It gives me great pause that the voices of more than 80 civil rights, disability, parent, student, grassroots and education organizations were ignored during the markup. Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) represented these interests by offering amendments to strengthen the definition of highly qualified teachers and require equitable distribution and supervision for those who are not highly qualified. However, both lost during the markup. Sen. Alexander suggested that deeming a teacher as highly qualified had little meaning and creates bureaucracy. Further disregarding those 80 organizations and the millions of students, parents and educators that they collectively represent, Sen. Alexander announced plans to offer a floor amendment to eliminate highly qualified provisions altogether.

In reality, there is no federal bureaucracy devoted to establishing a common floor that designates whether new teachers are “highly qualified.” That function has been left to the states. Students and their parents deserve to know that the teachers they encounter in their classrooms are actually able to teach. It is astonishing for Sen. Alexander to assert that any apparatus that seeks to provide this assurance is little more than bureaucratic. We have the tools and strategies, such as the Teacher Performance Assessment, to inform these deliberations at the program level and at the state licensing level. It is disingenuous pseudo-reform double-speak to advocate that any of those assuming the role of classroom teacher should be excused from providing valid evidence that they know how to do the work they will encounter. All teachers should be required to show that they have the skills and knowledge necessary to make them qualified to be effective in practice.

In addition, Sen. Bennet’s bill passed on a voice vote during the markup – a bill that numerous organizations, including the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the National Council of Teachers of English, the National Education Association and the Learning Disabilities Association of America, opposed. It is clear that this bill is an attempt to divert funds that could be used to support reforms already underway in educator preparation, but that will instead be used as venture capital to fund another boutique provider system. Many changes, including rigorous residency models supported by the Teacher Quality Partnership grants, are occurring in educator preparation. Additional federal funds should be channeled in the direction of expanding these reform efforts. That money should be used to leverage more extensive impact on student achievement and to strengthen the educator preparation industry by driving these impressive strategies to scale.

Several prominent education, civil rights and business groups have indicated that they are not able to support the Senate bill in its current form. While ESEA reauthorization continues to move forward, we then will continue our efforts to strengthen the bill so that it becomes a true benefit to students.

I have vowed not to spend our good readers' time any longer in the tired old song of responding to Monty Neill. But I must break that vow at least once more.

Once again: there was a huge increase in NAEP scores the year of and the year after the passage of NCLB. These gains make up virtually all of what Neill wants to call pre-NCLB gains. Russ Whitehurst and other serious observers suggest that these "border" years be left out of the analysis.

I do not concede the rate of gain has slowed, as Neill suggests. I'm just refusing to play the pre and post game with him because of this issue.

The gains during the period of consequential accountability, first by pioneering states and then through extension by NCLB, have been large, especially for disadvantaged students.

I would add that the progress has substantially accelerated since NCLB for younger students who were not featured in earlier state accountability systems - students with disabilities and English language learners.

After virtually exclusively blaming NCLB for "slowing" gains in the 2000s, he then plays the game of looking for every cause in the world other than accountability to explain gains in the late 1990s. He can't have it both ways! Either these policies are substantially causal, or they're not. He can't say they are and then aren't depending on what results suit his ideology.

We have had prosperous periods and increased spending in many periods, including the 80s through the mid-90s, when NAEP was flat. So, the gains from the late 90s through the most recent assessment, which has been no more prosperous, and perhaps less so, were not due to money. Neill presents no proof, and never has, of other causal factors.

He's right on one thing: we haven't had the gains in college readiness that we've had in the earlier grades. And to deal with that, it's high time finally that we bring serious accountability to our high schools!

He's also right that the civil rights movement helped increase achievement for children of color in the 60s and 70s. That progress stagnated in the mid-80s through the mid-90s. It is now on the way up again. And consequential accountability is one big reason.

Nations that are doing well on international tests are doing so for many reasons. Of course, Neill, who quickly looks to many causes to deny accountability's role in gains in the US, rushes without any proof past all the many causes for success in those nations to claim it's because they don't impose accountability. Maddening.

One thing he'd have to admit from OECD data: it's not because these nations spend more than we do! They don't.

Is it less child poverty? Is it that they only allow the most effective people into teaching? Is it that their tests actually count for a lot MORE than ours? I don't know, and he doesn't either.

I vow once again not to engage with Monty Neill. Lord, help me honor it next time.

Since Kress particularly takes me to task in his comment, a brief response. Kress does not dispute my clearly proven point that the rate of gain on NAEP has fallen. The link in my initial comment will lead the reader to the details, which come straight from NAEP's own data. Similar findings have been made by others. I keep repeating this because Kress and others keep ignoring and denying the evidence.

Kress then faults me for comparing NCLB pre-NLCB years, a period during which, he claims, test-based accountability spread across the states. For this he credits the NAEP gains of the 90s.But there were other factors at work in that relatively prosperous period, including real increases in school funding. Studies find different causative factors as to the NAEP gains. NCLB forced states that did not have Texas-style test-based accountability to adopt those measures. The result has not been salutary, given what has happened to NAEP since.

