The League of Iowa
Human & Civil Rights Agencies

Obama Proposes Overhaul in Education Law 

By Sam Dillon

Published: March 13, 2010, New York Times

The Obama administration on Saturday called for a broad overhaul of the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind law, proposing to eliminate divisive provisions, including those that have encouraged instructors to teach to tests, crowded out subjects other than math and reading, and labeled one in every three American public schools as failing. The proposals, if approved by Congress, would replace the current law’s pass-fail school grading system with one that would measure schools not only with test scores but also with indicators like pupil attendance and the learning climate in classrooms. And while the proposals call for vigorous interventions in failing schools, they would also reward top performers and lessen federal interference in tens of thousands of reasonably well-run schools in the middle.

President Obama’s plan would replace the No Child law’s requirement that every American child reach proficiency in reading and math, which administration officials have called utopian, with a new national target that may be even harder to achieve: that all students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career. “Under these guidelines, schools that achieve excellence or show real progress will be rewarded,” he said in his weekly radio address, “and local districts will be encouraged to commit to change in schools that are clearly letting their students down.”

Administration officials said their plan would urge the states to achieve the college-ready goal by 2020.

The No Child law, passed in 2002 by bipartisan majorities, focused the nation’s attention on closing achievement gaps between minority and white students, but included many provisions that created what Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Friday called “perverse incentives.” In their effort to meet the law’s requirements for passing grades, many states began dumbing down standards and teachers began focusing on test preparation rather than engaging class work. “We’ve got to get accountability right this time,” Mr. Duncan told reporters. “For the mass of schools, we want to get rid of prescriptive interventions. We’ll leave it up to them to figure out how make progress.”

The administration’s turn toward education signaled that the president hopes to get beyond health care and broaden the agenda before the midterm elections make progress on legislative issues more difficult. Mr. Duncan has been working behind the scenes on rewriting the No Child law with a bipartisan group of senior lawmakers in both chambers, and administration officials say they hope to complete work on a new bill by August, when the elections will dominate the Congressional agenda. Many skeptics question that timetable. The proposals made clear that the administration hopes to thoroughly rework dozens of the law’s most problematic passages, even while retaining some key features of the Bush-era law, including its requirements that states test students in reading and math every year in grades three through eight and once in high school.

But while leading Democrats on the education committees praised the plan, one of the nation’s major teachers unions did not. “Right now this doesn’t make sense, so we’re surprised,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “From everything that we’ve seen, this blueprint places 100 percent of the responsibility on teachers, and gives them zero percent of the authority.” Representative John Kline, a top Republican on the House education committee, was also skeptical. “From 30,000 feet the blueprint seems to set a lot of right goals,” Mr. Kline said. “Yet when we drill down to the details, we are looking at a heavier federal hand than many of us wish to see.”

Administration officials laid out their far-reaching proposals for the No Child revisions in briefings on Friday and Saturday with governors, lawmakers, education organizations and journalists, but did not release their proposals in writing with all the fine print. Officials said they intended to leave the legislative language up to Congress.

Mr. Duncan was scheduled to tour Iowa schools on Sunday with Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who is the new chairman of the Senate education committee. “We have an opportunity to fix the problems with the No Child Left Behind Act,” Mr. Harkin said in a statement. “President Obama has taken the lead by laying out a bold vision.” Representative George Miller, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said, “This blueprint lays the right markers to help us reset the bar for our students and the nation.” The new proposals would require states to use annual tests, along with other indicators, to divide the nation’s nearly 100,000 public schools into three groups: some 10,000 to 15,000 high-performing schools that would receive rewards or recognition, some 5,000 chronically failing schools requiring vigorous state intervention, and 80,000 or so schools in the middle that would be encouraged to figure out on their own how to improve.

Under the current law, testing focuses on measuring the number of students who are proficient at each grade level. The Obama administration would like instead to measure each student’s academic growth regardless of the performance level at which they start. Under the administration’s proposals, schools would also be judged on whether they are closing achievement gaps between poor and affluent students. No sanctions exist now for schools that fail in this area. Under the administration’s new proposals, states would be required to intervene even in seemingly high-performing schools in affluent school districts where test scores and other indicators identify groups of students that are languishing, administration officials said.

New provisions would also require states to develop teacher evaluation procedures to distinguish effective instructors, partly based on whether their students are learning. These would replace the law’s current emphasis on certifying that all teachers have valid credentials, which has produced little except red tape for state officials, officials said. The current law, signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, required states to adopt ”challenging academic standards” to receive federal money for poor students under the section of the law known as Title I. But the law left it to states to define “challenging,” and many set standards at mediocre levels.

Last month, President Obama said that his No Child blueprint would require states to adopt “college- and career-ready standards” to qualify for $14 billion Title I program, and that new sources of federal money would be provided to states as competitive grants, rather than through per-pupil formulas. “This’ll be controversial,” said Bob Wise, a former West Virginia governor who leads the Alliance for Excellent Education, a nonprofit group. “They’re trying to change about 40 years of established formula funding, and to change an accountability system that a lot of people are wedded to because it’s forced us to come to grips with the achievement gap.”