Thew New York Times | Politics
President Obama Signs Into Law a Rewrite of No Child Left BehindBy JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS | DEC. 10, 2015
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WASHINGTON — Putting an end to more than a decade of strict federal control of public education, President Obama on Thursday signed a sweeping rewrite of the No Child Left Behind act that returns power to states and local districts to determine how to improve troubled schools.
The bill is a bipartisan measure that preserves federally mandated standardized testing but eliminates the punitive consequences for states and districts that perform poorly. The new version, renamed the Every Student Succeeds Act, also bars the government from imposing academic requirements like the Common Core.
“This bill makes long-overdue fixes to the last education law, replacing the one-size-fits-all approach to reform with a commitment to provide every student with a well-rounded education,” Mr. Obama said at a White House signing ceremony for the law. “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.”
Embraced by an unusual coalition of Republican, Democrats, business groups and teachers’ unions, the law was a curiosity in a capital more often gripped lately by partisan gridlock. Mr. Obama referred to the bipartisan bill-signing as “a Christmas miracle.”
The law is the latest revision of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which sets out the government’s role in schooling from kindergarten to 12th grade. It was the product of lengthy negotiations between Democrats and Republicans and a shared opposition to the strictures in the No Child Left Behind law signed by George W. Bush 14 years ago — and to the Obama administration’s efforts to institute its own performance incentives tied to teachers’ pay.
“The backlash to Washington trying to tell 100,000 schools too much about what they should be doing,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, an architect of the law, “caused people on both the left and the right to remember that the path to higher standards and better teaching and real accountability is community by community, classroom by classroom, state by state, and not through the federal government dictating the solution.”
“What we’ve learned from this is that a national school board doesn’t work in the United States of America — we’re just too big and complex a country,” added Mr. Alexander, who served as education secretary from 1991 to 1993. “We’ve settled the question of where the responsibility is going to be, probably for the next 10 to 20 years.”
The new measure will maintain the mandatory standardized testing in reading and math established by the Bush-era law, but leave it up to state and local officials to set their own performance goals, rate schools and determine how to fix those that fail to meet their objectives.
It will remove a requirement that all children become proficient in reading and math by a certain date.
States will still face some federal requirements for the schools that struggle most, including the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools and those where more than a third of high school students do not graduate on time. Those schools will also be required to take steps to close gaps in achievement and in graduation rates between poor and minority students and other groups. But the federal government will not dictate how they must do so.
The law explicitly prohibits the government from imposing academic standards on states and from issuing waivers that are not authorized by law. Arne Duncan, Mr. Obama’s outgoing education secretary, used such waivers to exempt states from the most burdensome federal mandates if the states agreed to establish their own rigorous academic standards.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the law marked “a new day in public education” that would bring about “the most sweeping, positive changes to public education we’ve seen in two decades.”
“It ensures that the federal government can no longer require these tests as part of teacher evaluation,” she said. “And it makes public education a joint responsibility.”
For some, the pendulum may have swung too far from a robust federal role.
Civil rights groups are concerned that by restricting federal authority to intervene in states and districts, Mr. Obama is surrendering what has been a potent tool in decades past to rectify racial discrimination in the nation’s schools.
“The whole purpose behind the original bill was to ensure that there were consistent standards and federal oversight to make sure that states and localities were doing the right thing by poor children, by children who needed that assistance the most, and reducing that and granting so much discretion to states is just worrisome,” said Leslie Proll, the director of policy at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “Some states will do the right thing, and that’s great, others may not, and therein lies the problem.”
She said her group and other civil rights organizations would press Mr. Obama to act swiftly during his final year in office to use whatever federal authority was left to set education parameters for states.
Margaret Spellings, who served as Mr. Bush’s education secretary from 2005 to 2009, said she worried that in removing the consequences for failing to meet a federal educational standard, the law would take the pressure off states and districts to perform, especially for poor and minority students.
“I’m disappointed that the law doesn’t have consequences except for the bottom 5 percent,” Ms. Spellings said. “We are now in the era of local control once again, and with that comes a lot of responsibility to work with states and school districts to make sure that we close the achievement gap.”
“I’m a little bit skeptical,” she added. “We’ve tried the local control approach before, and we saw pretty pitiful results.”
The law falls short of some of Mr. Obama’s top priorities. It does not include a major expansion of early childhood education, as the president wanted. And it does not go as far as some Republicans wanted in providing flexibility for states from federal oversight.
But it represents a compromise that neither side thought was particularly likely just a year ago.
Mr. Alexander said he had recently told Mr. Duncan that when he discussed the prospects with a Democratic colleague at the start of the year, they thought the odds against enactment of an education rewrite were 5 to 1. “Arne said, ‘I would have put it at 10 to 1,’ ” Mr. Alexander said.
A version of this article appears in print on December 11, 2015, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline:
Revamping of No Child School Act Is Signedhttp://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/us/politics/president-obama-signs-into-law-a-rewrite-of-no-child-left-behind.html