BTW, NAEP is a good but still limited test. It is hardly a great assessment of higher order thinking, conceptual understanding, or the abilities to apply or create knowledge - all of which should be parts of schooling and the things most driven out by test-based accountability. Achieve, a promoter of high stakes testing, conducted a survey and found that first year college profs want from students mostly things that are not on the tests and at risk of not being taught. Thus, as the NY Times recently reported, remediation needs remain high for graduates of 'test high.' So, NAEP is useful, but limited, and closer to what state tests measure than to what a comprehensive, high-quality assessment system would provide.

Back to the history. When NAEP was first introduced in the 1960s and early 70s, there was a marked gain among African American students. This was the period of desegregation. The Civil Rights Project argues deseg was the primary basis of the gains, and as deseg waned (was politically defeated), scores declined, concommitant with rising ractial segregation especially among poor people of color. In any event, I know of no evidence that the earlier gains could possibly be attributed to test-based schooling.

If those rates of gain had been sustained, then we would have come vastly closer to equity of outcomes in graduation rates, NAEP scores and perhaps college attendance. Test-based accountability was and is a bad substitute for building equity on a solid foundation. It is no accident that most nations doing substantially better on international asseessments and now often on graduation and college entry rates have far greated ecomonic equality, far less child poverty, and no need for illusory "improvement" schemes such as No Child Left Untested.

For talented, committed educators who want their students to be engaged, challenged and supported, the choice seems to come down to this: Is it better to have their professional commitments and their students’ educations undermined by bad policies made by states or by bad policies dictated by Washington? If that framing seems a bit melodramatic or depressing, please read this recent article from the Kappan (http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/10/01/kappan_burris.html)

As a starting point, Diane’s assertion is correct and wise: “The federal role in K-12 education should return to what Congress envisioned in 1965: providing additional resources for the neediest children; supporting basic and applied research; providing useful information about the condition and progress of American education; and protecting the civil rights of students.”

But the larger education discussion, in state capitals as much as in DC, remains imbalanced. Legislators at all levels continue rummaging for magic beans hidden (we’re led to believe) within a never-ending series market-based and test-driven policies. Even if Congress were to end federal policies requiring or promoting these policies (which I doubt it’ll do), I expect to see no short-term change in the landscape. Real change will occur only with a larger shift whereby trust is given to professional educators and to research evidence.

Before I address the topic directly, I must respond to a few of the early comments.

When she was a historian, Diane Ravitch would never have spit out as truth a speculative statement from a government official, particularly one she doesn't trust. Yet, here she is repeating Duncan's charge that 80% of the schools will be labeled failures this year.

I've seen data from virtually all the states. Though it's hard to be exact, the number looks closer to 48%. In fact, one would hope that an enterprising reporter might examine the data more closely than I can and do a story on the good Secretary's prediction. It seems sorta important to the current debate.

The charges by Ravitch and Neil that the strategies inherent to NCLB haven't worked remain baseless - no matter how many times they repeat them.

Neil beats up on all the policies associated with consequential accountability. Yet, he keeps comparing data from the late 90s (when these policies were first spreading through the states like wildfire) to post-NCLB data. He's very proud of showing the early data are way up, and the later data are just up. I could quibble, but ok.

What Neil ought to do is compare NAEP results from a time before consequential accountability took root, say, when Ms. Ravitch was in government, to that period when the policies the two of them despise became and stayed ascendant.

As to comments by my friends, Rick Hess and Mike Petrilli, I believe the civil rights and business groups who are standing up for rigorous accountability toward closing the achievement gap are going to fight and fight hard against any weakening of accountability.

"Grim tea leaves" for them? They're "getting rolled?" Has punditry really fallen this far inside the Beltway? Legislation is a long way from being completed. I can't exactly predict when legislation will pass or what direction politics will take before it does. Can they?

But, even more important, the civil rights and business groups know precisely why Harkin-Enzi is hardly better than current law. Current law should be fixed, but, indeed for these groups, the new bill is far worse.

After decades of forward progress in terms of policies that promote the interests of disadvantaged students, this bill is the first in those many decades that goes backwards.

To turn timid, as the Senate bill would do, at a time when global competition demands greater exertion, greater rigor, and greater accountability for all our children - this goes backwards.

Bold or backwards - that's the choice.

One thing we’ve learned from watching the Senate HELP Committee wrestle with the bill is that it seems much easier to change the rhetoric than the substantive details. For example, Congress has clearly heard the message from the folk who grappled with the impact of NCLB every day -- administrators, teachers, students and parents -- that it has failed to drive real school improvement where it’s needed. Senators also recognized that the law mislabeled many good schools as failing. The result? It seems certain that Congress will eliminate the name “No Child Left Behind.”

Unfortunately, despite intra- and inter-party disagreements, inside-the-Beltway politicians appear to remain wedded to NCLB’s failed approach to improving schools -- massive over-testing and overreliance on test scores to judge.

