You’ve been waiting for it: the Senate draft of the rewritten No Child Left Behind Act. And we’ve got it for you!
My intrepid colleague Lauren Camera over at the Politics K-12 blog offers the bipartisan draft that senators will be debating next week, and she walks you through this 600-page gorilla, too.
Readers of this blog will be most interested in the Title I section. That’s got all the stuff about standards and testing.
Click over to Lauren for a full account, which is nothing short of required reading in this ESEA-rewriting season. But a few highlights to look for right off the bat:
- The draft maintains the current testing schedule in math, English/language arts, and science.
- States still would have to disaggregate test results for subgroups.
- States would have to report test scores in their accountability systems, but they’d get much more freedom in designing those systems.
- States would have to have challenging academic standards. But the draft says that the federal government can’t incentivize or require states to adopt a particular set of standards.
- The bill says the federal government can’t approve states’ standards. And it restricts to 90 days the peer-review process that is typically used to decide whether states’ tests reflect their academic standards.
- The bill would authorize a comprehensive state literacy program.