State Of The Union Doesn’t Mention No Child Left Behind Rewrite Efforts

Parents, teachers and policymakers who listened to Tuesday night’s State of the Union address heard an earful from President Barack Obama about his intentions to retool education’s bookends by making community college free, expanding child care and increasing cybersecurity for students.

Obama mentioned few specifics about K-12 education, one of his administration’s top priorities during his first term. Notably, the president mentioned not one word directly about one of his education secretary’s priorities for 2015: rewriting the much-maligned No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush-era school accountability law. Obama also failed to mention the words teacher and testing.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave a speech calling for overhauling No Child Left Behind. The speech marked a major policy shift for the administration, which had all but given up on a legislative fix.

No Child Left Behind, signed into law in 2002 by President George W. Bush, required that states regularly use standardized tests to measure the progress of public school students in reading and math, and to use those test results to reward or punish schools. The law included the aspirational goal of 100 percent proficiency by 2014.

Even the law’s original backers have acknowledged its flaws. Its use of raw test scores unfairly punished poorer schools, and provided perverse incentives for schools seeking high marks to exclude students with disabilities and to lower academic standards.

During his first presidential campaign, Obama promised to rewrite the law. Once he took office, he gave Congress a deadline of 2011 for rewriting the law. Despite fits and starts and the passage of a Republican version in the House, it didn’t happen. Much to the chagrin of Congress, Obama and Duncan offered states waivers, giving them an escape from the law’s increasing strictures in exchange for agreeing to implement Obama-preferred education reforms, such as test-based teacher evaluation.

Duncan last week told a crowd gathered at a Washington public school that the administration is seriously revisiting the idea of returning to a legislative fix, instead of waivers that could very well fade away the moment Obama leaves office.

“No Child Left Behind created dozens of ways for schools to fail and very few ways to help them succeed or to reward success,” Duncan said. “We need to do exactly the opposite.”

Duncan said the administration would call for boosting poor schools and streamlining standardized tests, but would still require them, because “parents and teachers and students have both the right and the absolute need to know how much progress all students are making each year.”

Duncan is expected to reiterate this goal at a speech Wednesday to the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

Duncan’s endorsement of a No Child Left Behind rewrite came as the new session of Congress swings into business. Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions committee chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) will hold a hearing Wednesday on the role of standardized testing in the law. Alexander’s office last week circulated draft legislation that would undo the law’s key accountability provisions and lighten the standardized testing load.

Obama’s failure to mention No Child Left Behind may have been because his administration focused its energy on K-12 education during his first term, said Anne Hyslop, a senior policy analyst at Bellwether Education Partners.

“K-12 has not been the focus of the president’s state of the union proposals for several years. This is a recurring theme,” Hyslop said. “So much of the push to reform K-12 came through the stimulus act through the first term with programs like Race to the Top. … All of those programs were dependent on that new money that was flowing to the department. The money has been cut off.”

Others said they were pleased with the focus on different educational priorities.

“The president has laid out new plans to make college more affordable for all Americans, including a historic push to expand access to community college, improve some of our nation’s poorest performing schools, and protect our children’s privacy as we continue to introduce innovative new methods of learning,” said Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.), who has been active on education issues. “These initiatives, coupled with new resources for pre-K programs, will give lower and middle-class kids the tools to get ahead, no matter what their zip code.”
 
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), in remarks prepared for her Republican rebuttal, had even less to say about education than Obama.

President Barack Obama used part of his State on the Union address on Tuesday to call for bipartisan criminal justice reform.

Obama referenced the protests over the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York last year, and said that while people may have differing opinions on those tragedies, there is room for agreement on criminal justice reform more broadly.

“We may have different takes on the events of Ferguson and New York. But surely we can understand a father who fears his son can’t walk home without being harassed. Surely we can understand the wife who won’t rest until the police officer she married walks through the front door at the end of his shift,” Obama said.

