How Congress finally killed No Child Left Behind

 ‘I said, “We’ve got a bill for you,” ’ 

-- Sen. Lamar Alexander to Speaker Paul Ryan

This from Politico:

Speaker John Boehner's September announcement about leaving Congress was a shock to lawmakers who had been deep in painstaking negotiations for months on a bill to replace No Child Left Behind, which President Barack Obama signed into law this week. Getting a new federal education law was hard enough, given the many warring constituencies involved. With the exit of the speaker — a key supporter — lawmakers' plans were again jeopardized.

But then came Paul Ryan.

The new speaker wanted to bring more old-fashioned legislating to the House. So Sen. Lamar Alexander, an old-fashioned lawmaker, sat next to Ryan during a visit to the senators' weekly Tuesday lunch, just days after Ryan was sworn in. He pitched him on the bill, which would replace the central federal law governing public schools.

“I said, ‘We’ve got a bill for you,’” said Alexander, chairman of the Senate education committee. “Here’s an opportunity for you to do something big and bipartisan and successful — and do it in regular order.”

Rep. John Kline, education chairman in the House, also spoke with Ryan about the merits of the bill — which had drawn major opposition from the same conservatives who had pushed Boehner to resign. Weeks earlier, friends Ryan and Kline had each been trying to edge the other toward taking the speaker’s gavel. Now, Ryan agreed to support Kline’s bill. They’d bring it to the House floor for a vote soon, when Ryan was still new to the speakership and the bill could arguably pass off as part of Boehner’s legacy, according to Alexander.

The No Child Left Behind bill, momentarily lost in the scramble, was charging forward again.

The uncertainty in Alexander’s parlance had looked like yet another alligator that was “lurking at every corner” for the education bill over the course of 2015. There were many: opposition from House conservatives that led leadership to pull an earlier version of the bill from the House floor; union-backed calls for less testing that could have killed support from the Obama administration; a three-hour break from Senate debate to settle a dispute between Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) over school funding that could have sunk a Senate vote on the bill. At the same time, constituents and teachers unions were increasingly frustrated with the state of federal education policy, as evidenced by massive protests against testing and the Common Core across the country.

But in the end, Boehner’s retirement was ironically a blessing for the four lawmakers who had confidently guided their bill forward through marathon markups, a months-long effort to woo skeptical House conservatives and even chatting up the president on Air Force One. Now, they had a route back through the House with Ryan’s support, to the Senate and onto Obama’s desk. The time frame was tight, but it would keep them from running into any issues with the 2016 elections making it difficult or toxic to legislate on education.

There was only one issue. The bill wasn’t finished yet.

This year’s work to rewrite No Child Left Behind, the country’s overarching education law, started the day after the 2014 midterm elections. Alexander, fresh off a successful reelection bid and expected chairman of the Senate HELP Committee with Republicans now in control, gathered aides to tell them his top priority would be replacing the dated education law.

No Child Left Behind, first passed in 2002, was an ambitious, bipartisan attempt to close achievement gaps between poor and minority students and their peers by setting a goal for all students to eventually become proficient in reading and math. But the law prescribed tests to measure students achievement, and sanctions for schools who weren’t yielding improvement. The end result: The law became widely unpopular and was blamed – many argue, incorrectly – for an explosion of testing in the states in recent years. An Obama administration attempt to remedy the situation by offering states waivers from parts of the law only spurred more acrimony, because the waivers also pushed the Obama education agenda. The waivers also killed the momentum of earlier attempts to rewrite No Child Left Behind, dragging the law seven years past its expiration date.

Rewriting a widely unpopular law may seem like a no-brainer for an incoming education chairman. But the divisive politics around education policy had made it extremely difficult to do. Multiple attempts to rewrite the law since its 2007 expiration had fallen flat. Before last year’s midterms, an overwhelming majority of education experts polled by the consulting firm Whiteboard Advisors said replacing No Child Left Behind would have to wait until well after the 2016 elections — if it ever happened at all.

Even Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who called on Congress repeatedly for a new law, suggested that Alexander try working on higher education policy first, according to a GOP aide.
 

But constituents in Tennessee and elsewhere had long been crying out for changes to No Child Left Behind. And Alexander, a former U.S. education secretary for President George H.W. Bush and the son of a teacher, plowed forward. 

