The Boehner effect and No Child Left Behind
After 13 years in office, House Speaker John A. Boehner is set to resign.
The politics of rewriting No Child Left Behind, the main K-12 federal education law that seemingly everyone has grown to hate but no one has been able to fix, just got more muddled.
House Speaker John Boehner’s decision to step down in October immediately complicates the fragile effort between House and Senate negotiators, who have been working to craft a compromise bill to replace No Child Left Behind.
Congress has been trying to update the 2002 law, widely recognized as broken and a burden to the nation’s 100,000 public schools, since 2007. In July, the Senate passed a bipartisan bill while House Republicans approved a GOP version. The two sides have been trying to come to terms ever since.
Boehner’s decision to step down came as conservative GOP members of the House Freedom Caucus were talking about a no-confidence vote in him - the same members who opposed the House bill to replace No Child Left Behind because it included a federal role in public education, which they believe is strictly a state and local function.
But to reach a deal with the Senate that could also win President Obama’s signature, House negotiators are going to have make their GOP bill more appealing - not less appealing - to Democrats, who insist the federal government must be able to exercise some oversight of K-12 education.
If Boehner is succeeded by a speaker more closely aligned with the Freedom Caucus, the chances for a compromise education bill plummet considerably, some observers said Friday.
“This brings passage of a bill that can get signed by Obama from ‘very likely’ to ‘somewhat doubtful’,” said Charles Barone, policy director at Democrats for Education Reform who helped negotiate No Child Left Behind as a Hill aide. “One reason is they’re going to need to pass this with Democratic votes and the reason Boehner got pushed out is because of his willingness to work with Democrats. He’s got 40 or so guys that never agree to any compromises.”
But Mary Kusler, the chief lobbyist for the National Education Association, which represents 3 million educators, said she thinks there is a window of opportunity to push a compromise bill through both houses and get it signed into law before Boehner gives up the gavel.
She noted that both chambers have already passed their bills. “I’m not willing to concede that this is over,” Kusler said. “Passing a conference bill that cannot be amended and passing a bill open to amendments are two different things,” she said. “It is much easier to move a conference report than a bill. This means it’s even more important to get this done before he leaves. And so The Boehner effect and No Child Left Behind - The Washington Post:
