Don't Believe The Obama Administration Jive On Capping Testing Time (UPDATED - 3:35 PM)

From the "We caused it - now we're trying to walk it back without really walking it back" file:

Faced with mounting and bipartisan opposition to increased and often high-stakes testing in the nation’s public schools, the Obama administration declared Saturday that the push had gone too far, acknowledged its own role in the proliferation of tests, and urged schools to step back and make exams less onerous and more purposeful.

... 

“I still have no question that we need to check at least once a year to make sure our kids are on track or identify areas where they need support,” said Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, who has said he will leave office in December. “But I can’t tell you how many conversations I’m in with educators who are understandably stressed and concerned about an overemphasis on testing in some places and how much time testing and test prep are taking from instruction.

“It’s important that we’re all honest with ourselves,” he continued. “At the federal, state and local level, we have all supported policies that have contributed to the problem in implementation. We can and will work with states, districts and educators to help solve it.”

So long as teachers and schools are rated based upon test scores, the "cap" on testing time the Obama administration educrats talk about is meaningless.

In New York State, teachers currently have 20% of their ratings based upon state test scores (even if they don't teach classes that end with state tests) and 20% based upon so-called "local assessment" measures that may be state test data crunched a different way.

Last spring Governor "I want to break the public school monopoly" Cuomo shoved through a reiteration of the evaluation system tied to school funding that increases the weight of state test scores to 50% because not enough teachers were being rated ineffective and fired under the old system.

In addition, he shoved through a school receivership plan that forces "persistently struggling schools" to increase their test scores in one year and "struggling schools" to increase their test scores in two years or be taken over by the state.

With such a test-centric environment (one that was absolutely encouraged by the Obama administration's Race to the Top program and their NCLB waiver system), the Obama educrats can call for a cap on testing time all they want - nothing about the system will change so long as the scores are used to fire teachers and close schools.

In any case, the administration isn't going to put out "guidelines" until January on the testing changes, so for now all we have is some meaningless rhetoric that may excite Randi Weingarten but will have little practical effect on what happens to all the overtesting that is currently going on in schools.

In short, the Endless Testing regime continues no matter the Obama administration public relations statements.

UPDATED - 3:35 PM: Peter Greene points out in comments that the Obama administration has hawked this testing cap gambit before. 

He's got a new post analyzing today's announcement and finds they're

offering pointless PR nuggets and avoiding the real discussion, which is why, exactly, we need the BS Tests at all, and what possible justification there is for using the BS Tests to measure, rank and rate students, teachers or schools.

But the tests are a "civil right," don'tcha know?

John Oliver: Let's Put The Tests To The Test

Why Does Testing = Civil Rights?

Stephanie Simon at Politico reported Republicans in the House and the Senate, along with some some Dems, may force a roll-back of the NCLB testing mandates.

But guess who's criticizing talk of the roll-back?

Some "progressive Dems" and some in the "civil rights community," who see testing as a "civil rights issue":

Part of the difficulty in rewriting the law is that the most hated parts of the bill are deeply intertwined with its heralded civil rights provisions: The testing requirements, for example, allowed the government for the first time to spotlight the achievement gaps between white students from higher-income families and their peers when those test results were broken down by race and socioeconomic status. NCLB put a public spotlight on schools and districts that were falling flat when it comes to helping disadvantaged students — and pressed them to improve when no one else would.

Civil rights groups say they were caught a little off guard by the sudden resurgence of debate over this aspect of NCLB. They fear Congress will strip core provisions of the law but hope that the national conversation about race sparked by recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City will help keep a spotlight on civil rights.

Rep. George Miller, the outgoing ranking member of the House education committee and an original author of NCLB, said he anticipates the business and civil rights communities will rein in lawmakers when it comes to keeping the law’s testing and accountability requirements.

“There’s no future for the NEA in being anti-civil rights for poor and minority children. Historically, that’s never been their position,” Miller said.

Have you got that, folks?

George Miller, who has taken gobs of money from for-profit education companies, wraps himself in the veneer of "civil rights champion" as talk of rolling back the federal mandates on testing circles Washington D.C.

 Miller's got a financial stake in keeping the status quo going (especially now as he exits Congress and gets ready to rake in even bigger bucks lobbying - reportedly for Pearson), but he's not the only one rapping the anti-testing movement as essentially racist:

For the civil rights community, collecting annual data allows parents to know how their children are doing, and to an extent, just having the data public can shame schools into doing better.

“We see this as a civil rights bill,” said Nancy Zirkin, executive vice president for the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

“I am hard-pressed to understand how you give states federal money with no strings attached,” Zirkin said.

Right - because the only way to ensure a quality education for all is to test children every year in every subject and punish districts, schools and educators whose students don't "measure up."

You know, I went back to that iconic speech Martin Luther King Jr. gave at the March on Washington in 1963 I noticed that there's this little repeated passage:

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed - that every child shall be tested in every subject in every grade and their schools and teachers held accountable for those scores.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood and compare Common Core test benchmarks.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom, justice and charters schools that do more to bring about segregation in public education than anything else.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where their teachers will not be judged by the colors of their skin but by their students' scores on their yearly Common Core exams and fired if those scores do not show improvement two years running.

I have a dream today!

See?

Testing and judging schools and teachers by the test scores is a civil rights issue, one that MLK Jr. and some the other great Civil Rights leaders of yore gave their lives to champion.

No wonder Miller, Zirkin and the other "Civil Rights" champions of today continue to promote testing and Common Core as a "civil rights issue."

I'm sure it has nothing to do with the Gates Foundation money that ends up funding Zirkin's Leadership Conference (see here) or the for-profit education company money that funded Miller for so long and the Pearson money that may fund him in the future.

Obama Looks To Keep His Education Policies In Place Long After He's Out Of Office

Obama looks to lock in Common Core, high stakes testing and teacher evaluations tied to test scores long past the sunset on the Obama administration:

The Obama administration is inviting states to apply to renew their waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act. And according to guidance issued Thursday, these renewed waivers could last all the way through the 2018-2019 school year -- locking down some of President Barack Obama's education policy changes well into the next presidency.

The new guidelines don't radically change the criteria for escaping the law's strictures. According to an Education Department document, states will have to ensure that schools cannot receive top ratings for accountability if they are not closing "significant achievement or graduation rate gaps" between different groups of students. Some states have struggled to keep promises they made under the 2011 waiver guidelines to improve low-performing schools. Under the new guidance, states must update their lists of such schools "to ensure that interventions are being implemented in the lowest-performing schools."

