Two prominent senators have unveiled bipartisan legislation aimed at replacing the No Child Left Behind program enacted under President George W. Bush,
The Washington Post reported.
Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and Washington Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, the panel's ranking member, said the goal of the 600-page legislation is to shift decision-making authority to states and local school districts on matters like evaluating teachers, academic standards, and what to do about poorly performing schools.
The agreement in essence "continues important measurements of academic progress of students but restores to states, local school districts, teachers, and parents the responsibility for deciding what to do about improving student achievement," Alexander said.
The measure continues what supporters say would be a limited federal oversight role for Washington, something Murray describes as "guardrails" aimed at ensuring equal education opportunities for low-income students.
States would still be required to test every student each year in math and reading in grades 3 through 8, and to test them one time in high school. They would be required to break down scores by race, income, disabilities and knowledge of English.
The Alexander-Murray measure would allow states to decide whether and how to evaluate teachers, and "would block the U.S. education secretary from anything connected with academic standards," the Post reported.
Although states would be required to demonstrate that they have "challenging" standards in reading, mathematics and science, the federal government would have little to no say over them, according to supporters of the bill – a direct response to intense criticism of the
Common Core education standards.
To reach the deal, Alexander abandoned efforts to allow federal funds to "follow the child," so that federal dollars would follow a poor student who transfers from a high-poverty school to one where families are more affluent. Murray agreed to drop her effort to create a new category of federal formula funds for early childhood education.
But the situation in the House remains unclear. Although the House Education
Committee passed a Republican overhaul measure on a party-line vote, it was pulled off the House floor in February after conservatives said it did not do enough to reduce the federal role in education.
Although it is unclear whether these conservative criticisms will be enough to derail the bill in the Senate as well, the objections from the right are not going away.
As Alexander and Murray prepared to introduce their bipartisan measure,
Breitbart published a story suggesting that the Senate measure was likely to turn out to be a disappointment to those who wanted to see real education reform.
It quoted a statement by the Heritage Foundation's Lindsey Burke; Williamson Evers of the Hoover Institution, a former U.S. assistant secretary of education; Theodor Rebarber, CEO of AccountabilityWorks; Sandra Stotsky, professor emerita at University of Arkansas; and Ze'ev Wurman, former senior policy adviser with the U.S. Department of Education expressing concern about both House and Senate versions of the bill.
Both proposals "do not return authority to the states and localities or empower parents," they said in the statement.
They claimed that the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (the landmark federal education measure passed in 1965 which now includes No Child Left Behind) "has evolved from what was described at the outset in 1965 as a measure to help children from low-income families into an instrument of testing mandates and federal control of public K-12 education and, increasingly, of private education as well."
Any reauthorization of the ESEA "should roll back the host of programs and mandates that burden states and local boards, and allow states, school districts and charter schools to opt out completely, and allow school policy to be set at the local level," they wrote.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.