 

He started his chairmanship by dropping a draft bill that, to the chagrin of Democrats, was stacked with Republican priorities. Sen. Patty Murray, new as the top Democrat on HELP, sold Alexander on the idea that the two should work together on a bipartisan bill that could move through the chamber with the support of both parties. Back in 2001, Republicans had lined up behind President George W. Bush in support of No Child Left Behind and its dramatic increase to the federal role in education. But Alexander now wanted to scale back the federal role, trim the education secretary power and potentially give states block granted federal funds that could be converted into school vouchers. These proposals would have ostracized Democrats, including Obama.

Not only was the conversation the start of months of bipartisan work between the two senators, it also set the tone for what lawmakers in both chambers say were upfront, collaborative relationships that were crucial in nabbing them a victory. Lawmakers joined Alexander for breakfast in the Senate Dining Room; aides bonded over pizza late at night.


Both sides played the long game, positioning themselves for an eventual conference and a bill that Obama could sign. During a January trip to Tennessee on Air Force One for the announcement of a community college initiative, for example, Alexander explained his plan to the president, and made a request: He didn’t want the president to threaten to veto the bill he was negotiating with Murray. The president agreed, Alexander said. Six months later, when a bill came to the Senate floor that was in conflict with the administration’s priorities, the White House stopped short of a veto threat.

In February, House Republicans moved forward with a conservative bill that had cleared the chamber in 2013. At the time, Kline saw it as a speedy way to pass an initial bill and position himself with a strongly conservative proposal as a starting point for conference. But the bill was scheduled for a vote the same week as a debate over Department of Homeland Security funding erupted, and anger from the far right against House leadership was running high. In the hours leading up to the scheduled vote, it was clear it wasn’t going to pass. Critics said the bill didn’t do nearly enough to roll back the federal role in education, anti-Common Core bloggers had spread misinformation about the bill in the states and the conservative groups Heritage Action and Club for Growth launched an assault against it.

“I thought we could get to the solution better, quicker, cleaner” by using a bill that had passed the House before, Kline said. “I made a mistake.”

Kline and other House Republican supporters including Rep. Todd Rokita (R-Ind.) worked for months to win support they needed from their colleagues to bring the bill back up for a vote, discussing the bill in meetings and one-on-one to skeptics. Months later, in July, it just barely passed the chamber.
On the other side of the aisle, Rep. Bobby Scott, the education committee’s top Democrat, was wrestling with the his party’s divide between unions and education reformers, and preparing for the point when House Republicans would need his support to keep the ball moving forward.

Scott and Murray, like most Democrats, have good relationships with the teachers unions. But in this year’s negotiations, labor was more closely aligned with Republicans on some of the most contentious points of the bill: how often to test students, what constraints to put on opting out of exams and how states should rate schools.

Scott, Murray and the White House all wanted to preserve testing students each year, break out data on test results to show achievement gaps and use that information to determine when a school needs to change — as a clear way to ensure poor and minority students don’t fall through the cracks in the system. And they wanted requirements that low-performing schools work to change. This was civil rights advocates’ point of view, and they worked closely with the White House and business groups such as the Chamber of Commerce to advance it.

But teachers unions, who spend tens of millions of dollars each cycle backing candidates, saw the system differently: No Child Left Behind created a “test-and-punish” environment where students are drilled on subjects, and the resources schools are given aren’t taken into account. They think students would benefit from more flexibility for teachers and less testing.

Across the country, the “opt-out” movement, strongly supported by unions, encouraged students to skip standardized tests tied to the Common Core. In New York state, 20 percent of students skipped tests last spring. And lawmakers, particularly in the House, heard the complaints from students, parents and teachers loud and clear. They introduced multiple, union-backed bills that would cut the number of federally mandated tests or secure students’ right to opt out of testing without any consequences for schools.
 

This posed a particular challenge for Scott and his allies. To deflect critics Democratic Rep. Suzanne Bonamici put forward a bill that would encourage states to identify redundant tests and delete them — a productive way to deflect unions’ demands for getting rid of annual testing all-together. The Bonamici proposal was inserted into the broader bill and became “a trump card that we played almost daily” during conversations with Democrats this year, Scott said.

