http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc … re/419475/On Wednesday, the Senate delivered the bill that Duncan has been seeking for nearly seven years, passing by 85-12 vote a rewrite of the George W. Bush-era No Child Left Behind education law. The House approved the measure in similarly bipartisan fashion last week, and Obama plans to sign it on Thursday morning at a White House ceremony.
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The legislation maintains the requirement for annual testing, and it requires the Department of Education to sign off on state-developed plans for improving when states fail to improve their lowest 5 percent performing schools and high school “dropout factories.” It prevents states from exempting more than 1 percent of students from their main annual tests, and it mandates that states report performance data broken out by subgroups based on factors like income, race, language barriers, and learning disabilities—a tool advocates consider crucial for addressing the achievement gap.
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Perhaps most importantly to Duncan, the law codifies the idea that states must develop standards to make students “college and career-ready.” “This is the first time in the history of the nation that college and career-ready standards are going to be the law of the land,” Duncan told me. “That’s a massive breakthrough.”
Yet Congress leaves it to the states to define what those mean, and Duncan acknowledged that the added flexibility offers “both the greatest opportunity and the greatest risk.” “If they focus on real long-term outcomes, then this is going to be a huge step in the right direction,”
I am probably asking the wrong group of people but does anyone have some insight into this? It has bipartisan support but I can't find who voted against it.
Sounds good on the surface but I am worried about the power if the DoE being curtailed too much. A lot of Bush's GOP allies who had NCLB passed are pretty upset for whatever that is worth.
