The Senate's vote moves the bill, which rolls back a significant amount of federal power over K-12 education, to the president's desk. | Getty | Getty Senate scraps No Child Left Behind; education battle moves to states

The Senate sent a bill to the president’s desk Wednesday that replaces much of the widely disliked No Child Left Behind Act and shifts more power over education to states and school districts.

The bill passed the chamber 85-12 on the heels of its passage in the House last week. After No Child Left Behind established a high watermark for federal involvement in education, the new bill slashes the federal role by historic proportions, experts say. The bill — which the president is scheduled to sign Thursday — would dump the current law’s intense focus on test scores and the well-intentioned but impossible goal of having all students reading and calculating at grade level.


The Every Student Succeeds Act (S.1177) allows states to set their own guidelines for rating schools and improving them, with federal oversight and restrictions. It was a victory for many Republicans and teachers unions, who were allied in their mission to undercut what they viewed as prescriptive, top-down regulation and intrusion into local schools.

The bill would “put education back in the hands of those who understand their needs best: parents, teachers, states and school boards,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday. “It’s conservative reform designed to help students succeed instead of helping Washington grow.”

Democrats see the bill as a chance to offload some of the aspects of NCLB that are unpopular with constituents, while maintaining their paramount goal of protecting poor and minority students, whose performance often lags their peers and who disproportionately attend the worst schools. The bill requires states to track performance of such students closely and intervene when schools are failing. Because of this, it earned the backing of the president and overwhelming support from Senate Democrats.

Senate Republicans supported the bill, with the exception of a handful of conservatives including 2016 presidential candidates Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, who don’t think it walks back the federal role in education far enough.

The bill “unfortunately continues to propagate the large and ever-growing role of the federal government in our education system—the same federal government that sold us failed top-down standards like Common Core,” Cruz, who didn't vote, said in a statement Wednesday. “The American people expect the Republican majority to do better.” Fellow 2016 contenders Marco Rubio and Bernie Sanders also didn't cast votes. Paul voted against the bill.

The new bill bans future Education secretaries from pushing a Common Core-like set of academic standards and limits what the department can and can’t regulate. Dozens of waivers from No Child Left Behind granted by the Obama administration would be void starting in August 2016. States would have more than a year to shift to the new system, which would take hold starting in the 2017-18 school year.

But there will also be places for the Obama administration to leave an imprint, thanks to a streamlined regulatory process written into the bill that it will have a year to leverage. For example, the department could place broad parameters on when a group of students would be considered “consistently” low-performing, signaling a need for intervention.

Even before the bill was headed to the president, a swath of education, civil rights and business groups were already lining up ways to shape the law’s implementation. Since the bill returns power to states, advocates plan on waging state-by-state battles over education policy that were previously fought in Washington.

Advocates in D.C. have worked furiously over the last year to preserve strong federal protections in the bill for poor and minority students. But in the coming years, they’ll be “trying to make equity at the heart of education in states,” said Ryan Smith, executive director of The Education Trust-West, the California arm of the Washington-based education advocacy group.

“With all of this wonderful flexibility comes great responsibility” for states, said Cheryl Oldham, vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber is highlighting the need to continue to focus on minorities this week with a conference it is co-hosting with the NAACP on African-American student achievement.

One central issue for the Chamber will be making sure states continue to heavily weigh academic measures of students success — like test scores and graduation rates — when they rate schools. The new law allows states to also use some non-academic measures, such as student engagement, when evaluating schools.

That change in school rating metrics alone was a major legislative victory for teachers unions. Unions pushed all year to ditch No Child Left Behind’s embrace of testing, which they’ve dubbed a “test-and-punish” approach. Lawmakers ultimately settled on keeping a federal requirement that schools test students annually — but they gave states more leeway in how much test results matter. The law will also provide new funding to help states audit and get rid of excessive tests.

“You’ve had 15 years of test, test, test, test, test, test, test,” American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten said. “This is a vast improvement over what we have right now.”

And in another win, states will no longer have to evaluate teachers in a way that takes student outcomes — such as test scores — into account, a provision in the Obama administration’s waivers that unions opposed.

Now unions are making preparations of their own for the new law.

The National Education Association is pulling together a task force to begin planning how to educate teachers and organize in states.

The Obama administration, too, has begun positioning itself for an intense new phase — designing regulations to implement the law.

“We’re gearing up,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in an interview Saturday. Getting the law passed now is important to the Obama administration so it has “13 months to think about implementation,” he said. On Tuesday, Duncan was at Maryland’s National Harbor kickstarting outreach about the new law in a speech to educators.

Duncan is set to step down at the end of the year, so the dash to regulate the law will be the work of his successor, John King. And King will be operating in a different environment than Education secretaries did in the past because of the bill’s limit on the secretary’s power.

Senators celebrated the bill’s passage, but the next steps already loom on the horizon. Senate HELP Committee ranking member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) pledged Tuesday to keep close watch on implementation now that the work in Congress is done.

“We can’t just sign the bill and walk away,” Murray said. “We have to follow through and make sure they’re doing what we wanted to do with this law.”