By August, the House and Senate had each passed their NCLB bills. In the Senate, Alexander and Murray had hammered out an agreement that eventually passed with strong support from both parties.
The White House had held back on threatening to veto the Senate’s bill. But negotiating a bill that met halfway between the two wasn’t going to work: Scott and the White House wanted a bill that featured key aspects, further to the left in some ways than either the House or Senate versions.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan “still didn’t know” at that point whether the lawmakers would emerge with a decent bill, Duncan told POLITICO. “If they came back with a mediocre version of the House bill, or a mediocre version of the Senate bill, I would have recommended [Obama] not sign it.”

And so, after months of watching House Republicans wrestle with moving their bill through the House, Scott — who had views similar to the White House, and could deliver Democrats’ votes — finally “had a seat at the table,” he said.

Aides began bridging gaps between the two bills in August. By September, they had made headway on large chunks but despite extensive discussion couldn’t compromise on the most politically divisive section of No Child Left Behind: how to evaluate schools and handle them when they do poorly.
Scott was eager to find a solution that didn’t sacrifice civil rights principles and satisfied Republicans’ hankering for a return to local control.

In October, he pitched a plan to Kline: The federal government could mandate specific circumstances in which states and districts would have to intervene in a school — for example, in high school “dropout factories” where few students graduate. But it could give states significant leeway in both rating schools’ performance and deciding how to help struggling schools.

After some questions and changes, Kline’s office agreed and, soon after, so did the Senate.

Not long after Ryan became speaker, in mid-November, and with little time left to wrap negotiations before lawmakers hoped to bring a bill up in the House, the four key lawmakers dialed in for a conference call.

It was the kind of day, Murray said, that the emerging deal on the education bill “was either going to fall apart, or not.”

They were optimistic. But there were still two gnarly, contentious issues that had divided lawmakers all year, and they needed to be resolved swiftly. Aides had been working late at night, sometimes until dawn. Top Obama administration officials had been woken up in bed for calls on education policy, two officials said.

Murray, a former preschool teacher, put her foot down during the call — as she had done many times before — on one of her chief priorities: The bill had to include a pre-K program, which pained House Republicans’ hankering to cut the number of government programs.

Alexander and Kline argued that the bill had to significantly restrict future education secretaries’ power to curb the executive overreach they have said the Obama administration is guilty of. Democrats, and especially the White House, were nervous that stripping too much authority from the secretary would make the law unenforceable.

Slowly, each lawmaker gave a little.

Murray would get the program she wanted but stationed at Health and Human Services over her preference, the Education Department. Kline and Alexander would get restrictions on the secretary but Democrats won minimum assurances that the changes wouldn’t go so far as to keep the department from being able to enforce the law.

It was a deal.

And soon, news trickled out to education advocates and and analysts across Washington. Civil rights advocates became apprehensive about whether the plan would strong enough on protections for minority children and those from low-income families. They pushed for small changes throughout the the bill in conference, even in the days leading up to it hitting the House floor. They won a tweak, for example, that would help ensure the federal government could prevent states from allowing wide swaths of students to opt out of tests. Eventually, they announced their support.

The Obama administration had last-minute jitters of its own but said the bill represented a major legislative victory — even with its restrictions on the education secretary. And The Wall Street Journal, in a major victory for conservative proponents of the agreement, declared the bill the biggest devolution of federal power in 25 years.

Kline and Scott took the bill back to the House, where it passed 359-64. A week later, senators voted 85-12 to approve it. The president signed the Every Student Succeeds Act the next day at the White House, declaring it “a Christmas miracle.”

A day earlier, a beaming Ryan congratulated the conferees on their work during a ceremony at the Capitol.

“This shows what we can do when both parties work together,” Ryan said. “All of our members have done fine work, and this is a good moment.”

AN ESSA ADDENDUM from Morning Education:

Our story [above] on how the big education deal got done was packed with juicy tidbits from over the course of the year. But we couldn't include everything, and tipsters flagged one other key moment for Morning Education: The work in the Senate, led by Sens. Chris Murphy, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker and backed by Senate HELP Committee Ranking Member Patty Murray, to garner votes for an amendment strengthening accountability provisions in the bill last July. It wasn't a done deal that Senate Dems would line up behind the pro-accountability measure. "The accountability conversation sometimes pits two Democratic constituencies against each other," Murphy told Morning Education. The lawmakers putting the measure together "worked hard to put together an amendment that caused the least amount of antagonism from labor as possible," but the amendment didn't garner the National Education Association's support. Supporters like Murphy were working down to the wire to get Democrats to line up behind their proposal, which they mostly did, and the strong support sent a message that the party was pro-accountability.