Democrats across and beyond the nation’s capital—in the Administration, on Capitol Hill, in advocacy groups, and in think tanks—are up in arms about the ESEA reauthorization proposals released by House GOP leaders on Friday. Or at least they are pretending to be. While they contained a few surprises, the House bills were pretty much as one would expect: significantly to the right of both the Senate Harkin-Enzi bill and the package put forward by Republican Senator Lamar Alexander and his colleagues. In the parlance that we’ve been using at Fordham for three years now, the House GOP embodies the views of the Local Controllers, Senator Alexander embraced Reform Realism, and Harkin-Enzi represents a mishmash of ideas from the Army of the Potomac and the System Defenders.
But while there are significant differences among the players, a clear path toward a workable, maybe even bipartisan, package is still visible. In short: all roads lead to Lamar. Not only does the Alexander package represent smart policy, it also serves as a sort of mid-point between the Senate bill that passed out of committee and the House GOP bill that is likely to do the same. Let’s tackle the five big issues:
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Requirements
for standards and tests. The Administration and the Senate (including
supporters of both the Harkin-Enzi and Alexander measures) want states to adopt
standards that indicate college and career readiness; the House Republicans
don’t. The real issue at stake is not just differing views of big, pushy Uncle
Sam but also the new Common Core standards initiative, and whether federal
policy should encourage (or even coerce) states to participate. The House GOP
bill comes out swinging, stating that “the Secretary shall not attempt to
influence, incentivize, or coerce state participation” in any work on common
standards or tests. On the other hand, the same bill also says states must
develop accountability systems that “ensure that all public school students
graduate from high school prepared for postsecondary education or the workforce
without the need for remediation.” That amounts to college and career
readiness, right? Proponents of the Common Core should simply swallow their
pride, and accept the House language. It doesn’t really matter, anyway; with
forty-six states already on board, those of us who support the Common Core
should have a very quiet victory party and then move on to hoping that at least
one of the two test-building consortia devises a workable assessment system.
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Federal
mandates around state accountability systems. No Child Left Behind famously
required states to adopt the “Adequate Yearly Progress” measure for identifying
failing schools. Today, nobody wants to keep AYP; the question is how
much leeway to give states when creating their next-generation systems. The
Administration’s waiver policy allows states to propose radically different
approaches—but they must still consider subgroup performance and must set
annual targets for all schools (and groups) to hit. Harkin-Enzi concurs on
subgroups but leaves out the annual targets; instead, states must expect
schools to make “continuous progress.” (For that alleged crime by the Senators,
many reformers and civil rights groups cried bloody murder.) Alexander goes a
step further, leaving it to the states to figure out how to “differentiate”
among schools, though they still must consider the performance of “categories”
of students. And the House GOP goes the farthest by prohibiting the Department
of Education from dictating the contours of state accountability systems at all
(though still requiring states to evaluate schools based on the performance of
subgroups).
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Federally
mandated interventions in failing schools. Here there’s more agreement than
may meet the eye. Nobody wants to continue NCLB’s notorious (and
ineffectual)“cascade of sanctions” for faltering schools: choice for kids in schools “in need of
improvement”; supplemental services for kids stuck in schools in “corrective
action”; more stringent demands for those in need of “restructuring.” And
nobody wants to force states to intervene in schools that are merely mediocre.
(Which isn’t to say states should leave them be, especially if their students
have no viable alternatives. Remember, this is about federal policy.) The question is whether states—to keep receiving
federal dollars—must do something about really awful schools at the bottom. The
final Harkin-Enzi bill includes a compromise with Lamar Alexander to offer
states and districts a wider range of options for intervening in their five
percent worst schools. (That range is wider than Senator Harkin—or the
Administration—may have preferred.) The House GOP bill, on the other hand,
merely asks states to develop a “system for school improvement for
low-performing” Title I schools and to make sure districts “implement
interventions in such schools that are designed to address such schools’
weaknesses.”
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Teacher
effectiveness. There is a bundle of questions in play here: Should Congress
scrap the “highly qualified teachers” mandate? Should it replace it with a
tougher requirement that states and/or districts develop rigorous teacher
evaluation systems? Should it mandate the “equitable distribution of teachers”?
Should it require such an equitable distribution within districts by tweaking
Title I’s “comparability” rule? On most of these issues, the House GOP plan is
(predictably) less demanding than the Senate. Unlike Harkin-Enzi, it would
scrap the HQT mandate while eliminating any federal efforts to redistribute
teachers (via “comparability” or otherwise).
Alexander’s plan does the same. On teacher evaluations—a genuine
surprise--however, the House would
require them (at either the state or district level), while the Senate would
simply provide competitive funds for such systems.
- Spending. It always comes down to money in the end. The House GOP bill explicitly limits the growth in out-year spending on ESEA programs to the rate of inflation; the Senate is silent on the issue. Furthermore, the House wants to scrap the law’s longstanding “maintenance of effort” requirements, which penalize districts for cutting their own expenditures. Expect the House to lose on the out-year spending issue (which is another symbolic fight; Congressional appropriators will make these decisions every year anyway). But dropping maintenance of effort is a good idea, especially in the New Normal of tight budgets. (In the real world, after all the compromising is done, MOE is more likely to be loosened than jettisoned entirely.)
This truly is not rocket science; with a little presidential leadership and goodwill from both parties, a deal could be hammered out quickly. We haven’t had much of any of that in recent months, however—an issue voters might raise come November.