After a trip down memory lane on Tuesday, I’m back with two important developments for the immediate future of NCLB.
1.) Education groups are lobbying to put a hold on the Bush administration’s final effort to change NCLB through regulations, Alyson Klein reports over at Campaign K-12. The Council of the Great City Schools was pushing for that even before the election in the extensive advice it gave to the incoming president. But the two most important lawmakers in K-12 like the graduation rate requirements in the rules. The Obama team is caught in the middle.
2.) The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit heard arguments in the latest round in the National Education Association’s attempt to declare NCLB an unfunded mandate. “States and school districts are prisoners of this law,” Robert H. Chanin, the general counsel of the NEA, told the judges, according to Mark Walsh’s report from the Cincinnati courtroom. But the judges seemed skeptical of the NEA’s legal argument, focusing on the ambiguity of the unfunded mandate language in the law.
I won’t predict which way these two issues will be settled. But I’ll bet that both the administration and the court will announce their decisions before Congress writes a law to replace NCLB.
