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Politico...
Could ‘No Child’ get
left behind?
By Meredith Shiner
It’s one of the few areas in which Republicans, Democrats and the White
House might agree: The decade-old “No Child Left Behind” law needs to
be fixed.
But congressional leaders, wary of last year’s legislative battles,
almost unanimously dismissed a fall deadline announced Monday by
President Barack Obama for passing a major education reform bill.
The path to any deal is littered with land mines: Congress is divided,
and Speaker John Boehner, one of the chief co-sponsors of the original
“No Child” bill, is dealing with a much tougher Republican caucus
filled with tea-party-backed freshmen skeptical of a heavy federal hand
in education.
The key House committee of jurisdiction — Education and the Workforce —
has 11 of these freshmen, who make up half of its GOP membership. And
the bill’s cost — more than $12 billion in fiscal year 2010 alone — is
another strike against the law in a year when virtually all domestic
spending is on the chopping block.
It all adds up to a fuzzy picture in 2011 for a bill once heralded not
only as a landmark 21st-century education law but also a rare
bipartisan breakthrough a decade ago, when Boehner, President George W.
Bush and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy negotiated the final deal in 2001.
For months now, a group of eight bipartisan lawmakers calling
themselves the “Big Eight” have been meeting with administration
officials, from Obama himself to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, to
try to lay the foundation for education reform. As recently as a White
House meeting last Thursday, the group has been engaging in what all
parties have categorized as “productive negotiations.”
The details on what a reform package might look like, though, are still
unclear, and the president’s big education speech Monday at a school in
Arlington, Va., didn’t really change the state of play on the Hill.
“It’s a speech that is nice — it’s nice that the president continues to
focus on it; it’s a very pleasant thing, but it neither spurs action
nor inhibits action,” said a Senate GOP aide familiar with the talks.
The balance of reform versus spending, particularly given last
November’s wave election and the GOP line on spending cuts, is tenuous
at best. Republicans on the Senate side say they don’t want to be
negotiating just for show and that they must figure out a deal that
will be acceptable to their House counterparts, even if Boehner so far
has been coy in what he might support...
Read the rest of the story at Politico
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