Beyond that, a state must continue to show "how it will continue to ensure all students graduate from high school ready for college and a career, through implementation of college- and career-ready standards and high-quality aligned assessments," the new guidelines say. Many states have satisfied this waiver requirement by adopting the Common Core State Standards, a controversial set of learning standards that formally define what students need to know in English language arts and math by the end of each academic year. Oklahoma dropped Common Core earlier this year, and lost its waiver in August as a result.

States must also continue to show that they are implementing teacher evaluations that take student performance into account, as they promised when they initially joined the program. Washington state lost its waiver for failing to comply with this directive.

Peter Greene took on the news at Curmudgucation:

The new guidelines are essentially like the old guidelines, with a hard line emphasis on basing evaluation of teachers, schools, students, principals, bus drivers, landscaping artists and the guy who delivers paper supplies to the school on standardized tests. It was just a month ago that Duncan was shrugging his shoulders and saying, "Dang. I don't know why the heck everyone got so obsessed with testy stuff. I guess it was all of us, huh?" Now he's back to "You will all eat, breathe, live and die by the tests. Or else."

For Obama-watchers, there is no surprise in this news.

There was no way the Obama administration was going to back away from CCSS, high stakes testing, teacher evaluations tied to test scores and all the other ed reforms they brought to fruition.

Sure, Arne Duncan paid lip service to over-testing concerns.

But he was jiving - this is the Ed Sec who never saw a test he didn't like or a test score that wasn't the responsibility of a teacher.

So now they're looking to impose the Obama ed policies long after Obama and Duncan will be gone from the scene.

Obama is looking to do the same with his immigration policies.

There's been a huge outcry over Obama using executive orders to bypass Congress.

It will be interesting to see if the NCLB waiver renewals Obama and Duncan want in place through 2018 or 2019 cause the same furor.

They surely ought to, as Neal McCluskey at Cato points out:

If the outcry over unilateral executive moves we’ve seen over the last few years remains consistent, Obamacare and immigration are likely to keep sucking up most of Republicans’ attention and the media’s coverage. But just as sweeping have been executive waivers issued from the hated No Child Left Behind Act – really the most recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act – that have been instrumental in connecting numerous states to, among other things, the Common Core national curriculum standards. And yesterday, the Education Department issued guidance offering states the chance to obtain waivers – if they do the administration’s bidding, of course – lasting well into the term of the next president: the 2018-19 school year.

These waivers are almost certainly illegal – even a Congressional Research Service report often cited to suggest the opposite says they are unprecedented in scope and, hence, an untested case – and even if they are not deemed technically illegal, the reality is they still amount to the executive department unilaterally making law. NCLB does grant the Secretary of Education the authority to issue waivers from many parts of the Act, but it grants no authority to condition those waivers on states adopting administration-preferred policies. Indeed, as University of South Carolina law professor Derek W. Black writes in a recent analysis of waivers, not only does NCLB not authorize conditional waivers, even if a court were to read any waiver authorization as implicitly authorizing conditions, the actual conditions attached – “college- and career-ready standards,” new teacher evaluations, etc. – fundamentally change the law. In fact the changes, Black notes, are essentially what the administration proposed in its 2010 “blueprint” to reauthorize NCLB. And quite simply, the executive fundamentally changing a law is not constitutional.

The latest waiver guidance goes beyond even the toxic status quo. Not only is the President using his vaunted pen and phone to unilaterally make education law, but law that would continue well into his successor’s term. It is a very dangerous move that, quite frankly, deserves at least as much alarmed coverage as Obamacare waivers and immigration actions. If for no other reason, because the action is moving us swiftly toward a de facto federal curriculum. In other words, direct control over what the vast majority of the nation’s children learn.

Federal power can’t get much more invasive than that.

Nope, it really can't.

The Obama administration has picked up where the Bush administration left off with their authoritarianism.  

Imposing policies, laws and the will of Congress (or the people) be damned.

Note To Merryl Tisch: Do The Teachers Get An Exemption Too?

Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch in the Daily News:

The surge of unaccompanied minors crossing our southern border has become an urgent issue for New York because a disproportionate share of them have come here as they seek better lives.

In fact, Suffolk and Nassau Counties are third and fifth among all U.S. counties in the number of these children they have absorbed; together, they have received more than 2,600 this year.

Our schools are educating young people in desperate need. That’s a fact of which we should be proud.

But local school districts that are meeting their constitutional and moral obligation are bearing the burden wholly on their own without additional federal or state aid.

That’s forced unacceptable tradeoffs and serious tensions with existing student populations. The schools that have taken on these students are not swimming in money; they are being forced to make difficult choices about the basic services they provide.

Tisch goes on to write that the state must pony up the extra aid and the feds must extend the ELL exemption for these children:

Beyond stretching local resources, this influx of new students presents a challenge to these districts in meeting federal accountability standards under the No Child Left Behind law. Many of these students fled traumatic circumstances in which they had little formal schooling, and in many cases their English proficiency is extremely limited.

To address this kind of challenge and not penalize districts, the State Education Department has asked the U.S. Department of Education for an exemption for these students from the English Language Arts assessment for two years — beyond the traditional one-year exemption for English language learners.

This is only fair to these students and the districts, which should not be labeled as failing as a result of addressing the needs of a new population.

So we need to be fair to the students and the districts when it comes to how these children are assessed within the confines of NCLB.

What about the teachers?

I notice you never once mention teachers here.

I applaud you for standing up for these children and stating explicitly that we should be proud our schools are educating these young people in desperate need.

I also applaud you for calling on the state to add extra money for the education of these children rather than forcing districts to cut existing programs or services to meet the new obligations.

I applaud you too for calling on the feds to double the ELL exemption.

But I can't help but notice in this entire piece, you never talk about the teachers who will be teaching these students and who will have their teacher evaluation ratings based in part upon the performance of these students.

There are state measures of performance and local measures of performance and both of those can ding an effective teacher and give them a rating of ineffective overall - as we know from the highly respected Long Island teacher who is suing after the state gave her a 1 out of 20 on the test component even though her students scored better than most students around the state on their tests.

So what about the teachers who teach students who are newly arrived in what you call this "surge of unaccompanied minors across our southern borders...who have fled traumatic circumstances in which they had little formal schooling."

