Obama signed a bipartisan bill that easily passed the Senate on Wednesday and the House last week – long-awaited legislation that would replace the landmark No Child Left Behind education law of 2002, now widely viewed as unworkable and overreaching.
Advertisement
President Barack Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act into law Thursday morning, a day after the Senate voted to pass the bill.
One key feature of No Child remains: Students will still take the federally required statewide reading and math exams.
President Obama is expected to sign the Every Student Succeeds Act. Parents, teachers and lawmakers came to believe the measure’s provision’s were unworkable and gave Washington bureaucrats too much control over the country’s 100,000 public schools.
“With this bill, we reaffirm that fundamental American ideal that every child, regardless of race, income, background, the ZIP Code where they live, deserves the chance to make out of their lives what they will”, Obama said, adding that the administration would be talking to stakeholders to “make the promise of this law reality”.
Republicans backed the new law because it transferred power away from the federal government.
“No Child Left Behind actually required that states adopt standards, but there was no benchmark by which those standards could be compared, state-to-state”, Snowberger said. And now, the political battles over thorny issues such as testing, academic standards and the best way to ensure quality teachers will migrate from Washington to 50 state capitals, observers say.
But states will decide what to do about the most troubled schools, those where test scores are in the lowest 5 percent, achievement gaps between groups of students are greatest, or where fewer than two-thirds of students graduate on time.
It would also encourage states to set limits on the total amount of time kids spend taking tests and would end federal efforts to tie test scores to teacher evaluations.
NEA members waged an unprecedented mobilization and advocacy campaign on behalf of the nation’s students to turn the page on the failed NCLB law and bring in a new federal education law that provides more opportunity for all students.
The law returns “responsibility to the state to really make sure their accountability system is one that will foster improvement, not punishment”. These provisions also support training for school staff and volunteers to help them recognize the signs of behavioral health problems in students and refer them for appropriate services.
Thursday, a bipartisan bill that will fix the No Child Left Behind Act to reduce over-testing and one-size-fits-all federal mandates. “We’re having our discussions with Harrisburg instead of Washington, D.C. and I think that’s a step in the right direction”, said Old Forge School District Superintendent John Rushefski.
But No Child Left Behind soon became known for its excesses, which enforced a teach-to-the-test philosophy and produced sometimes punishing consequences for low-performing schools.
Advertisement
After more than a decade, an even broader bipartisan consensus was reached that the previous bipartisan consensus on the federal role in education didn’t work very well.
