At Long Last?

HELP Committee to Move Forward

on Bill to Reauthorize the

Elementary and Secondary Education Act

Next week’s Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee mark up of legislation to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) will begin on WEDNESDAY at 10 A.M. The comprehensive bill will reflect 10 months of bipartisan negotiations between Chairman Harkin and Ranking Member Mike Enzi (R-WY), and will address many of the problems created by ESEA’s most recent reauthorization, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), while advancing America’s commitment to helping all children succeed.

EXECUTIVE SESSION: Legislation to Reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act

DATE: Wednesday, October 19th

TIME: 10:00 A.M.

PLACE:106 Dirksen Senate Office Building

SOURCE: Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Press Release

This from Eduflack:

The day has finally come. This afternoon, Senate HELP Chairman Tom Harkin (IA) officially unveiled his draft of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The bill offers the sexy title "Elementary and Secondary Education Reauthorization Act of 2011."

The highlights: Adequate Yearly Progress is history. Race to the Top and i3 are woven into the tapestry of ESEA. HQT is gone, replaced by a plan to better evaluate teachers.

Alyson Klein over at EdWeek's Politics K-12 has a great summary of the bill and why we were offered what was released today.

Even in advance of the release, civil rights organizations expressed concern about the ESEA draft, worried that the death of AYP provides the potential for turning back recent accountability measures and expanding some already dreadful achievement gaps. You can see the full letter sent by six civil rights orgs today to Senator Harkin here. That drumbeat is likely only going to get louder as the language is further sliced and diced.

One big question remains — Is it necessary? At this stage of the game, NCLB is known mostly for its testing provisions, and most of those remain in the draft. Replacing AYP with another tool and funding RttT and i3 on an annual basis are steps the EdSec can take, with or without a new ESEA (as long as he has a congressional checkbook to support the latter). And we won't even raise the issue of how this fits with House Education Chairman John Kline (MN)'s piecemeal approach to reauth.

So while this finally puts a flag in the edu-ground for Harkin and Senate Democrats, no one should be rushing to schedule a bill signing any time soon. And if we truly want to get it on the calendar now, there are probably some lovely openings in the spring of 2013 just waiting to be booked. That sounds about right for an ESEA reauth signing.

But we have to start somewhere, don't we?

This from Sherman Dorn:

The fundamental dilemma with...hard targets is that while they may be necessary in the short term, they are very difficult to sustain politically in the long term. Scold fatigue sets in after a few years of suburban schools’ being told most of them suck. The reality is that while this year’s high school sophomores might not be learning everything you or I might like, many suburban parents are happy with the schools their children are attending.

That fact does not mean suburban schools are doing well by all their students, but rather that we’re in a particularly bad policy place if a “you mostly suck” strategy is the best we can do. It also happens to be a particularly bad political place (see Carter, James).