Is there a dispensation in APPR for the teachers of these students as well?

Or are just the students and the districts deserving of fairness?

Some Good News Out Of The Election - Race To The Top Is Probably Not Long For This World

A Republican-controlled House and Senate is almost certain to try and dump the Obama education agenda, including Race to the Top and the school turnaround program:

Conservatives will almost certainly use the budget process to try to eliminate the Obama administration's favorite competitive-grant programs, such as Race to the Top, Investing in Innovation, and the School Improvement Grant program. GOP lawmakers in the House have tried for the past few years to scrap those programs, but Senate Democrats have always championed them in budget negotiations.

Conservatives will undoubtedly push school choice and vouchers.

But we may also see a NCLB Jr. bill come to the president's desk that gets rid of some of the more controlling features of NCLB Sr:

 Alexander, a former U.S. Secretary of Education under President George H.W. Bush, has already laid out his education priorities, which include overhauling the NCLB law and tackling higher education legislation.

...

The starting point for Alexander would be a bill he introduced last year to renew the NCLB law. The plan garnered support from every GOP member of the committee, but didn't get a single Democratic cosponsor.

The measure would significantly scale back the federal role in K-12 policy, allowing states to devise their own accountability plans, among other things. As under the current law, schools would be required to test students in reading and math in grades 3-8 and once in high school, and report the results, including for subgroups of students, such as English-language learners and those in special education.

Obama won't want to sign anything like this into law even if it comes to his desk, so what we may end up with over the next two years is gridlock on these issues.

But if Lamar Alexander is going to push for more local control of schools, put a leash on Arne Duncan and his USDOE goons, scale back the accountability measures set by the feds and let states do some of their own setting, well, I'm all for that.

And if Alexander and his fellow Republicans kill RttT and the turnaround program, well, I'm all for that too.

The way politics works these says, especially around education issues, there's no red vs. blue dichotomy that works for me any more.

I may not support choice and vouchers as the GOP will push in this next session.

But I surely can support some of the other items on Alexander's list.

And if he goes after Common Core, well, I'm all for that too.

We'll see if these GOPers put their money where their mouths are on these issues.

After all, there are some corporations that stand to lose millions if education policy changes.

But if they do follow through on some of that stuff like getting rid of RttT and the turnaround program, I can get on board with that.

Will A Hillary Clinton Administration Limit Federal Madates On Testing?

Buried at the bottom of an Alyson Klein piece on the movement to cut back federal madates on testing in schools is this:

Recently, former President Bill Clinton said he would be in favor of fewer tests—perhaps once in elementary school, once in middle school, and once in high school. That testing regime is "quite enough if you do it right," Mr. Clinton said, according to the Huffington Post.

Mr. Clinton's remarks pack a political punch: His wife, Hillary Clinton, is considered a likely candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.

I'm skeptical that any Dem or Repub is going to reduce the number of testing mandates from Washington.

My sense is, they'll say they're going to do that while not actually doing it.

Kinda the way Barack Obama talks about the dangers of teachers teaching to the test while pushing through ever more insane mandates like teacher evaluations tied to test scores that force teachers to teach to tests.

But we'll see - the anti-testing movement is certainly gaining momentum and is becoming a force to be reckoned with.

Still, the pro-reform "non-profits," the testing companies, and the edu-entrepreneurs and Wall Streeters who want the Endless Testing regime to continue are a force to be reckoned with too and they have a lot more money to throw around.

And let's be honest - is there anything in this world Bill and Hillary Clinton hold above the almighty dollar?

Cuomo: Not Every Teacher Can Get An A Rating - But Every Student Had Better Get One

A commenter points out a core contradiction in Governor Cuomo's assertion that his APPR teacher evaluation system needs to be redone to rate more teachers "ineffective":

Cuomo's OWN WORDS:

"...not everybody can get an ‘A,’ it can’t be – I think it’s going to be a very valuable tool..."

Now, of course, he is speaking about teachers--but can't this argument be used to undermine the entire premise behind evaluating teachers?! If not everybody can get an A, then why are teachers expected to have all of their students get As? Why are we being evaluated on this very illogical expectation? Can someone point this out to Cuomo and other reformers?

This is is the same contradiction we have in No Child Left Behind wherein 100% of every student in every demographic in every school must be proficient in ELA and math scores or schools are declared "failing".

Illogical expectation?

Of course.

But that's what's at the core of education reform and the "Blame Teachers/Blame Schools" movement.

Expect to hear a lot more about this stuff in Cuomo's second term - a second term that he will win in part because the UFT and NYSUT helped him win the Working Families Party ballot line (keeping a daunting third party candidate challenge from the left off the November ballot) and because AFT President Randi Weingarten lent her support to him via robocalls for his right-wing running mate, Kathy Hochul.

Arne Duncan Says New York Is One Of Two States NOT Eligible For Testing "Flexibility"

Yesterday I posted that it seemed ironic Arne Duncan was now giving states flexibility around testing and teacher evaluations since his DOE had just threatened New York State in June that de-linking teacher evaluations from student test scores would result in New York losing nearly $300 million in Race to the Top money.

Well, tonight we learn that Duncan is saying New York is one of two states that is not eligible for that "flexibility."

This is a report from Capital NY and it's behind the paywall so I have no more details than this from State of Politics:

New York is one of two states not eligible for new “flexibility” policies announced by the federal government to help states transitioning to the Common Core standards.

How about that?

Duncan says testing is sucking the oxygen out of the classroom, taking the joy out of education, and therefore waiver states get another year before they have to link teacher evaluations to test scores.

Except for New York and one other state - they have to use test scores in teacher evaluations or have their No Child Left Behind waivers taken from them. 

More on this as details come in.

Time To Sue Arne Duncan And The USDOE

From Politico:

An unprecedented set of recent Education Department decisions about No Child Left Behind waivers is at the least an overreach and at the very worst illegal, a chorus of critics say.

Last week, the department declared NCLB waivers for Kansas, Oregon and Washington state “high-risk” because each state has more work to do in tying student growth to teacher evaluations – a major requirement for states that want out of the more arduous provisions of the law. And in early August, the department granted waivers to eight districts in California, the first time the department bypassed states on No Child Left Behind flexibility.

