Lawmakers to launch bipartisan effort to rewrite No Child Left Behind

By Nick Anderson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 18, 2010

Senior House Republicans and Democrats plan to announce Thursday that they will team up to rewrite the No Child Left Behind education law, a rare show of bipartisanship in the polarized Congress.

Last month, the Obama administration launched talks with lawmakers on an overhaul of the 2002 law, which mandated an expansion of standardized testing and established a national framework for school accountability. This month, President Obama's budget proposed eliminating the standard of "adequate yearly progress" for schools to close test-score achievement gaps, a key element of the law.

Many analysts say time is growing short for passage of a major education bill before the midterm elections because Congress is consumed by the economy, health care and financial regulation, among other issues.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a former U.S. education secretary, said the most realistic approach would be to focus on a few fixes to the law that can attract consensus and save other reform issues for another time. "A thousand-page bill is likely to get bogged down," Alexander said. Better, he said, "to work on a big problem step by step."

(More here.)