Dive Brief:
- Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Patty Murray (D-WA) — the chairman and ranking Democrat of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, respectively — have made headway on a rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, saying they hope to see the bill go before a committee in mid-April.
- This bill is expected to be a more bipartisan effort than the one currently set for a vote later this month in the House, being prepared by Rep. John Kline (R-Minn), the chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
- The House initially planned to vote on its version of the bill in February, but the vote was never held because of conservative opposition.
Dive Insight:
As it last stood, the House bill is all but certainly going to be vetoed if it makes through the Senate. At a breakfast last month, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that President Barack Obama won't put his name on anything that takes funds away from "poor kids and poor districts." The House rewrite would arguably do that, since it would allow Title I funds to follow students from school to school as opposed to slotting them for the nation's neediest districts.
Conservative groups including Heritage Action for America and Club for Growth were against the original House bill and pressed to keep it off the House floor.
There is a bit more hope when it comes to Alexander's bill, especially since it appears to be more of a bipartisan effort. In January, he released a 400-page draft bill to get people to start talking about what they did and didn't want to see happen to the controversial No Child Left Behind Act.
The draft, which was first obtained by Education Week, outlined two different options when it comes to dealing with standardized testing requirements, which in many ways became the crux and most contentious part of the 2001 measure. One option gave states agency to decide how and when they want to test students and wouldn't require those ideas to be submitted to the U.S. secretary of education for approval. The other would maintain the status quo of having states test annually in grades three through eight, and once during high school. The House version of the bill, on the other hand, currently sticks with the testing status quo.