Senate, House look to update Bush-era education law | 790 KGMI

The bill also would expressly prohibit the federal government from requiring or encouraging any specific set of academic standards – a reference to the Common Core standards, which were drafted by the states with the support of the administration but have become a rallying point for those who want a smaller federal involvement in education.

And they would not administer the same assessments as public schools-which would diminish accountability to federal taxpayers.

“We can’t backtrack on holding schools accountable for helping all students learn”, Murray said.

Emphasizing the necessity for Congress to provide you with a invoice acceptable to the White House, Duncan and Cecilia Munoz, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, launched a report citing sizable achievement gaps between college students within the lowest-performing 5 % of faculties and people in all different faculties – a 31-proportion level hole in studying and 36-proportion level hole in math.

The House action came five months after conservatives forced GOP leaders to pull the bill just before a scheduled vote. Remarkably, though, as they debate a renewal of the No Child Left Behind law, many legislators are fighting to abandon any such accountability. He said the House “is shortchanging our kids’ future” and “would bring us back to a time where there were no accountability standards”.

No Child Left Behind mandated annual testing in reading and math for students in grades three to eight and again in high school. That’s something both teachers’ unions and conservatives would like to see changed. And finally, studies have shown that vouchers do not increase student achievement.

And then there’s the Senate.

This week, lawmakers in the House and Senate are working to rewrite No Child Left Behind.

“I am disappointed that House Republicans advanced a flawed and partisan reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that disinvests in America’s public schools”. Jon Tester would replace the annual testing mandate, upheld in Kline’s bill, with so-called “grade span” testing, which is less frequent. Alexander and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., are the chief sponsors of the bipartisan bill, which is also being debated this week.

Whatever Congress agrees on is likely to have at least a few items that are true crowd-pleasers across the board. Congress must not compromise the nation’s vital interest in protecting our most vulnerable, ensuring that all students have the opportunity to reach their full potential, and providing educators and schools with the support and resources that they need to do their vitally important work.

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.

“We join numerous civil rights and business groups in urging that significant improvements be made to the bill to make it a law that will further equity, rather than moving backwards”, says Duncan. Now, according to their bill, students would still have to take reading and math tests, but those tests would effectively mean less.

Passage fell narrowly along party lines on a vote of 218-213, with 27 Republicans joining all Democrats in opposition to almost derail it on the floor. 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.

But Obama administration officials – while stopping short of issuing a veto threat – say they won’t support the Senate bill in its current form because it remands too much oversight control to individual states.