House passes No Child Left Behind rewrite

But critics complained the law was inflexible, overly formidable and punitive, and there was an excessive amount of testing.

But it’s much harder to get people to agree on what a new law should look like.

The Senate is debating a similar bill. And the House approved its own version on Wednesday.

The call comes as Congress is set to take up consideration of separate bills to replace the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, better known since 2002 as No Child Left Behind. But there are other important issues that have gotten less attention – school vouchers, for instance.

And yet, there are numerous hurdles to actually getting a bill that passes muster in both chambers and that President Obama will sign. He said the House “is shortchanging our kids’ future” and “would bring us back to a time where there were no accountability standards”.

School districts identified by their states as under-performing would be eligible for federal grants to make improvements, but the federal government wouldn’t prescribe which reforms are necessary. “But I’m anxious that we’ll react to that in such a way that we’ll have very few rules”. There are also major proficiency gaps between white and black students and between white and Hispanic students, according to results compiled in the report. The Senate bill seeks to reverse key provisions of the Affordable Care Act through blocking funding for the Risk Corridor program and discretionary funding for state Marketplaces. It is clearly preferable to the House measure that would undo the education gains of No Child Left Behind and that the Obama administration has rightly threatened to veto. So say a low-income student leaves a high poverty school and enrolls instead in a more affluent one. For example, it required states to gather student test data, which helped document troubling gaps between the nation’s middle-class children and their poorer, often minority peers.

Munoz said No Child Left Behind was supposed to address problems in 2000, when school reporting was not so rigorous and there was dropout rate of 28 percent for Latinos and more than 13 percent for African American students. Patty Murray (D-WA). In a Tuesday op-ed published by The Hill, Sens.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said the proposed change would “solve inequality in America by giving children the opportunity to attend a better school”.

Oklahoma City district schools, which receive a large share of the federal money in Oklahoma, received 42 F’s, 17 D’s, 15 C’s, 8 B’s and 10 A’s in that state report.

Some proponents of the current version of the bill would like to leave accountability questions up to states.

Heritage Action, an influential conservative group, said the opt-out amendment was critical for passage.

It also would stop the federal government from mandating national education standards, including the Common Core standards. The basic provisions of the act requires that public schools receiving federal funds must administer an annual statewide standardized test to all students. Tennessee can choose Common Core if it likes, but it can’t be mandated by Washington.

White House Domestic Policy Director Cecilia Muñoz said the president wants to work with the Alexander and Murray. However, a push to amend the Senate bill this week to make accountability measures stronger, as the administration would like, would cause Republican support to drop away.

Mr. Duncan agreed that the federal government has a role in ensuring progress.

Representative Dan Newhouse, a Washington state Republican, disagreed, saying the House bill would “empower” parents, local communities and states to fix education systems. And finally, studies have shown that vouchers do not increase student achievement.