This is a very interesting interview with Senator Lamar Alexander, which appears in Education Week.
Alexander was the architect or ringmaster in crafting the Every Student Succeeds Act, which reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
Alexander explains how he created a bipartisan coalition to draft the law. The Education Department, he says, was left out in the cold. He doesn’t like “federal outreach” or a “national school board.” He was critical of the Education Department (and Duncan) for not recognizing any restraints on the federal role.
He noted that the subject he heard the most about was testing and over-testing. The Network for Public Education was one of many grassroots groups that urged Congress to abandon annual testing and switch to “grade-span” testing instead (e.g., 4, 8, and 12). There was considerable public opposition to annual testing, imposed by federal law. But in the end, Democrats insisted that annual testing had to remain, because of pressure from civil rights organizations. To get the bill passed, he acquiesced to the Democrats’ insistence on annual testing and “subgroup accountability.” To this day, it remains hard to understand why civil rights organizations wanted annual standardized testing, because in the past, the same organizations had filed lawsuits against standardized testing.
Ironically, it was Senate Democrats (including Senators Warren and Sanders) who ended up protecting George W. Bush’s NCLB legacy in the new law. Almost every Democrat in the Senate voted for the Murphy Amendment, which would have retained NCLB accountability and punishments. Fortunately, the amendment did not pass.
Senator Alexander is watching the Education Department closely now, because he fears that it is drafting regulations intended to subvert the intent of Congress.
Here is a small part of the Q&A:
How do you square the law’s crackdown on secretarial authority with its accountability focus?
“I didn’t trust the department to follow the law. … Since the consensus for this bill was pretty simple—we’ll keep the tests, but we’ll give states flexibility on the accountability system—I wanted several very specific provisions in there that [limited secretarial authority]. That shouldn’t be necessary, and it’s an extraordinary thing to do. But for example, on Common Core, probably a half a dozen times, [ESSA says] .. you can not make a state adopt the Common Core standards. And I’m sure that if we hadn’t put that in there, they’d try to do it.”
Alexander said that when he was education secretary during President George H.W. Bush’s administration Congress created the direct lending program, allowing students to take out college loans straight from the U.S. Treasury. Alexander didn’t like that program, but he implemented it anyway.
“Contrast that with the attitude of this secretary and this department,” Alexander said. Exhibit A: supplement-not-supplant.”That’s total and complete disrespect for the Congress, and if I was a governor I would follow the law, not the regulation.”
Do you think that there’s anything you possibly could have done in crafting this bill to prevent current controversy over supplement-not-supplant?
“I guess we could abolish the Department of Education. … I’m convinced that the law is the most significant devolution of power to the states in a quarter century, certainly on education.”
What’s your take on the accountability regulations?
Alexander declined to talk about the Education Department’s proposal, released late last month. “At the request of the White House I’m holding my powder on this until I have a chance to read and digest it.”
But it’s clear he’s pretty fired up about the supplement-not-supplant regulation, which deals with how federal dollars interact with state and local education spending. Congress, he said, produced a bill that could give school districts certainty on education for years. “Now the department is trying to rewrite what the Congress did and throw the whole issue into political wrangling,” he said. “They have no authority to do that.”
The change to the way teacher’s salaries are calculated that the department is pursuing through its proposed supplement not supplant regulation was already floated in a bill by Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., which failed to gain support, Alexander noted.
“Under this department’s theory of regulatory authority, you can apparently do anything,” Alexander said. “Governors across the country will fight and resist, and I think it’s a shame because we had ended a period of uncertainty, there were hosannas issuing forth from classrooms everywhere, and this one little department is about to upset that.”
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