No Child Left Behind gets left behind
The new law shifts more decision capabilities back to state control.
washington» Calling it a “Christmas miracle,” President Barack Obama signed a sweeping overhaul of the No Child Left Behind education law on Thursday, ushering in a new approach to accountability, teacher evaluations and the way the most poorly performing schools are pushed to improve.
Joined by lawmakers, students and teachers in a White House auditorium, Obama praised the George W. Bush-era No Child Left Behind for having the right goals. He said that in practice, it fell short or applied a cookie-cutter approach that failed to produce desired results. Under the new law, the federal government will shift more decision-making powers back to states.
“With this bill, we reaffirm that fundamentally American ideal that every child — regardless of race, gender, background, zip code — deserves the chance to make out of their lives what they want,” Obama said. “This is a big step in the right direction.”
The overhaul ends more than a decade of what critics have derided as onesize-fits-all federal policies dictating accountability and improvement for the nation’s 100,000 or so public schools. But one key feature remains: Students will still take federally required statewide reading and math exams. Still, the new law encourages states to limit the time students spend on testing and diminishes the high stakes for underperforming schools.
The long-awaited bill to replace the 2002 law easily passed the Senate on Wednesday and the House last week, in a rare example of the Republican-controlled Congress and Obama finding common ground on major legislation. Obama held it up as an “example of how bipartisanship should work,” noting that opposing sides had compromised to reach a deal.
“That’s something that you don’t always see here in Washington,” Obama said. “There wasn’t a lot of grandstanding, a lot of posturing, just a lot of good, hard work.”
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet was one of several lawmakers who attended the billsigning.
The Colorado Democrat — and former Superintendent of Denver Public Schools — helped write the measure and was a member of the House-Senate conference team that negotiated the final version.
He praised the bipartisan effort. “I can say now with great pleasure that No Child Left Behind is now a thing of the past — it is not the education law of the United States,” Bennet said afterward in an interview.
Though the new measure keeps what Bennet called “accountability provisions” — such as tracking the progress of students in poverty — he said states and local school districts now are more empowered to address problems as they see fit.