Senators Tom Harkin And Mike Enzi Announce Agreement On No Child Left Behind Education Law

WASHINGTON — Signaling some unity in the Senate on overhauling the "No Child Left Behind" law, two senators announced Monday an agreement to move forward on bipartisan legislation to revamp it.

Soon after, however, Education Secretary Arne Duncan issued a statement noting that the bill did not include a provision the administration favors, which is a requirement that local and state districts develop teacher and principal evaluation systems. Duncan said he believes "that comprehensive evaluation system based on multiple measures, including student achievement, is essential for education reform to move forward" and "we can't retreat from reform."

Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Mike Enzi, Wyo., the top senators from their parties on the Senate committee with jurisdiction over education, made the announcement two days before the committee will consider the sweeping bill that seeks to give more control to states on education and change some of the law's unpopular proficiency standards. Last week, Harkin released an outline of the plan the senators had been working on behind closed doors that did include a component on teacher and principal evaluations. At the time, Enzi hadn't yet publicly signed onto the plan.

In a statement, Harkin called the bill a "compromise that demonstrates that congressional Democrats and Republicans can overcome partisan differences."

The National Education Association teachers' union as well as four organizations representing principals, school administrators and school boards, had sent a letter to the senators expressing concern about the language in the bill. On teacher and principal evaluations, the groups said they were concerned about the capacity of states and local school districts to develop meaningful evaluation systems that did not become mechanisms for forced teacher and principal distribution.

On the other side, groups representing students with disabilities, low-income students, and minority students had sent the senators a letter asking them to go further in ensuring that states hold districts accountable.

Last month, President Barack Obama said he was frustrated with Congress' inability to update the law passed in 2002, so he was moving forward to allow states to apply for waivers around certain requirements. To obtain a waiver, one of the requirements to qualify is that states must set guidelines for teacher and principal evaluation and support systems. At least 39 states, in addition to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, have said they intend to apply for a waiver, which could be issued to some states early next year. The administration has said the waivers are a stopgap plan until Congress acts.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., a former U.S. education secretary who has proposed his own plan, told reporters on a conference call he thinks the bill crafted by Harkin and Enzi has too many federal mandates, but he plans to support moving it out of committee so it can be debated by the entire Congress. He said he's hopeful a law can be passed by the end of the year, so that Duncan isn't turned into "waiver-granting czar."

The GOP-led House Education and the Workforce Committee is reworking the law in a more piece-meal way. It has forwarded three bills, but has yet to fully tackle more contentious issues such as teacher accountability.

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Kimberly Hefling can be followed at http://twitter.com/khefling

Comments

[BrendaNYC]

09:33 AM on 10/19/2011

How about we consider those who HAVE been left behind and how we can address their needs. I natter more here: http://heresheisboys.com/2011/10/19/mind-the-gap/

[dancingbones]

05:14 PM on 10/17/2011

NCLB was the most idiotic 'improvement' plan ever conceived. It guarantees failure and Program Improvement status with its attendant penalties to every school. My grandson goes to a CA elementary school with a score of well over 800 and it was put on PI because it is so good it can't make mandated higher scores. Another great idea from The Great Idiot President....

[Paganus]

08:56 AM on 10/18/2011

Wow, I honestly had no idea it worked like that at the institutional level. I had heard the horror stories from educators about getting more credit/points from an AP class that showed little improvement than for the regular class that showed great improvement, but didn't get to the "target" proficiency. What a nightmare.

We just need to scrap the entire approach and begin anew from the ground up. The first thing we should do is work on getting college/university education departments out of the loop or radically restructuring them. Inasmuch as they despise disciplinary content, they are part of the problem. Paedagogy can be learned much more effectively in the context of individual disciplines.

[Marx Twain]

04:20 PM on 10/17/2011

Cheers to the Senate for ignoring Duncan's Folly, changing teacher evals. His position so far is that they need to be changed, but he doesn't know how, though they should be tied to test scores.

These senators, however, have taken the smart approach, which is not to try changing things when you don't have a clue what the improvement will look like.

[megwright]

09:46 PM on 10/17/2011

Teacher evaluations should NOT be tied to test scores unless you want to ensure no teacher will teach in disadvantaged schools, or perhaps will be ALLOWED to teach in them more than one year. Socioeconomic status of students has about a 90% correlation with how they perform on tests. The hardest working teachers are probably those who do their best to teach disadvantaged kids who start school with every strike against them, while teachers in average and affluent districts can be assured their students will score reasonably well no matter what the teacher's input is. I don't want to minimize the role of teachers or how hard they work. I'm just pointing out that rating teachers on student test scores is the height of folly.

[Marx Twain]

10:02 PM on 10/17/2011

I couldn't have put it better myself.

The best notion that I've heard in a long time though is the 360 evaluation, whereby everyone in the school system rates those under them and above them. I think this would promote shared accountability. Imagine if principals were accountable to teachers as well as their administrators, and teachers were accountable to students and paras as well as principals. This would do more than anything single measure to change school culture.

[VA Jill]

02:50 PM on 10/17/2011

Don't bother overhauling it........SCRAP IT!. NCLB is not worth the paper it's printed on.