“Surely we can agree it’s a good thing that for the first time in 40 years, the crime rate and the incarceration rate have come down together, and use that as a starting point for Democrats and Republicans, community leaders and law enforcement, to reform America’s criminal justice system so that it protects and serves us all,” he continued.

Read more here.

Ryan Reilly

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— HuffPost Media (@HuffPostMedia) January 21, 2015

“I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act. Well, I’m not a scientist, either,” Obama said. “But you know what — I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities. The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe. The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it.”

President Barack Obama during his State of the Union address reiterated his support for a federal plan to allow Americans with expensive federal student debt to refinance into cheaper loans.

About 41 million Americans owe a combined .3 trillion on their student loans, according to data from the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Department of Education. Unpaid debts have doubled since 2008, making student loans the second-biggest source of household debt after home mortgages. The average debtor with federal student loans owes nearly ,000.

“I want to work with this Congress, to make sure those already burdened with student loans can reduce their monthly payments, so that student debt doesn’t derail anyone’s dreams,” Obama said Tuesday evening.

The most popular version of the proposal, championed last year by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), would have given millions of borrowers the opportunity to lower their monthly federal student loan payments. Obama and a majority of the Senate supported Warren’s plan, but nearly all Senate Republicans blocked it from advancing.

Under the plan, borrowers with student loans would be able to refinance debts that sometimes exceed 10 percent into new loans ranging from 3.86 percent to 6.41 percent.

“To every problem his solution was, ‘more cowbell, more cowbell,” Cruz said. “This president, to every problem his solution is ‘more taxes, more government.’”

Read more at Politico.

The Huffington Post reports:

Many are expected to tune into President Obama’s State of the Union Address Tuesday night but few will have the opportunity to hear his remarks in person — and among them will be one of the nation’s oldest living civil rights leaders.

103-year-old Amelia Boynton was invited to attend this year’s annual address by U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Al.), who represents Alabama’s 7th Congressional District.

Boynton is largely known for her efforts during the peak of the voting rights movement in the 1960s. She made headlines in newspapers across the nation after she was brutally beaten by policemen during a march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965. The march was later identified as “Bloody Sunday” after Boynton and sixteen of the 600 protesters who demonstrated that day were beaten unconscious and sent to the hospital.

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Two new veto threats from WH on House GOP bills aimed at restricting abortion access and expediting natural gas pipeline projects #SOTU

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) January 20, 2015

#SOTU nostalgia: @JimWebbUSA gave Dem response Jan 23, 2007 SOTU http://t.co/jS1S2DoG0O cc: @craig_crawford #webb2016 pic.twitter.com/RKHJdiHq4c

— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) January 20, 2015

The Associated Press reports:

Sen. Harry Reid has returned to the U.S. Capitol after missing the first two weeks of the new session with major injuries from an exercise accident.

The Senate’s top Democrat has broken bones in his face and fractured ribs suffered when a piece of exercise equipment broke and sent him barreling into cabinets at his new home in Nevada.

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Roll Call reports:

Speaker John A. Boehner’s list of invitees to Tuesday night’s State of the Union address includes two prominent Cuban dissidents, Jorge Luis García Pérez (known as Antúnez) and Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera.

Pérez is a leader of the Cuban resistance movement who was jailed for 17 years for publicly denouncing the Castro regime. He was released in 2007.

His wife, Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera, founded the Rosa Parks Feminine Civic Rights Movement to fight against human rights violations in Cuba.

Read more here.

Re-upping my reminder that State Of The Union addresses are pseudo-events that don't accomplish anything http://t.co/if1kd39V34

— Jason Linkins (@dceiver) January 20, 2015

Malik Bryant from Chicago wrote Santa a letter asking for one thing: safety. Now he's the First Lady's #SOTU guest → http://t.co/amKnW4ZmF6

— The First Lady (@FLOTUS) January 20, 2015

In case you were wondering, Sheila Jackson-Lee has already grabbed a prime seat in the House chamber.

— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) January 20, 2015

The Huffington Post