House Readying K-12 Bill for Floor
by Fawn Johnson

Legislation that would fundamentally rework the K-12 education system is headed for the House floor this month, according to Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline, R-Minn., The bill passed out of his committee last month. Now its members are promoting it with videos emphasizing different aspects of the legislation. The most recent video deals with one of the more emotional elements of the law--how to hire and evaluate teachers. The Republicans on the committee are touting the bill's removal of federal qualification requirements that they say get in the way of hiring the best teachers.

"Outdated federal policies are making it hard to get the best teachers into our schools," said Rep. Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., in the video. The House legislation would eliminate "ineffective federal teaching requirements" that he says are based more on credentials than ability in the classroom. The House bill would leave teacher credentials to states to determine how best to get effective teachers into the classroom. Importantly, the legislation would eliminate the current federal requirement for "highly qualified teachers" that many education reformers—both liberal and conservative—say has little bearing on actual teacher effectiveness. It also would consolidate teacher quality programs into block grants for the states.

Democrats on the committee hate the bill, saying it would dismantle most of the federal protections now in place for disadvantaged students. When it comes to teachers, they complain that the legislation would eliminate professional development funding for teachers and require that teacher evaluations simply "inform" the personnel decisions rather than driving them. (They also note that there are no protections for collective bargaining in the measure, but that shouldn't be surprising since it's a GOP-sponsored bill.)

The K-12 action is all in the House at the moment. The Senate has also passed its own reauthorization bill, but there is no schedule yet on when it will come to the floor. A Democrat-driven measure, the Senate bill doesn't go as far as the House bill in terms of ceding school controls to states. But it would ease up on some of the teacher evaluation requirements. It, too, would require evaluations to "inform" personnel decisions. It would keep the highly qualified teacher criteria in place, but it would add some variations for schools with their own evaluation programs and for teachers on alternative routes.

Should the current "highly qualified teacher" credential be eliminated? If so, what should replace it? The teaching provisions of No Child Left Behind are the least popular of the landmark legislation. Why? What makes it so difficult to write into law a workable system for teaching credentials and evaluations? Should states be solely responsible for credentialing and evaluating their own teachers? If not, what input should the federal government have? What is the best way to analyze the House bill overall? What about the Senate bill?

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The ESEA Reauthorization: Distracting Disputations about the Wrong Things
by Bill Mathis

In unintended irony, the Republicans touted their House committee version of the Elementary and Secondary Education (ESEA) reauthorization over the Fourth of July week, and as we commemorated the 150th anniversary of
Gettysburg. The Declaration of Independence said all men were created equal andGettysburg left 46,000 dead, wounded and missing. The legacy of this pivotal battle, as Lincoln proclaimed,was to make equality a reality.

In furthering these paramount principles, the purpose of the reauthorization (section 102), is to provide equality of educational opportunity to our neediest children and to close the achievement gap. Sadly, in this palest imitation of great visions and nation-changing accomplishments, this would-be successor to the near-universally criticized No Child Left Behind Act, is much less than the high and universal equality of opportunities it promises. (To be fair, the Senate Democratic version is arguably no better).

Conceived inside the tone-deaf echo chamber of the beltway, politicians, pundits and insider groupies failed to comprehend that the great rejection of No Child Left Behind was due to the top-down, test-based, rigid punishments inflicted on the needy. Furthermore, it just did not work. Amazingly, both Democrat and Republican versions of the reauthorization continue this mandated, lock-stepped testing approach. The big difference is that Republicans seek to impose this vision through the statehouses while the Democrats want to inflict it through Washington.

Not addressed in any of the reauthorization versions is the simple fact that there
are great spending inequalities between and within states. Our children of color and those in impoverished circumstances have the greatest needs and the fewest resources. Yet the federal government pays less than ten percent of education costs --and this share is plummeting with the end of ARRA funds and the sequestration. As a nation, the United States ranks near the bottom on income equality.

Lacking the vision or the will to do anything substantive about inequality, this most fundamental of education problems, has led to a great deflection and
misdirection in the reauthorization debates. Heated and partisan disputations are
voiced -- about the wrong things:

For instance, the evaluation of teachers based on standardized test scores is one of the hottest political and think-tank reform strategies. While all reasonable
people agree on the need for high quality teachers, test-based evaluation
systems have such a high error rate that their use in teacher evaluation is unstable. Beltway insiders and think-tankers go wrong when they fail to comprehend that teaching is a complex and qualitative undertaking. How effective teaching is defined varies tremendously based on subject,
grade level, personal relationships, student characteristics and caring.
Reducing this to a one size fits all quantitative scheme is scientifically weak and educationally unwise. Missing the point entirely, Senate Democrats and House Republicans myopically argue about whether this approach should be required by the federal government or whether it should be mandated by state governments.

Continuing to point-out the obvious, both House and Senate versions would still
“disaggregate” test results by ethnic affiliation and income levels so as “to
shine a light” on the disparities and inequalities of educational opportunities
and outcomes. These inequalities have been well-documented for the last
half-century. National Assessment data has published achievement gap data for decades. The problem is that the simple act of exposing inequalities does
nothing to actually resolve the inequalities. It would seem that it is time we attend to the actual problems.

This would require politicians and inside the beltway actors to actually press for funding equal to the mandates. It would require significant investments in job, community and comprehensive educational support systems. Sadly, when the politicians actually talked about funding, the best the Senate could do was to propose that school districts be required to pay equal salaries across rich and poor schools. Not to be outdone in marginal trivialities, the House funding solution is to tweak the rules about when it is OK to move funds from one source to another.

Perhaps there are some people who believe this tangential tinkering will actually result in an educational renaissance. Perhaps, it could also be an avoidance of the greater issues of inequality and inadequacy.

When Abraham Lincoln called on the mystic chords of memory, he drew upon those principles that bind us together. He drew upon the common good. At that time, equality was so embraced that it found Constitutional power and protection in the thirteenth amendment. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a wave of state Constitutional amendments enshrined public education because a functioning democracy demanded education and equality for all. In 1965, when we dreamed of a great society, we furthered our reach with the supportive help of the ESEA.

Today, both Democrat and Republican versions of the reauthorization give vacant, distracted nods to these principles. They fail to ring with great
purpose. They do not stir the soul. They are unlovely and parrot our social and
economic strategies. In both we punish the poor, loudly proclaim liberty and
equality, and provide only the rhetoric of opportunities.

William J. Mathis is the Managing Director of the National Education Policy Center and a former Vermont school superintendent. The views reflected here are his own and do not represent the positions of any group with which he is affiliated.