ESEA In 2010?—Ellen Winn, Director, EEP

Have President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan breathed new life into the effort to renew the No Child Left Behind law this year?

Although congressional action this year had seemed unlikely, the Obama administration has pushed hard in recent days for lawmakers to move forward on reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The president mentioned the issue in his State of the Union address and, he is proposing a significant funding increase for the reauthorization in his fiscal 2011 budget request. Duncan has been hammering the message that there's no time like the present to move forward. Behind the scenes, the secretary has been working with key members of Congress to cement bipartisan support.

Can the administration generate the momentum for Congress to pass a reauthorization, even in an election year in which many other issues are crowding the agenda?

-------

Reauthorization: hard but necessary.

Ellen Winn -- Director, Education Equality Project

In his first State of the Union address, President Obama had this to say about tough battles:

“I never suggested that change would be easy, or that I could do it alone. Democracy in a nation of 300 million people can be noisy and messy and complicated. And when you try to do big things and make big changes, it stirs passions and controversy. That's just how it is.”

So regardless of whether or not it will be easy (it won’t), whether or not there are other issues flooding the agenda (there are), or whether or not Congress will be distracted by other matters and elections (they will be), we must reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The students who are languishing in America’s failing schools cannot wait. Every day they fall further and further behind; every day their odds of achieving the American dream get a little bit worse. In our land of great opportunity, only one in 10 students from low-income communities graduates from college.

As Margaret Spellings (a signatory of the Education Equality Project) so eloquently points out in her blog post, we must only reauthorize a law that is worth passing – a law that not only takes up, but improves upon NCLB’s goals of closing our country’s achievement gaps and ensuring that a high quality education is available for every student in our country.

Like any piece of wide ranging policy, we didn’t get it completely right the first time. Many components of the law need to be re-conceived in its second iteration. There are, however, key components of NCLB that changed education policy in our country profoundly and positively, and we must not lose these critical elements.

NCLB set the stage in three important ways.

First, NCLB reflected the good school promise – every family deserves a quality public school. In the 1990s, chronic school failure was widely accepted, with failing schools concentrated in low-income minority neighborhoods. The prevailing sentiment seemed to be that the problem was simply too big to solve. NCLB created the first-ever, national school accountability platform mandating that every state take progressive steps towards turning around struggling schools. The problems with the framework quickly became apparent, but the mere establishment of a federally mandated school accountability system was a crucial civil rights victory.

Second, NCLB redefined success by requiring us to investigate the progress of every child rather than relying on average achievement. Prior to NCLB, schools were not required to track the achievement of subgroups of students (e.g., low-income, minority, special education, etc.). We had no real idea how these students were faring in our educational system. NCLB mandated that local and state agencies disaggregate data and take specific steps to ensure that all sub-groups are progressing. Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) clearly needs to be reworked, but the hard-won “all means all” core of NCLB must remain central to federal education policy.

And finally, NCLB reflected the good teacher promise – that every student deserves a good teacher, every year, in every class. The provision that become known as “Highly Qualified Teacher” relied too heavily on traditional preparation and certification routes as a proxy for quality (and was written in a way that made it easy for states to game), but it was an important recognition that two ineffective teachers in a row could derail the life of a low-income student permanently.

Was the original NCLB a perfect bill? Most certainly not. Was it an enormous improvement over existing (non-existing) policy? Emphatically yes. With only their opening plans to judge them by, it is clear that Obama and Duncan have indeed breathed new life into this legislation by retaining the bill’s core equity goals while vastly improving upon the means to meet these goals. Launched by a Republican President and improved upon by a Democrat – I can think of no better, bipartisan, way to move towards equity in education. We’ve got no time to lose.

VIEW THE SOURCE

Categories: Education News