Observers and analysts say the department’s high-risk waiver decision simply isn’t allowed under federal law. And they say Education Secretary Arne Duncan broke with what he told Congress in February about a preference not to grant district waivers, which these critics think are just plain bad policy. NCLB is long overdue for reauthorization. With that renewal nowhere in sight, Duncan has granted more than 40 waivers of the law to states, D.C. and the group of California districts, freeing states from requirements such as having all students reading and doing math at grade level by the 2013-14 school year.

“Why deal with pesky Congress when you get to make all the rules?” said Michael Petrilli, executive vice president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The department doesn’t have the authority to declare waivers high-risk, he said, and one of the states should call Duncan’s bluff.

“One of these states should sue,” Petrilli said. “It’s absolutely nuts.”

Kansas, Oregon and Washington state received one-year, conditional waivers in 2012 that could be extended for another year if they complete the necessary work on their evaluation systems, but the department feels they haven’t hit the mark. If the states don’t get their teacher evaluation systems in order, they could lose their waivers.

“Many conservatives would say he’s rewriting the law,” Petrilli added. “Some of this really is uncharted territory, and while the administration has the authority to issue waivers, they do not have the authority to issue mandates on the waivers.”

Indeed - the Secretary of Education does not have the power to force states to tie teacher evaluation systems to test scores through the NCLB waiver process.

For that matter, the Secretary of Education cannot do anything to states once the RttT money runs out if they get rid of their teacher evaluation systems tied to test scores and the rest of the RttT mandates they agreed to in order to win the RttT money.

And when did Duncan get the power to offer waivers to districts on their own?

Oh, right - he doesn't have that power.

The state of California should sue as well.

As Petrilli says in the Politico article, somebody should call Duncan's bluff.

Frederick Hess agrees:

Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said the high-risk waivers set a troubling precedent that stretches the federal role in “novel and problematic ways.”

“It seems to me to be inconsistent with the law, especially given there’s no language enabling the secretary to impose new conditions in exchange for a waiver,” he said. “So, while there’s always a little murkiness on this stuff, if push comes to shove, I regard them as illegal.”

States need to test the USDOE on their mandates in court.

It's time to sue Duncan and the USDOE.

 

He doesn't have the powers he is exerting.

 

It is crucial that some entity push back on this or he and every Secretary of Education after him will claim these powers through precedent.

Obama Administration Warns Three States To Tie Teacher Evaluations To Test Scores Or Lose NCLB Waivers

The Obama administration threatens three states who they say are not complying with their teacher evaluations tied to test scores dictates:

The Education Department said Thursday that three of 40 states granted waivers from the No Child Left Behind law were at high risk of losing them, because they either have been slow to link teacher evaluations with student achievement or had adopted programs that didn't meet federal guidelines.

If they fail to comply with federal requirements by May, Kansas, Oregon and Washington state face losing their waivers from the George W. Bush-era law, which could entail a loss of autonomy over some funding decisions and changes in how school districts' performance is judged.

The Education Department granted all three states approval to continue their waiver programs for the 2013-2014 school year and asked each to submit a plan of recourse within the next month.

Oregon plans to appeal the designation, while Kansas is undecided and Washington won't appeal, state officials said.

This is first time states have been given such a warning for this program, federal officials said. "What we really need is for states to commit to a solution to show what works for them and meets our broad parameters," said an Education Department official during a conference call Thursday.

Oregon and Kansas have been trying to create teacher evaluations systems tied to test scores that work well - but Arne Duncan and the USDOE don't care about that.

They just want teacher evaluations tied to test scores NOW:

Both Kansas and Oregon said they needed more time to finesse their pilot programs for teacher and principal evaluations. While Oregon hasn't decided on a definite program to use, Kansas wants more time to perfect its plan of choice.

"It appears that they want us to go at a faster pace than what we are prepared to do at this time," said Diane DeBacker, commissioner of education in Kansas. Ms. DeBacker described the state's relationship with the Education Department as positive overall.

Who cares if these teacher evaluation systems tied to "student achievement" work or not?

Just make sure they're in place by our deadline or we revoke your NCLB waiver and declare all the schools in your state failing.

Barack Obama and Arne Duncan - change in the education system because we said you have to!

Republican Education Bill Vs. Democratic Education Bill

From the Times:

Signaling a preference for a much smaller role for the federal government in public schooling, Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, is introducing legislation on Thursday to revise No Child Left Behind, the Bush-era education law. 

Coming two days after Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa and chairman of the Senate education committee, released a 1,150-page education bill, the bill by Mr. Alexander, who is the ranking Republican on the committee, will compete with it. 

The Alexander bill is described in its introduction as restoring “freedom to parents, teachers, principals, governors and local communities so that they can improve their local public schools.”

At less than one-fifth the length of Mr. Harkin’s bill, Mr. Alexander’s legislation would allow states to devise curriculum standards, tests, school rating systems and consequences for schools that fail to meet state goals with far fewer guidelines than are included in the Harkin bill. 

Both bills would amend the half-century-old Elementary and Secondary Education Act that governs public schools receiving federal money to support the most vulnerable students.

“What they are really saying is they don’t trust parents and they don’t trust classroom teachers and states to care about and help educate their children, and they want someone in Washington do it for them,” Mr. Alexander said of Democrats in a telephone interview. “I just completely reject that.” 

...

Mr. Alexander’s bill continues the current law’s requirement of testing students in reading and math in third through eighth grades and once in high school. All schools must report the scores and show how different racial groups, students with disabilities, those learning the English language and poor students perform on the tests. 

The bill would require states to set standards that would allow students to be ready for college or a job “without the need for remediation.” 

Neither Mr. Harkin’s nor Mr. Alexander’s bill mandates the content of academic standards. Mr. Alexander’s bill also does not prescribe what should be included in a state’s annual goals for student performance on tests; Mr. Harkin’s bill sets more guidelines. 

The Alexander bill encourages, but would not require, states to set up teacher evaluation systems. It also does not mandate any turnaround measures for schools that fail to meet state goals, although it does list options including closing a school, replacing the principal or offering higher pay to recruit new teachers. 

The details on the Dem bill introduced by Harkin are here.

It is quite clear that the Democrats have decided everything in education policy will be micromanaged from Arne Duncan's office in Washington.

Republicans are still looking to kill off the system with vouchers (Alexander is adding that as an amendment to his bill), but there is less and less micromanaging from them these days.

