U.S. House passes school reform bill
By Joanne Kenen
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The House
Thursday overwhelmingly passed a broad education reform bill, boosting federal spending by 20 percent and aiming to set even the nation's most troubled schools on a path of better accountability and higher achievement.
Approved by a vote of 381-41, the bill was a top priority of President Bush, and one of the few domestic initiatives that was not eclipsed by the Sept. 11 attacks on America.
The legislation, known as the "No Child Left Behind" bill, also has bipartisan support in the Senate, which plans to vote on it next Tuesday.
The biggest overhaul of U.S. education since the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, it authorizes $26.5 billion in federal spending for the 2002 fiscal year that began Oct. 1 -- a $4 billion increase over 2001. Much of that money will go to low-income students in low-achieving schools.
The bill sets up a comprehensive testing system to identify failing schools and needy students. The schools would get resources to get them back on track, and the students could get the option of transferring to another public school or could get tutoring or other supplemental services.
"For 35 years we've promised from the federal government that we would help the poorest of our children. We failed and we failed miserably," said the chairman of the House Education Committee, Rep. John Boehner, an Ohio Republican.
With a 12-year blueprint for improvement and accountability, he said, this bill will change that.
"It's the most important piece of legislation I have ever worked on," Boehner said. "It's my proudest accomplishment."
Many House Republicans in recent years had wanted to dismantle the Department of Education and leave education in local hands. But Bush demanded greater federal involvement to assure accountability and a renewed drive to close the achievement gap between poor students and more affluent ones.
In a spirit of compromise, conservatives earlier this year dropped their push for vouchers that would allow students in poorly performing public schools to use taxpayer money to attend private or religious schools.
WHITE HOUSE HAILS HOUSE ACTION
"The president is pleased that the House has acted quickly on these monumental reforms to provide every child with a first-rate education," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said after the vote.
Rep. George Miller of California, the senior Democrat on the Education Committee, said the bill built on a "deep and uncompromising belief" that all of America's children can learn, and it tries to provide them with the chance to do so.
"We have established some magnificent goals for the American educational system and its children," Miller said.
The testing system is a compromise between those who wanted a consistent national testing system and those who wanted such evaluations left in local hands.
States will choose math and reading tests for all students in grades three to eight, and those will be the basis for measuring school achievement. But a more limited sampling of fourth and eighth graders also will take a standard national test as an additional yardstick.
"We have diagnostic tests, not high-stakes punitive tests," said Rep. Tim Roemer, a centrist Democrat from Indiana who helped the two sides find middle ground.
FLEXIBILITY FOR STATES
While increasing federal spending, the bill also gives states more flexibility in how they spend certain federal education dollars. In an effort to get rid of inefficient and overlapping programs, it also cuts by 10 the number of federal programs funded by the act, from 55 to 45.
The bill also reforms bilingual education, putting more emphasis on exposure to English and less on teaching children in their native tongue. It adds literacy and after-school programs, and creates initiatives to improve teacher quality and provide incentives to retain good teachers.
The five months of House-Senate negotiations over the bill nearly collapsed several times in disputes about spending more on special education.
A few senators who remained dissatisfied because of the special education funds said they would vote against the bill next week, but they do not plan to delay its consideration.
The National Education Association gave the bill a mixed review, saying it has good programs and policies but unless special education was fully funded, states and school districts would not have all the resources they need to carry them out. |
