

A prominent Washington policy expert not surveyed by the Fordham 
Foundation said that Congress is unlikely to finish the reauthorization 
because it has other things to accomplish, and it doesn’t have firm 
answers on how to fix problems in the law.

“I don’t see any rush to reauthorize,” said Jack Jennings, a former aide 
to House Democrats who is now the president of the Center on Education 
Policy, a Washington research and advocacy group that has been tracking 
the law’s impact.

Now or Later

But officials at the local level expressed optimism that Congress will 
solve the problems that states and districts are having in complying 
with the law, which requires schools and districts to meet ambitious 
achievement goals and holds them accountable for failing to reach them.

“There are a lot of things … that need to be fixed,” said Ellen C. 
Guiney, the executive director of the Boston Plan for Excellence in the 
Public Schools, a group working to improve the city’s schools.

For example, the law gives states the authority to take over schools 
that fail to make annual academic goals. But it doesn’t say whether 
states have the power to ignore teacher collective-bargaining agreements 
while doing so. If a state tries to do so, it is likely to face a legal 
challenge from teachers’ unions.

“Do you [answer the question] in the courts, or do you do it by getting 
clarity in the statute?” said Ms. Guiney, a former aide to Sen. Edward 
M. Kennedy, D-Mass.

Under the NCLB law, which reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary 
Education Act, funding authority for Title I and other programs in the 
statute expires on Oct. 1 of this year. Although that date is written 
into law, Congress has routinely extended such deadlines for the ESEA 
and other laws

When Democrats won majorities in both the House and the Senate in the 
midterm elections, they said they would pursue a long list of domestic 
priorities they had emphasized during the campaign. In education, those 
plans included lowering student-loan interest rates and creating new tax 
breaks for college-tuition costs. On Jan. 17, the House is scheduled to 
consider a bill to cut student-loan interest rates in half by 2011.

The Democratic agenda also encompasses improving access to health care, 
raising the minimum wage, and other issues outside of education.

But the two most powerful lawmakers on education matters have said that 
the NCLB law is on their lists for action. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., 
the new chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said last 
month that renewal of the law was a “very, very high priority.” (His 
committee has reverted to its longtime name after being called 
“Education and the Workforce” under the Republican majority.)

In a post-election speech on the Senate floor, Sen. Kennedy, now the 
chairman of his chamber’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions 
Committee, listed several labor and health-care bills before mentioning 
the NCLB reauthorization as part of his agenda.

Even while other issues may take priority, Rep. Miller and Sen. Kennedy 
are laying the groundwork for the reauthorization process.

Rep. Miller plans to hold hearings that will address critical issues 
facing the NCLB law, according to a House aide familiar with the plans. 
Those include how to measure students’ academic growth in determining 
whether schools and districts are making adequate yearly progress, or 
AYP, how to recruit the “highly qualified” teachers required under the 
law, and how to improve states’ reporting of graduation rates, the aide 
said.

In the Senate, Mr. Kennedy hopes to begin NCLB hearings next month, said 
Melissa Wagoner, a spokeswoman for the education committee.

In his speech to the Senate, the senator’s main goal for the 
reauthorization of the law will be to give struggling schools help in 
meeting their AYP targets. The aid could include financial and other 
incentives for highly qualified teachers to stay in such schools, as 
well as professional development on how to address students’ failure to 
meet proficiency goals.

Also in the speech, Sen. Kennedy said he wants to ensure that states set 
challenging academic standards and improve the quality of school 
assessments.

Room for Compromise

In the interview last week, Secretary Spellings said that the Bush 
administration wants Congress to address issues such as using “growth 
models” in calculating students’ academic progress, expanding access to 
school choice and tutoring, and improving assessment of special 
education students and English-language learners.

But she said the administration is steadfast in principles that are the 
“heart and soul” of the law. Those include the goal that all students be 
proficient in reading and mathematics by the end of the 2013-14 school 
year, and that schools annually test students in grades 3-8 and once in 
high school to determine whether their students are making progress 
toward meeting that goal.

The administration is also committed, she said, to ensuring that 
test-score data continue to be broken down by ethnic, racial, and 
socioeconomic subgroups.

“Those things are sound, true, and righteous,” Ms. Spellings said.

But exactly how to accomplish those objectives will likely be the 
subject of intense debate.

Last week, the Forum on Educational Accountability, a coalition of 100 
education, civil rights, and religious groups, recommended changes to 
the law that would cross some of those principles. The forum said it 
wants to “replace the law’s arbitrary proficiency targets with ambitious 
achievement targets based on rates of success actually achieved by the 
most effective public schools.”

The member groups include the National Education Association, the 
National School Boards Association, and the National Association for the 
Advancement of Colored People

The recommendations show how hard it will be to build consensus around 
the NCLB law even though President Bush, Rep. Miller, and Sen. Kennedy 
all support the underlying principles, said Mr. Petrilli of the Fordham 
Foundation.

Democrats will have to assuage groups such as the NEA, the NAACP, and 
others traditionally aligned with them. The Republicans will have a 
similar dilemma getting support from conservative groups that believe 
the law gives too much authority to the federal government, Mr. Petrilli 
said.

“They’re going to have to deal with the anger on the right and on the 
left,” he said.

To enact a renewal of the No Child Left Behind law or any other major 
bills, Democrats will need President Bush’s support and possibly help 
from Republicans in Congress.

As House leaders move quickly to pass legislation to raise the minimum 
wage and cut student-loan rates, they may be spoiling their chances of 
bipartisan cooperation later, said one Democrat with long public policy 
experience.

“The Democrats are making a tactical mistake. There’s a lot to be said 
for this fast start—it projects energy—but they’re passing up a chance 
to practice working with the Republicans,” said Alice M. Rivlin, a 
senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, who 
was the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget 
under President Clinton.

“They can’t do any big piece of legislation, any expensive piece of 
legislation without working” in a bipartisan way, she said.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/01/10/18congress.h26.html