The influence of the Tea Party and the libertarian wing has some positive effects

Obama Administration Doubles Down On Federal Overreach In Education

If Race to the Top was NCLB Jr., the latest proposal put forth by Tom Harkin in the Senate at the behest of the Obama administration is NCLB III: Revenge of the Data Trackers:

No Child, which is the most recent version of the half-century-old Elementary and Secondary Education Act, has been up for reauthorization since 2007. Mr. Harkin’s 1,150-page bill, which was described in a statement issued by the education committee as an effort to get “the federal government out of the business of ‘micromanaging’ schools,” received moderate praise from some quarters and drew criticism from the left, the right and overlapping groups in between.

The bill faces an uphill climb. Although it is co-sponsored by fellow Democrats on the education committee, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the ranking Republican on the committee, will introduce a competing version this week. The bill would also have to pass a fractured House. 

Jim Jeffries, a spokesman for Mr. Alexander, said that Mr. Harkin’s bill was “congested” with federal mandates and that Mr. Alexander’s bill “will get Washington out of the business of deciding whether schools and teachers are succeeding or failing.” 

At its core, Mr. Harkin’s bill retains the most controversial plank of the current law: the requirement that states test all students in reading and math every year from third through eighth grades and once in high school. Schools must report test scores, and how different groups, including racial minorities, students with disabilities and those learning the English language, perform against annual goals.

Educators and parents have complained that No Child Left Behind focuses too narrowly on standardized tests and then prescribes stringent consequences for schools that failed to hit benchmarks. 

Mr. Harkin’s bill would allow states to use portfolios or projects as well as standardized tests to assess students. And in contrast to current law, which requires states to choose from a short menu of turnaround measures like closing schools or firing staff members at schools labeled failing, Mr. Harkin’s bill gives states and districts more flexibility to devise their own supports for all but the most struggling schools. 

The bill would require states to base student assessments on “college and career ready” academic standards for reading, math and science. Already, 45 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core, a set of standards that outline what each student should learn from kindergarten through high school.

In other words, every state must use the Common Core, the testing madness continues, the data tracking madness continues, and states must use "student performance measures" in teacher evaluations.

Meet the new NCLB III, same as NCLB Jr. and the ESEA waivers.

Critics of the new proposal abound:

But some critics said the bill remained too tough. “To say that this bill provides flexibility is laughable,” said Michael J. Petrilli, executive vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy group, who said states should be allowed to decide how to rate schools. “Let states do it differently, and let’s find out how it works.” 

Groups that have pushed to roll back high-stakes testing were also deeply disappointed. “The Senate bill fails to undo the damage caused by No Child Left Behind to teachers and students and schools,” said Monty Neill, executive director of FairTest, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing.

The bill has no shot of being passed into law.

Feds Threaten To Take Back $700 Million In RttT Money If NYC Teachers Aren't Evaluated With Test Scores

Uh, huh - apparently the whole state loses it's Race to the Top money if NYC teachers do not agree to APPR.

Which seems patently unfair considering 99% of the other districts agreed to this piece of crap system.

But never let it be said that the oligarchs in power will not force their polices NO MATTER WHAT.

Who cares if the policies are unpiloted, untested and potentially harmful to students?

This is education reform, folks, and the oligarchs know best.

That's why some "business leaders" are urging Congress to reauthorize NCLB.

Because "business leaders" know what's best for this country and its people.

And haven't they brought so much good into the world already?

You know, like collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps and the housing bubble and the tech bubble and income inequality comparable to the Third World...

Just what condition would this country be in without it's "business leaders".

Probably healthy and happy.

I say, let NY lose its $700 million in RttT money.

That money can only be used to fire teachers, close schools, develop tests, and track data anyway.

And to win the $700 million in RttT money, NY State districts have had to pledge to spend over $2 billion on "reforms".

It seems to me losing RttT money would be one of the better things that could happen to this state.

And it also seems to me that ignoring, or better yet, mocking the "business leaders" who promote an education policy for the country is also one of the better things that could happen.

So thanks for sharing your thoughts on education, Bill - now whyn'tcha go back to working on that terrific Windows 8 system that everybody loves so much...

Education Reformers Want To Declare Every Teacher And Every School "Failing"

Rick Hess exposed the rationale behind much of the education reform movement in his Education Week blog piece last week.

Hess noted that many of the erstwhile reformers who showed up to Jeb Bush's annual Excellence in Education conference are all excited about the new Common Core Federal Standards because they believe parents in suburban districts all around the country will come to see their children's schools are failing once the new standards and "assessments" based on those standards are fully implemented:

In a number of conversations this week over at Jeb Bush's annual edu-fest, at AEI, and around DC, I was struck by the degree to which the Common Core seems to have become Dr. Pendergast's miracle cure for everything that ails you (seemingly including heat blisters). The exchanges were eerily reminiscent of the run-up to Waiting for Superman, when smart, enthusiastic people kept telling me how everything was about to change--how suburban voters would wake up and leap on the reform bandwagon. And it reminds me more than a little of conversations had earlier this decade or back in the '90s about how NCLB, school choice, or site-based management were going to change everything as well.

...


Every time I ask about these things, I get watery, vague reassurances. Meanwhile, when I ask how exactly the Common Core is going to change teaching and learning, I'm mostly told that it's going to finally shine a harsh light on the quality of suburban schools, shocking those families and voters into action. This will apparently entail three steps:

First, politicians will actually embrace the Common Core assessments and then will use them to set cut scores that suggest huge numbers of suburban schools are failing. Then, parents and community members who previously liked their schools are going to believe the assessment results rather than their own lying eyes. (In the case of NCLB, these same folks believed their eyes rather than the state tests, and questioned the validity of the latter--but the presumption is that things will be different this time.) Finally, newly convinced that their schools stink, parents and voters will embrace "reform."

Well, we're already seeing some of that plan in action with the new teacher evaluation systems that have been put into place in places like Tennessee, Florida and soon, New York State.

Yesterday, Valerie Strauss told her readers about a "Teacher of the Year" in a Florida school who was declared "unsatisfactory" via the VAM score on her even though she was rated highly effective in the other evaluation categories.

What's worse, because this teacher teaches first grade and her students do not take the state test, test scores of students in another school who had graduated from her school were used for this teacher's value-added measurement:

Here’s the crazy story of Kim Cook, a teacher at Irby Elementary, a K-2 school which feeds into Alachua Elementary, for grades 3-5, just down the road in Alachua, Fla. She was recently chosen by the teachers at her school as their Teacher of the Year.

