‘No Child’ soon will flunk most schools...
Feds might waive rules if Congress doesn’t revise law
By Rob Hotakainen, McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - With the clock ticking, federal education officials fear that calamity awaits. 

If Congress doesn’t move quickly to change the “No Child Left Behind” law, they project that a whopping 82 percent of the nation’s public schools could fail to meet proficiency targets this year, facing sanctions that ultimately can include a loss of federal aid. That’s up from 37 percent last year. 

Beset with a case of the jitters, Education Secretary Arne Duncan is warning of “a slow-moving educational train wreck for children, parents and teachers” - and he’s not waiting for the crash. 

With Congress showing no sign of meeting a request by President Barack Obama to overhaul the law by this fall, Duncan said he will use executive authority to waive some of its requirements, essentially freeing states from harsh consequences if their schools fail to meet the federal testing requirements. 

His threat has set off a clash on Capitol Hill, where key lawmakers say it would be a mistake to bypass Congress. They’re not eager to relinquish their authority to the executive branch. 

“If we give over to the administration complete authority to determine from the rooftops what those requirements are going to be, I think we have not done our responsibility,” said Washington state Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, a veteran member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and one of a handful of senators assigned to try to negotiate a renewal of the law. 

Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, the committee’s chairman, said it “seems premature at this point to take steps outside the legislative process” to try to fix the law “in a temporary and piecemeal way.” 

“The best way to fix the problems in existing law is to pass a better one,” he said. 

Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., the chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, wrote to Duncan on June 23 demanding that he explain the legal authority he has to act alone in granting waivers to states. 

“He is not the nation’s superintendent,” Kline said. He argued that Duncan’s demands could result in “greater regulations and confusion for schools and less transparency for parents.” 

The back and forth marks the opening salvos in what’s sure to be a hot debate over how fast and how far Congress should go in watering down or scrapping the requirements imposed by the landmark “No Child Left Behind” law. 

Some of the loudest calls for change have come from liberals and civil-rights groups arguing that the tough testing requirements and stronger discipline policies are causing too many students to drop out. 

Congress voted overwhelmingly in 2001 to pass the legislation, giving President George W. Bush one of his first major achievements. After having made education a centerpiece of his election campaign, Bush pressed for the law, wanting to put a new emphasis on high-stakes tests to identify poor-performing schools and then publicly shame them to force improvement. 

Ten years later, school officials have grown weary of the uproar that accompanies the annual release of test scores. For them, the most onerous result is a listing of schools that failed to make “adequate yearly progress” toward meeting a goal that many say was impossible from the start: getting every child in America to be proficient in reading and writing by 2014. 

Read it at The Columbus Dispatch