The Center May Not Hold for NCLB
Five years ago, after then House Majority Whip Tom DeLay entered his first vote for President Bush's No Child Left Behind bill, he went on Rush Limbaugh's radio program and apologized.
"I'm ashamed to say it was just blatant politics," he said. "I can't even remember another time I've actually voted against my principles." (He eventually voted against the final bill.)
Today, Bush's signature education law is up for renewal, but Republican loyalty like DeLay's will be harder to come by. Rep. Roy Blunt, the new No. 2 Republican in the House, yesterday joined a group of 57 GOP lawmakers in a revolt. Sens. Mel Martinez and Jon Kyl, the chairs of the Republican National Committee and the Senate Republican Conference, also signed on. Like DeLay, both Blunt and Kyl had supported the law in 2001.
What's changed?
"Bush had a lot of political capital then," says Joel Packer, a lobbyist for the National Education Association. "Now, I think [these Republicans] are all feeling–I'd use the word liberated."
Bush supports a fast renewal of NCLB, and his secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, is working hard behind the scenes to get it. The Republican legislation introduced yesterday would not just delay that process; it would gut the law, releasing states from testing and restructuring mandates without forcing them to lose federal funding. The legislation will almost certainly not win approval, but it did send a clear message: Republican leaders no longer stand strongly behind the Bush administration on education.
But the mutiny is against more than Bush. It is also against the law itself. In just five years, the law has transformed public education, giving the federal government more say over what and how children learn than perhaps ever before. To maintain federal funding, all levels have had to change practice: States have had to develop detailed math and reading standards for third through eighth grade, teachers have had to devote weeks of their school year to testing those standards, and schools have had to live by the tests' consequences, facing sticks like forced restructuring or mandatory after-school tutoring if their students don't perform.
While the Bush administration has declared this revolution a success, pointing to higher test scores in elementary and middle school, teachers, parents, and administrators across the country have railed against it, saying it actually hurts their ability to educate children–and they have not been quiet.
Blunt, who supported the law in 2001, says he changed his mind on the law after talking with educators in his home state of Missouri.
Worse yet for Bush, Democrats, the new majority party on Capitol Hill, are also skeptical.
Sending a letter pleading for more flexibility to his Democratic colleagues, Sen. Russ Feingold cited his state of Wisconsin.
"There is growing frustration around the country about NCLB," he said. "It is our responsibility to ensure that those voices are heard."
In a February interview, Time magazine asked Hillary Rodham Clinton about her first campaign visit to Iowa. "One thing that surprised me," she said, "were the number of questions I got about No Child Left Behind. I know that's a problem for people, but this was more intense than I had expected."
The intensity threatens to break an already tenuous consensus. Since 2001, conservatives have opposed the law's federal intrusion, and liberals have been wary of its reliance on testing.
The law's unusual coalition of supporters, led by Bush on the right and Sen. Edward Kennedy on the left, was able to forge a compromise despite the disagreements. They persuaded conservatives to let go of party favorites like private-school vouchers, while liberals had to concede to the testing and funding levels, which some saw as inadequate. But as yesterday's bills suggest, compromise will be much harder this time around.
"It brings us back to the timeless question," says Andrew Rotherham, codirector of Education Sector, a think tank. "Will the center hold?"
Yesterday's concessions have become today's stubborn demands for reform. Some Republicans, like Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, want to hand control of education back to the states and add in private-school vouchers, opportunities to send kids in low-performing public schools to private school on the federal government's dime. Should Congress continue with NCLB, Hoekstra said yesterday in introducing new legislation, "we will soon have federal government schools."
Democrats, meanwhile, have focused their complaints once again on funding and testing. Sen. Christopher Dodd, with the strong support of the National Education Association, is now working on a bill that would inject significant flexibility into the law, probably at the cost of the strict accountability definitions the Bush administration and the Senate's Democratic leadership support. Nine Democratic senators joined Feingold in his letter last month, outlining concerns about insufficient funding and excessive mandates.
"We have concluded," they wrote, "that the testing mandates of No Child Left Behind in their current form are unsustainable and must be overhauled significantly during the reauthorization process beginning this year."
As opposition mounted yesterday, though, the Bush administration and leading House Republicans insisted reauthorization remained a possibility. Asked whether Bush was worried about eroding support for the law, White House press secretary Tony Snow replied simply, "No." Dave Schnittger, deputy chief of staff for House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner, affirmed that. "Republicans are united," he said.
But Boehner has also declined to criticize Hoekstra's bill, and Schnittger pointed out that the leader had supported similar legislation in 2001. Ultimately, the vouchers pitch did not make it into the law.
But, said Schnittger, "with the law coming up for reauthorization, we're getting another bite at the apple. We're going to have the fight, we're going to make our arguments–and we'll see what emerges from the process."