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Framing the Debate

With the No Child Left Behind Act up for renewal next year, players on the policy stage are staking out positions on what they want to see changed.

The No Child Left Behind Act is slated to be reauthorized in 2007, and both President Bush and the leaders of the incoming Democratic-controlled Congress have signaled their interest in keeping renewal of the law on schedule.

Even so, they may face an uphill battle. With the Democrats taking charge on Capitol Hill after victories in the midterm elections, their leaders will need to build support for the law among at least 41 new House members and eight new senators from their party. Many of the freshman legislators ran campaigns sharply critical of the nearly 5-year-old measure, which Mr. Bush signed into law in January 2002. The Republican leadership, for its part, must hold on to support among conservatives, who have been increasingly vocal about what they see as the bipartisan law’s overreach into areas of state and local control.

Though many observers don’t believe the reauthorization will actually be completed until after the 2008 presidential election, national education organizations and other interest groups are staking out their positions and lining up supporters. For example, some 90 national education, civil rights, and religious organizations have signed a “joint organizational statement on NCLB” that, among other aims, calls for a stronger focus on the capacity of schools to improve and on an accountability system that judges schools based on more...