Her plight stems back to last spring when the Florida Legislature passed Senate Bill 736, which mandates that 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation must be based on student scores on the state’s standardized tests, a method known as the value-added model, or VAM. It is essentially a formula that supposedly tells how much “value” a teacher has added to a student’s test score. Assessment experts say it is a terrible way to evaluate teachers but it has still been adopted by many states with the support of the Obama administration.

Since Cook’s school only goes through second grade, her school district is using the FCAT scores from the third graders at Alachua Elementary School to determine the VAM score for every teacher at her school.

Alachua Elementary School did not do well in 2011-12 evaluations that just came out; it received a D. Under the VAM model, the state awarded that school — and Cook’s school, by default — 10 points out of 100 for their D. 

In this school district, there are three components to teacher evaluations:

1. A lesson study worth 20 percent. In the lesson study, small groups of teachers work together to create an exemplary lesson, observe one of the teachers implement it, critique the teacher’s performance and discuss improvement.

2. Principal appraisal worth 40 percent of overall score.

3. VAM data (scores from the standardized Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test scores for elementary schools) worth 40 percent of the overall score.

Cook received full points on her lesson study: 100 x .20 (20%) = 20 points

Cook received an 88/100 from her former principal: 88/100 x .40  (40%) = 35.2 points

On VAM data — points awarded by the state for the FCAT scores at Alachua Elementary School: 10/100 x .40 (40%) = 4 points

Total points that she received: 59.2 (Unsatisfactory)

This is her second year at Irby Elementary, where she teaches first grade. She never taught a single student who took the FCAT at Alachua Elementary last spring. The same will hold true for this year’s evaluation; 40 percent of her appraisal will be based on the scores of students she has never taught.

The Florida Education Association’s Web site says:

Every teacher will be evaluated using the new evaluation criteria and student learning growth. Veteran teachers must demonstrate Highly Effective or Effective performance; if they are rated unsatisfactory two consecutive or two out of three years, they will be placed on an annual contract then, if there is no improvement, terminated.

Here’s what Cook wrote to me in an e-mail:

I have almost 25 years of experience as a teacher. I JUST got my 2011-2012 evaluation on Friday. There is a real possibility that I will receive an unsatisfactory evaluation for this school year. I may go up to “needs improvement”, but either way, my job is in jeopardy.

Last month, the faculty and staff at my school voted for me as Irby Elementary School’s Teacher of the Year. I am so honored to have been chosen. I work with an amazing group of teachers. They are the most hardworking and talented group of women I have had the privilege to know. Yet every single teacher at my school received an evaluation of “needs improvement” or “unsatisfactory” because of this insane system that the Republican state legislators and Gov. [Rick] Scott dreamed up at the beckoning of Jeb Bush and ALEC [American Legislative Exchange Council]. My colleagues and I deserve better than this.”

I would add Barack Obama and Arne Duncan to the list of education reform criminals who dreamed up this criminal evaluation system and put it into place not to improve teaching and learning but simply to give school districts the tools to shed expensive veteran teachers like Mrs. Cook (a 25 year teaching veteran) and replace her with a much cheaper, more pliable rookie teacher (who also will be replaced after a few years.)

This is called getting "VAMMED" and it's about to start happening in NY State too.

Regents Chancellor Tisch, NYSED Commissioner King and Governor Cuomo have put in an evaluation system almost as absurd as the Florida one here in NY State and you can be sure that by next year, many excellent New York teachers will get VAMMED by the system.

As Carol Burris has pointed out, a teacher can actually be rated "effective" in all three parts of the NY State evaluation system and STILL be declared "ineffective" overall.

The only reason anybody would put such a system into place is because they have an agenda of destruction meant not to improve public education but to tear it down.

The blueprint behind corporate education reform - from NCLB to RttT to APPR in NY State - is to declare every school and teacher failing and give the privatizers and the edu-entrepreneurs access to all that public education money.

They must be stopped.

One way to stop them is to publicly acknowledge that it is not just Jeb Bush and ALEC behind the movement.

Corporate sell-out Democrats like Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel and other neo-liberals are behind the movement too.

Beware the Common Core, beware Race to the Top, beware VAM, beware the education reform movement.

Beware the politicians allied to the corporate education reform movement.

They are not out to improve public education.

They are out to privatize it.

Obama NCLB Waiver Process Even More Damaging To Schools Then NCLB

Under the No Child Left Behind waiver the state received from the feds, the lowest performing schools must undergo major overhauls or be closed and turned into new schools.

NY1 reports 123 NYC schools are on the state's list to undergo overhaul by 2014-2015 or be closed.

All but one of those schools serve high poverty populations.

But of course the "failure" of these schools lies with the teachers and the administrators, so the NYSED and the Regents are going to do the Obama USDOE's bidding and get these schools overhauled or shut in the next two years.

You can bet they will try and fire lots of teachers at these schools as an offshoot of this, close as many of these schools as they can and reopen as many of them as charters as possible.

The new schools will of course rarely serve the same high poverty, high needs populations as the old schools, so the students from the closed schools will get sent to other schools around them that are not currently on the state's list for overhaul or closure but will be in a few more years.

This is what the Bloomberg administration has been doing with their closure program since they got into office - closing schools, sending kids from the closed schools to other schools around them, then closing those schools when test scores and grad rates drop.

Now the state is going to pick up the ball and run with it in a big way.

If this process is allowed to continue unabated, most New York City public schools will be overhauled or closed in the next decade.

Many of the teachers at these schools will be fired and replaced with cheaper rookies or software programs.

And that, of course, has always been the goal of "education reform."

Ignore the outside socio-economic issues that cause the problems in these schools in the first place, blame instead the schools and the teachers in the schools for the problems, shut the schools, fire the teachers, send the kids to other schools that soon are in need of closure and overhaul as well.

Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat - the process goes on until they shut almost every district school and have it in the hands of an edu-entrepreneur.

Think Detroit. Think Philadelphia. Think New Orleans.

This is the Obama policy in a nutshell - brand them as "failures," close them, fire the teachers, reopen the schools as charters with non-unionized teachers.

Any teacher who votes for Barack Obama, knowing this has been his education policy from the beginning, that this was the point of Race to the Top and now his NCLB waiver process, ought to have his/her head examined.

