Dive Brief:
- Last week marked the beginning of the conferencing process to reconcile the House and Senate versions of the pending rewrite of No Child Left Behind (also known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act), but it’s not clear if the two bills can be successfully merged.
- Observers say the negotiations will begin in earnest after the five-week break in the Congressional session and are currently slated to end by winter.
- Both parties have signaled reluctance to let go of their pet issues: school choice for Republicans and accountability for Democrats.
Dive Insight:
Despite stark differences between the bills, there is a shared desire to end the uncertainty of the current law. No Child Left Behind expired in 2007 and states have operated under waivers that are renewed every year, exempting them from that law's most stringent provisions. Eliminating the waivers, which a rewrite would do, would curtail federal involvement in schools (a Republican demand) while stabilizing education law and eliminate future political maneuvering around waivers (Democrat priorities). Both bills toss out current federal accountability practices, which are largely unpopular, and give more control to states. The bills’ backers are hoping those commonalities will prevail over the differences.
"A president named Reagan used to say: If you got 80% of what you wanted, you might take it and fight for the rest on another day," Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), an architect of the Senate's Every Child Achieves Act, said when that chamber passed its version. "I am recommending we follow this advice."
If lawmakers fail to find a compromise with sufficient support in the notoriously divided Congress, the bill, which is now almost a decade overdue, could stall out and the process would have to restart.