Seattle Schools Community Forum

From Diane Ravitch, news that the Senate has passed their long-awaited revision to No Child Left Behind, the Every Child Achieves Act (ECAA). The underlying legislation is the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, whose purpose was to authorize federal aid to education targeted to schools that enrolled significant numbers of children living in poverty. The original bill was about equity, not testing and accountability. And we can all see how that turned out. The Senate bill retains annual testing, but r emoves federal sanctions attached to test results. Any rewards or sanctions attached to test scores will be left to states.

The fight is on.  Some in Congress are trying to rewrite NCLB (as this work has been put off/ignored for years).  Some of this push is about the use of Common Core which several states are now dragging their feet on.  This rewrite by Rep. John Kline (R-MN) and Rep. Todd Rokita (R-IN) is called the Student Success Act and passed the House on Friday.  Rep. Tom Harkin (D-IA) has released his own bill called Strengthening America's Schools Act of 2013 .  Via Diane Ravitch comes this great editorial from the LA Times on this issue.  From the editorial: After Congress dragged its heels for six years on the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, House Republicans suddenly passed a jumbled bill Friday that could best be described as the No Accountability Act, eliminating virtually all the school improvement mandates that were in the original law. President Obama has rightly vowed to veto it in the unlikely scenario that it reaches his desk, ...