They're coming for you, they're coming for your school, they're coming for your job, they're coming to fire you and toss you on the junk heap and give all that yummy yummy education money to the edu-entrpreneurs and oligarchs who like Eva Moskowitz, Joel Klein and Rupert Murdoch.

And they're doing this not because the reforms work - actually lots of research shows they're not working at all.

They're doing it because the reforms are the excuse for the larger objective - the privatization of one of the last piece of the public trust left.

NY Times Gets It Wrong: No Whittling Down Of NCLB By Obama

Wow - the NY Times REALLY gets this story wrong.

Obama hasn't "whittled down" No Child Left Behind. He's DOUBLED DOWN on it:

In just five months, the Obama administration has freed schools in more than half the nation from central provisions of the No Child Left Behind education law, raising the question of whether the decade-old federal program has been essentially nullified.

On Friday, the Department of Education plans to announce that it has granted waivers releasing two more states, Washington and Wisconsin, from some of the most onerous conditions of the signature Bush-era legislation. With this latest round, 26 states are now relieved from meeting the lofty — and controversial — goal of making all students proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014. Additional waivers are pending in 10 states and the District of Columbia.

“The more waivers there are, the less there really is a law, right?” said Andy Porter, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.

While No Child Left Behind has been praised for forcing schools to become more accountable for the education of poor and minority children, it has been derided for what some regard as an obsessive focus on test results, which has led to some notorious cheating scandals. Critics have also faulted the law’s system of rating schools, which they say labeled so many of them low performing that it rendered the judgment meaningless.

In exchange for the education waivers, schools and districts must promise to set new targets aimed at preparing students for colleges and careers. They must also tether evaluations of teachers and schools in part to student achievement on standardized tests. The use of tests to judge teacher effectiveness is a departure from No Child Left Behind, which used test scores to rate schools and districts.

Far from "whittling down" the accountability mechanisms of NCLB, Obama has doubled down on them and transferred them to teachers and administrators.

There is certainly a heavier reliance on standardized testing now under the Obama administration than under the Bush administration.

Under Bush, we tested ELA and math.

Under Obama, we will test everything - ELA, math, social studies, science, art, music, foreign language and physical education.

And it will only get worse as we move toward 2014 and the adoption of the nation-wide Common Core "State" Standards tests the administration is pushing for every state in the nation to collectively adopt.

Here in New York State, as a result of the NCLB waiver and the new teacher evaluation system agreed upon by the governor, the NYSED commissioner, the Regents chancellor and the union heads, students will take as many as 35 tests a year in math, ELA, social studies, science, art, music, foreign language and physical education - both state AND local tests - not for diagnostic purposes but simply to be used to evaluate their teachers, rank them on a bell curve and fire the "ineffective" ones.

How the hell is adding 35 high stakes standardized tests a year for every student "whittling down" NCLB and essentially "nullifying" the law?

Quite the opposite - it's simply moved the "accountability" from individual schools to individuals.

Instead of labeling schools "failing," the administration wants states to test their students throughout the year and label the teachers of those students who don't "add value" to their test scores as measured by a value-added algorithm "failing".

And the administration wants those teachers fired - just the way they wanted all those teachers in Central Falls, Rhode Island fired.

Doesn't matter what other challenges teachers and schools face, doesn't matter if even conservative columnist George Will recognizes that there are mitigating outside circumstances that can make a teacher's job very, very difficult - to Barack Obama and Arne Duncan there are "no excuses!"

Teachers MUST raise test scores or be fired.

Nothing matters more than test scores.

The Times article does get a critic of the waiver process to note that the administration is still putting a heavy emphasis on testing, but quite frankly, this is article gets most of this story wrong.

The fact is, the Obama administration's education policies are much worse than No Child Left Behind and the waivers they have provided for states from NCLB simply move the burden from schools to teachers.

Arne Duncan slings some crap in the article about there being "mix of indicators" states can use to evaluate teachers, but that's total jive.

The administration only gave waivers to states that used test scores as the primary evaluation measurement and the administration is promoting the adoption of the CCSS tests and assessments in all subjects by all states so that teachers can be evaluated and ranked nationwide.

Barack Obama's education policies are much more draconian and punitive than George Bush's.

They also rely on standardized testing as the primary mechanism to measure who gets punished - just as Bush's did.

Only under Obama, most schools don't get labeled "failing.

Instead, individual teachers will be labeled "failing" - and then fired.

It's a shame that the NY Times and many of the other media outlets can't see beyond Arne Duncan's jive to understand that and report it to the public.

But once the Obama policies become complete and children have to take 35 high stakes standardized tests a year simply to evaluate their teachers, the public is going to see just how full of crap Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, and the media are about this "whittling down" of NCLB.

Especially when the firings commence and Johnny's favorite 4th grade teacher - the one highly respected by her principal, her colleagues, her students and the parents of those students - is fired because she came up on the bottom of the highly flawed VAM bell curve two years running.

Arne Duncan: Give Us What We Want On Merit Pay, Charters And Teacher Evals Or We Declare All Your Schools "Failures" Under NCLB

The fascists at the USDOE have decided that since NCLB isn't going to be re-authorized in the way that Obama and his education reform jackboots want, they're going to by-pass the legislative process completely and resort to bribery and extortion to get their way on "reform":

Unless Congress acts by this fall to overhaul No Child Left Behind, the main federal law on public education, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan signaled that he would use his executive authority to free states from the law’s centerpiece requirement that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014.

The Obama administration has been facing a mounting clamor from state school officials to waive substantial parts of the law, which President Bush signed in 2002, especially its requirement that states bring 100 percent of students to proficiency in reading and math by 2014 or else face sanctions. In March, Mr. Duncan predicted that the law would classify 80,000 of the nation’s 100,000 public schools as failing this fall unless it was amended.

But his efforts to address the problem have gained little traction on Capitol Hill, where several attempts since 2007 to rewrite the sprawling school accountability law have failed.

“We’re not going to sit here and do nothing,” Mr. Duncan told reporters on Friday in a conference call that was embargoed until midnight Saturday. “Our first priority is to have Congress rewrite the law. If that doesn’t get done, we have the obligation to provide relief in exchange for reform.”

