With a flicker of bipartisanship, work has begun on a significant reform of the nation’s main education law, No Child Left Behind, which could end a lot of the frustration among students, parents and teachers with the emphasis it puts on testing students by shifting authority and decision-making to the states and local school districts.
Members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions began work Tuesday to consider legislation drafted by Sens. Patty Murray, D-Washington, and Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee, to reform No Child Left Behind, itself a revision of a 1965 law that sought to equalize funding and access to elementary and secondary education.
In announcing the legislation last week, Murray and Alexander admitted this is a compromise and includes provisions each wouldn’t have necessarily included on their own. But such compromises are key to bipartisan action.
The reforms, as written, would not do away with the current regimen of testing students in math and language arts each year in the third through eighth grades and again once in high school, as well as three science tests between the third and 12th grades. But the federal Department of Education would no longer mandate that the tests be used to evaluate teachers. Objections among Democrats in the Legislature and the teachers union to that requirement are what resulted in the state losing a waiver last year that cost school districts control of $40 million that instead went to tutors and for transportation of students to other school districts.
In seeking to restore the waiver this year, the Legislature has been considering Senate Bill 5748, which would put off the requirement to use test scores in teacher evaluations for a year and would allow school districts to negotiate with local teachers unions on how much weight the scores would be given in evaluations. With Congress only starting work to reform No Child Left Behind and passage not guaranteed, the Legislature shouldn’t put off action to restore the waiver.
The proposed federal reforms would preserve accountability but would put the responsibility on the state to design its own checks to ensure students are learning and prepared for the next grade level and ultimately for college and/or careers. Testing, used primarily to measure student performance and direct the education of each child, should continue on the current schedule.
There is opposition to the reforms. The National Education Association, the parent of the Washington Education Association, still objects to the testing regimen the reforms preserve. And, the national union says, the bill doesn’t go far enough in addressing the inequities between schools with higher rates of low-income families and those with students from more affluent families.
If the reforms proposed by Murray and Alexander become law, Washington state and local school districts should take seriously the responsibilities that would be transferred from the federal level to them.
The Legislature is expected to increase K-12 education funding by as much as $1.4 billion this session as it continues work to meet its obligation to fully fund education. But the state’s obligation extends beyond spending money; it must ensure that spending results in improved educational outcomes for all students. The state, local school districts, their unions, parents and the community should work together to hold each other accountable.
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