Today [Wednesday, December 9] the U.S. Senate has voted to replace the long-standing “No Child Left Behind” law.
The law has been in effect for 13 years and it will be returning significant powers to the states to help figure out how poorly performing school should be improved and restricting the authority of the Secretary of Education.
In an 85-12 vote, the Senate cleared legislation that will guide almost $26 billion federal spending annually from preschool through the 12th grade. This action comes after years of complaints from people who argued the bill used unrealistic goals to label numerous schools as failing and the use of excessive testing in public schools, according to the Wall Street Journal. The tests would still include reading and math for grades three through eight, and once in high school. The bill would end the federal guidelines for defining school quality. This legislation would also let states determine how to intervene in the bottom five percent of schools as well as those with low graduation rates.
The bill bans the federal government from allowing states incentives to use any specific learning standards and prohibits federal mandates on how teachers should be evaluated, this comes after the fact that students’ annual test scores were linked to teacher evaluations.
The replacement of the bill was already approved by the House of Representatives and will now go to President Barack Obama, who’s already announced he will go through with signing the replacement of the legislation. The replacement legislation will maintain the annual testing to help identify groups of students who are failing, but it will allow states to come up with their own standards and determine how to revamp schools that fail to make the grade.
The bill provides $250 million a year to help expand access to preschool.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the legislation was a significant step in the right direction. “It’s a fundamental course correction for education policy in the United States,” she said in an interview with the WSJ. “It basically moves away from the No Child Left Behind testing as education policy and moves toward a policy where states have much more discretion about how to educate our kids.”
