Belatedly, a Front Is Forming to Fight Education Legislation

After lying low through most of the legislative debate on President Bush’s bid to reform U.S. schools, the education establishment’s most powerful organizations are now agitating against central elements of the measure’s testing and school accountability provisions.

Even as House and Senate conferees begin negotiating the bill’s final form, groups representing teachers, school boards, superintendents, state school administrators and big-city school districts are looking to soften some of the measure’s key proposals. They argue that these provisions would impose unrealistic, and possibly counterproductive, standards on the schools.

“What we need to watch out for are the unintended consequences of micromanagement at the federal level,” Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Roy Romer said during a recent visit to Washington.

The reform bills that passed the House and Senate this spring are built on a similar foundation: the requirement that states test students annually in reading and math and intervene in schools that systematically fail to improve student performance. Eventually, in both bills, schools that repeatedly fail to improve scores would be compelled to become charter schools, bring in private management or replace administration and staff in a fundamental overhaul known as reconstitution.

Lobbyists Want More State Control

In their unusually late lobbying flurry, the education groups are urging lawmakers to limit the number of schools that can be declared as failing, to eliminate the bill’s new consequences for many schools that fail to adequately improve student performance and to let states determine what level of progress is acceptable.

“The big game in town now is, how do you get your constituents out from under this,” said Jeff Simering, chief lobbyist for the Council of Great City Schools, the association of the largest school districts. That group is supporting some changes in the bill but considers many of the more sweeping critiques an attempt to evade accountability.

The belated entry of the powerful education groups into the debate is creating political opportunity and risk for the White House as it begins the negotiations with Congress concerning the final legislation.

On the one hand, the White House shares the educators’ concerns that the bill may tag a failing grade on too many schools--and believe the grumbling may help them set the bar for school improvement at a level the administration considers more practical.

On the other hand, some of the school groups are aiming at Bush’s priority in the bill: annual testing of all students from third through eighth grades in reading and math. Indeed, the National Education Assn., the largest teachers union, recently approved a resolution opposing the bill’s proposal to use the new tests to apportion federal funds and determine which schools are failing.

The lobbying efforts also are raising alarms among reform advocates, who fear the education groups are trying to divert the demand for change and protect their existing approaches in the schools.

“Everyone is for accountability until it actually gets put into place and applies to them,” said Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), a principal architect of the Senate bill. “What we have to do is focus on the kids. You almost have the educational interests serving the system, instead of the kids the system is supposed to serve.”

Some Flexibility at State Levels

Despite their basic similarities, the House and Senate bills contain enough differences to promise complex negotiations with the administration that are likely to stretch until well into September. The conflicts cover a range of subjects, from teacher qualifications to the overall level of education funding.

But the heart of the disputes--and the issues that the education groups are targeting--center on how the new tests are administered and used and what consequences should face schools that fail to improve student performances on the exams.

None of the critics appears to be directly targeting the annual testing requirement. Instead, the testing fight will come on other grounds.

Under pressure from governors and state education officials, the administration accepted language in both bills that gives states freedom to meet the new testing requirement with exams that differ from year to year and even from place to place within a state in the same year.

The state officials argue that flexibility is necessary to preserve local control over education. But reform advocates have complained that such variation could produce a babel of results that undermines Bush’s goal of providing parents clear assessments of school and student performance.

Largely agreeing with that criticism, White House officials say that in the conference talks they will seek to stiffen requirements that states implement a testing system with results that can be more easily compared from place to place and year to year. “We can improve on that,” said one senior administration official who requested anonymity. “What we are going to do is honor the president’s commitment to local control yet come up with some language on ensuring comparability.”

But the effort to ensure greater comparability is likely to again trigger resistance from governors and state education administrators.

The NEA, meanwhile, is opening a new front in the testing debate. The administration and lawmakers propose identifying failing schools based solely on the performance of their students on the new annual tests. But the teachers union now is arguing that the assessment also should take into account a wide range of other factors--from the size of the classes to the qualifications of the teachers--in any given school.

To Bayh and other reformers, that’s a recipe for ensuring that few schools are ever found to be needing improvement. “If anything, we ought to err on the side of being too aggressive because we’ve erred on the other side for too long with consequences for the kids that are unconscionable,” he said.

Other education groups are challenging the provisions on failing schools on another front. Lobbyists and congressional aides involved in the talks say the Council of Great City Schools and the lobbying groups for state school administrators, local superintendents and school boards are circulating proposals to severely limit the number of schools that could be identified as failing.

A National Standard for Student Progress

Under the House and Senate bills, the federal government would establish a national standard for acceptable annual progress in improving student performance that schools would have to meet. The state school administrators are proposing that states be given more flexibility to determine adequate progress themselves--and that states be free not to identify a school as failing unless the state has received sufficient federal money to fund improvements in the school.

The great city school coalition is finalizing its own plan to focus penalties and intervention only on the most poorly performing 10% of schools. Simering said such limits only acknowledge the practical ceiling on the money and personnel that states have available to intervene in troubled schools.

“We don’t see how you can go in and provide intensive assistance in any more than about 10% of your schools,” he said.

The school board and superintendent groups are advancing a similar system.

These specific changes could be more than the administration can support. But Bush aides believe this resistance from educators could help them convince the conferees that the House legislation, in particular, has set standards so high that too many schools will be labeled as failing.

“I’m of the view that this last-minute message will drive some very idealistic people to be more realistic, and that’s a positive,” the senior administration official said. “But I don’t think people are going to abandon the basic structure of the bill.”