By SAM DILLON
Legislation rewriting the No Child Left Behind education law finally gained traction this week, and the Senate Democrat whose committee passed the bill said on Friday that progress became possible because lawmakers were irritated by the Obama administration’s offering states waivers to the law’s key provisions.
NCLB is a horrible piece of legislation, which, as written, will cause every school in the country eventually to be labeled failing. Teachers hate it. The Cheney administration, of course, felt it served a purpose.
“Some of us on both sides of the aisle were upset with them coming out with the waiver package that they did, so that spurred us on,” Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, who heads the Senate education committee, said in an interview. “It gave us a sense of urgency.”
Mr. Harkin’s committee voted 15 to 7 on Thursday to approve a bill that would greatly reduce Washington’s role in overseeing public schools. It was co-sponsored by Senator Michael B. Enzi, the Wyoming Republican who is the committee’s ranking minority member. Mr. Harkin called it “a good compromise bill” that would have bipartisan support in the full Senate.
But Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who had long criticized Congress for failing to rewrite the law, on Friday criticized the Harkin-Enzi bill, saying it compromises too much, particularly on teacher evaluations and student-achievement goals. “There are huge — significant problems with the current draft,” he said. “Though there are some things in this that I consider positive, others are quite concerning.”
The movement in the Senate came less than a month after Mr. Duncan and President Obama announced they would waive the school-accountability provisions for states that promise to follow their school improvement agenda, citing Congressional inaction as the prime motivation. Forty-one states have told the Department of Education that they intend to seek the waivers.
The Harkin-Enzi bill is the first No Child rewrite to gain committee approval since Congress began trying to overhaul the 2002 law four years ago. It would continue to require states to test students in grades 3 through 8 annually in reading and math, but would eliminate most provisions in the law that put the federal Department of Education in the position of supervising the performance of the nation’s 100,000 public schools. The department would continue to closely oversee how states manage their worst-performing schools.
Though the waivers were aimed at releasing states from the mandate that schools be deemed failures if all their students were not proficient in reading and math by 2014, administration officials said Friday that Harkin-Enzi’s most serious weaknesses were that it would not require states to set any student achievement targets, and that a requirement that schools evaluate teachers based on student test scores and other methods had been dropped.
Civil rights and business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said the legislation would so thoroughly eviscerate the federal role in school accountability that they could not support it. But powerful groups representing superintendents, principals, teachers and school boards said they were delighted.
“We couldn’t be happier,” said Bruce Hunter, a lobbyist for the American Association of School Administrators. “The current law is so toxic, and they’ve had a hard time in Congress for a long while coalescing on how to fix it.”
Earlier this fall, Mr. Hunter said he had given up hope for Congressional action any time soon. On Friday, he said there were good possibilities that the Harkin-Enzi bill would gain Senate approval, and that Republicans in the House might gain approval for their own package of bills overhauling various portions of the law — all before the presidential primaries make further progress a remote possibility.
Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president at the Fordham Institute, a Washington research group, who has also been skeptical on chances for a No Child rewrite, said he now saw a 50-50 chance that Congress could pass a bill before the presidential election.
“It still could be derailed, but you can see the contours of a bill now that would pass both chambers,” Mr. Petrilli said.
Charles Barone, a director of Democrats for Education Reform, said that senators of both parties seemed so eager to trim back Washington’s role in public schools that many were turning their backs on half a century of federal commitment to improving educational opportunities for poor children.
“Right now, they seem pretty determined to get a bill passed before Duncan can issue any waivers,” Mr. Barone said.
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