While the secretary said it was premature to lay out specific plans for potential waivers, his aides said that the 100 percent proficiency standard would be the main target, and that restrictions on how federal money is spent could be relaxed. Mr. Duncan said in exchange for such flexibility, states would have to embrace President Obama’s education priorities, a formula the administration used last year in its signature education initiative, the Race to the Top grant competition, which awarded money to those that opened new space for charter schools, toughened teacher evaluation systems, and remade their worst-performing schools, among other things.

...

Mr. Duncan said the administration would immediately reach out to governors, state school commissioners and other leaders to begin negotiations over the potential waivers, asking which provisions of the law they consider the most serious obstacles and what kinds of school improvement policies they would be willing to undertake in exchange.

Give Obama and Duncan what they want on "reforms" or you get no waiver and your entire state education system gets declared "failing" and closed down under the law.

That's the threat Duncan just issued.

At what point do people in this country say "Enough!" of these Washington jackboots deciding what is good education policy and shoving it down the throats of all 50 states?

For that matter, how will this play on Capitol Hill where the Obama administration has just said "If you don't act on our timetable, we're going to supersede you and the legislative process"?

Isn't that what Obama just did on Libya?

And now he's doing it on NCLB.

Don't think that hasn't gone unnoticed:

Sandy Kress, an Austin lawyer who as a senior education adviser to Mr. Bush helped devise the No Child Left Behind law, said he saw trouble in the administration’s new stance.

“This idea of, ‘if you don’t act, we’re going to go do these massive things’ — to me there’s the feel of a threat to Congress in it,” Mr. Kress said.

Chester E. Finn, a Republican who is president of the Fordham Institute, an education research group, said the Congressional inaction was leading to an increasingly serious impasse in American government.

“If you believe in the rule of law, this is not good,” Mr. Finn said. “If the Congress can’t fix, after 10 years, something that is widely seen as in need of repair, and the executive takes the law into its own hands, then we are looking at a dysfunctional government and a disruption of our separation of powers.”

But Mr. Duncan said his authority was clear, and his aides sent reporters an e-mail copy of the legislative language: “the secretary may waive any statutory or regulatory requirement of this act.”

Mr. Duncan said: “What I want to see in the fall is real action. It’ll either come from Congress or from us. It’s got to happen in real-people time, not Washington time.”

If Obama decides he gets to make the law and the hell with the Congress on this, then the time has come to impeach him.

It's that simple.

NCLB Reauthorization On Slow Track

This sounds good to me:

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan may wish that Congress moved on "real people's time," rather than "Washington time," when it comes to reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. But not all wishes come true—not even for a cabinet secretary.

At a campaign stop Tuesday in Minnesota, Duncan once again implored Congress to act swiftly to rewrite the No Child Left Behind Act.

"We desperately want to see this done before schools go back in the fall," he said during a discussion with local educators, according to this Associated Press story. "This can't be done on Washington time. It needs to happen on real people's time."

But Rep. John Kline, the Minnesota Republican who is the chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, is not persuaded. Last month, he declared there was "no chance" of meeting Duncan's back-to-school deadline. Yesterday, he said in a statement that rather than focusing on "timelines and rhetoric" in advance of an "arbitrary" deadline, his committee is focused on "thoughtful reform initiatives."

"Our education system is in critical need of improvement, but we have all seen what can result when Congress hastily crafts sweeping legislation to meet an arbitrary deadline," he said.

Given how the Obama education policy promotes charters, merit pay, school closures, teacher firings, national standardized tests and teacher evaluations tied to test scores, anything that delays Duncan getting NCLB reauthorized sounds good to me.

Since the presidential race for 2012 is starting to heat up and it will be difficult to get major legislation through the Congress, there is a good possibility that nothing substantial on ed policy gets done until 2013.

Again, that sounds good to me.

Maybe by that time, the damage created by the Obama policies promoted in Race to the Top will become apparent and some people in Washington will put a stop to the mess.

Politico On NCLB Re-Authorization Possibilities

Ever since the Republican victories in last November's midterms, every time I have seen some article in the corporate press about education, the meme has usually been that the one area where Dems and Repubs can find bipartisan ground to get something done is education.

Secretary of Education Privatization Arne Duncan has done his best to push this meme, babbling to any media lapdog that would listen that education is a great area to get some bipartisanship and reauthorizing NCLB is the best way to proceed.

Obama himself pushed this meme by appearing on stage a few weeks ago with union-busting former Florida Governor Jeb Bush to criticize teachers and teachers unions as impediments to reform.

Good to see Obama with his natural constituency.

In my opinion, the bipartisanship angle on the story was overwrought.

Yes, corporate Repubs like Lamar Alexander and Mike Penzi and corporate Dems like George Miller and Michael Bennet largely agree on how to proceed with NCLB reauthorization (blame teachers, scapegoat schools), but there are enough dissenters on both right and left to throw a monkey wrench into Arne Duncan's wet dreams of NCLB Jr.

Today Politico reports the same thing:

It’s one of the few areas in which Republicans, Democrats and the White House might agree: The decade-old “No Child Left Behind” law needs to be fixed.

But congressional leaders, wary of last year’s legislative battles, almost unanimously dismissed a fall deadline announced Monday by President Barack Obama for passing a major education reform bill.

The path to any deal is littered with land mines: Congress is divided, and Speaker John Boehner, one of the chief co-sponsors of the original “No Child” bill, is dealing with a much tougher Republican caucus filled with tea-party-backed freshmen skeptical of a heavy federal hand in education.

The key House committee of jurisdiction — Education and the Workforce — has 11 of these freshmen, who make up half of its GOP membership. And the bill’s cost — more than $12 billion in fiscal year 2010 alone — is another strike against the law in a year when virtually all domestic spending is on the chopping block.

It all adds up to a fuzzy picture in 2011 for a bill once heralded not only as a landmark 21st-century education law but also a rare bipartisan breakthrough a decade ago, when Boehner, President George W. Bush and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy negotiated the final deal in 2001.

The rest of the article focuses on the major players in the House and Senate on the ed committees, never investigates the kind of pushback a reauthorization push is going to get from backbench Repubs sick of federal control and backbench Dems sick of the union-bashing and teacher-bashing.

But given that Politico had been writing up until now that NCLB COULD get done before the 2012 election season goes into full swing, it's good to see the meme get out there that this reauthorization fight is in BIG trouble.

Frankly, a small fix on AYP might be the only thing that they can get done this year.

And that would be mighty fine with me.