US Chamber of Commerce

The House Education and the Workforce Committee recently released two pieces of draft legislation designed to rewrite the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The Student Success Act and the Encouraging Innovation and Effective Teachers Act scale back the Federal Government’s role in education and generally provide more flexibility to the states.

Similar to a Senate re-write cleared out of committee last year, the Student Success Act would remove the federal government from accountability by eliminating Adequate Yearly progress (AYP). Instead the proposal allows states to craft their own accountability systems with no Federal requirement to set annual goals for student achievement and no Federal requirement for interventions in schools that don’t make progress toward closing achievement gaps. In addition the draft bills would:

• Require districts to craft teacher evaluations based in part on student outcomes, and use them in personnel decisions;
• Eliminate tutoring and school choice requirements under No Child Left Behind;
• Retain the law’s testing requirements in math and reading in grades 3-8 and once in high school, but eliminate science as a required subject;
• Eliminate the law’s requirement that teachers be “highly qualified,” or required to demonstrate they are competent in the subject they are teaching and be state-certified;
• Require schools to continue to break out data to show how special populations of students—such as English-language learners, low-income students, and racial minorities— are doing relative to their peers.

The following changes to federal funding are also proposed: eliminate the “maintenance-of-effort” section which currently requires states to keep spending at 90 % of the previous year’s level to keep receiving Title I money; cap Title I spending at current levels; increase flexibility of Title I funding allowing schools to transfer these funds between programs as long as the money remains in the Title I school.

To learn more, please visit the House Education and the Workforce Committee website.

This article appears in ICW's January 2012 newsletter.