“We are pleased the House has voted in strong bipartisan fashion in favor of a bill that does that, and we look forward to the Senate moving quickly to do the same”, in a White House press release.
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The House passed the same measure last week.
The Senate, which overwhelmingly approved its version of the legislation in July, is expected to vote on the bill early next week.
Requires states to intervene on the lowest performing 5 percent of schools, high schools with high dropout rates.
The No Child Left Behind rewrite is positive because it substantially reduces federally mandated damage from testing overkill, though, by itself, does little to advance assessment reform or otherwise improve education.
Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee member Sen.
“Accountability is a good idea but execution of it in No Child was bad, ” Murphy said.
Katko said the bill will give local and state school leaders a bigger role in forming education policy.
The state board’s challenge will be to marry the federal requirement for a state-produced list of schools with a more decentralized school improvement system that features a different approach to measuring performance. All of the opposing votes to the legislation came from Republicans, however.
The bill scraps the No Child Left Behind Act, which was part of then-President George W. Bush’s legacy and was widely considered to be a failure by both parties. The former president described it as America’s best hope for reversing what he termed “the soft bigotry of low expectations”.
There also are several measures favored by Democrats, such as an expanded Preschool Development Grant program, aimed at expanding access to public preschool and improving its quality.
The law technically lapsed in 2007. The new law would also maintain the requirement that schools annually report the achievement scores of students and break down that data by race, economic status, disability, and English leaner status – the only universally touted aspect of No Child Left Behind that for the first time shined a spotlight on achievement gaps.
It attempts to shrink the federal government’s role in schools to appease conservatives, while still comparing the performances of states and individual schools for progressives. The measure also would end federal efforts to encourage academic standards such as Common Core. The Common Core college and career-ready curriculum guidelines were created by the states.
“It was important to me that this legislation address significant concerns that I share with my constituents with Common Core”, Ms. Stefanik said.
CT has 550,954 students in 1,169 schools.
And the goal was to reach 100% proficiency in math and reading at every school across the country.
The downside, she added, was that “the penalties were pretty harsh”. “It is deeply disconcerting to realize that our elected officials do not operate with a sense of thoughtful gravity and utmost respect regarding policies that affect over 55 million school children in the United States”.
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And, on the other side of the ideological spectrum, a coalition of 36 civil rights groups is concerned the bill would not provide protections for minority children and other subgroups of students. “I think the local individuals will have to be creative and being innovative”, she said.
