As the Senate continues its debate on the Every Child Achieves Act, a bill to replace No Child Left Behind, I took some time to sort through winners and losers under the bill. Here are my top 5 winners and losers:
Winners:
State bureaucrats, legislatures, education chiefs, and governors: This bill is fundamentally about giving more power to states. The various state actors would have pretty much an unfettered reign over how they spent billions of federal dollars.
Teachers unions: The bill includes no requirements on teacher or principal evaluation systems, a win for teachers unions that have campaigned against them. And, although the bill does not reduce the number of federally required assessments, it puts decisions about what to do (or not) about low-performing schools in the hands of states, where unions have more political clout.
State policy organizations like PIE-Net members and ALEC: As states decide what to do on education policy, state-based policy organizations on both the Left and the Right will take on an outsized role in driving their preferred reforms.