Yet, a decade of data shows that this strategy clearly hasn’t worked. According to the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) educational gains slowed or stalled after NCLB took effect. Achievement gaps based on poverty, race, disability or language have stagnated or grown.

At the same time, nations cited as models for achieving sustained growth in achievement, like Finland, take an approach that contrasts sharply with that of the old -- and the proposed new -- NCLB. Those countries reject of test-based accountability for students, schools and teachers.

The Forum on Educational Accountability (FEA) echoes the voices of many educators and parents with its calls for reducing the amount of testing. In the Joint Statement on NCLB, more than 150 organizational signers recommend that a revised NCLB “Decrease the testing burden on states, schools and districts by allowing states to assess students annually in selected grades in elementary, middle schools, and high schools.”

Of course, it is good the HELP Committee bill ended the absurdly unrealistic “Adequate Yearly Progress” provision. But now we are left with a dispute between proponents of two bad approaches: those who want to mostly preserve the failed NCLB, and those who want to mostly scrap a meaningful federal role in improving education. The only way out is a different paradigm, such as that outlined by FEA.

If the current effort to pass a law collapses, then Congress needs to get serious about a real overhaul of NCLB in 2013, not the tinkering compromise we see developing. If this bill does pass, assessment reform activists will have to shift the battle to the state level to move away from the test-based pseudo reform.

After watching the theater in the round that was the Senate HELP Committee this past week, we have learned one central thing. And it had nothing to do with Senator Paul (KY) seeking a speed-dating version of a bill mark-up nor was it Senator Sanders’ (VT) attempt to outlaw all teachers other than essentially those coming through a University of Vermont teacher education program. No, the one thing we have learned from last week’s activities is that serious reform – real changes that will lead to lasting school improvement – must be driven at the state level, for it won’t be happening on the federal stage.

Education-minded Senators had the opportunity to strengthen our teacher effectiveness provisions, building on NCLB’s HQT language, but instead punted, requiring such efforts only from those school districts that received Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grants from the U.S. Department of Education. And after being provided a golden opportunity to strengthen our educational accountability laws and take real steps forward to help close achievement gaps, the HELP Committee took a major step back, watering down what was left of federal accountability.

Ultimately, too few states have been incentivized with the funding carrots of Race to the Top and now the sticks of a federal ESEA law have been trimmed back to toothpicks. With federal investment in public K-12 education now back to less than 10 cents for every dollar spent, the Feds are quickly losing both the bully pulpit and the bully roles. States are now the real battleground for the lasting reforms we all seek.

In Connecticut, for instance, Gov. Dan Malloy has already declared that 2012 will be the “Year of Education Reform.” A new State Education Commissioner, Stefan Pryor, on the job just two weeks now, has been working round the clock to both diagnose what needs to be reformed in Connecticut and identify real solutions that can be implemented successfully in towns throughout the state.

This latest skirmish over ESEA demonstrates that Connecticut, as well as every other state in the union, cannot wait for the Federal government to provide yet another work plan for school reform. If we are lucky, reauthorization is 12 or 18 months in the offing. But too many of our schools and students cannot wait another year or two before real action is taken.

So it falls to the states to take on the major issues highlighted in the Senate HELP working draft and develop and employ real solutions for our classrooms. It means re-examining how our schools are funded, ensuring that our limited tax dollars are being directed to the public schools that offer the best opportunities for our students, particularly those who are on the short end of persistent achievement gaps. It means making hard decisions about teacher quality (such as the teacher contract adopted by New Haven), ensuring all of our classrooms are led by effective educators focused on student achievement. It means taking bold action to improve our lowest performing schools, providing families with choices such as charter schools and learning from other state-led turnaround efforts. And it means ratcheting up accountability efforts, requiring districts, schools, teachers, and families to be truly accountable for measurable improvements in student achievement.

We will continue to look to our nation’s capital for bold rhetoric on education reform and for targeted funding for pilot efforts and the incubation of new ideas. But last week’s hearings (as well as much of the last decade) has made clear that real reform needs to come from state capitols, not from Washington, DC. States (and by extension, localities) are the captains of our educational fates. And organizations such as ConnCAN will serve as the catalysts or agitators, depending on your point of view, that ensure we do not lose sight of our desired outcomes and our growing sense of urgency.

Here is a comment from Mike Petrilli, Fordham Institute executive vice president:

It sure wasn't pretty, but Harkin-Enzi's out of committee

The Senate HELP committee voted last week to send the Harkin-Enzi ESEA bill to the floor. It passed 15-7, with support from all of the Democrats and three Republicans (Mike Enzi, Lamar Alexander, and Mark Kirk). Now, let the analysis begin! Here are five thoughts:

1. This is a big deal, folks. The ESEA reauthorization process hasn’t gotten this far since–well, ever. In 2007 the House education committee floated a draft bill which then died an ignominious death. The Senate HELP committee has never produced a bill. So to have a comprehensive bill marked up and sent to the floor represents a significant milestone.

2. President Obama and Secretary Duncan deserve credit for spurring the Senate into action. It’s not a coincidence that a bill emerged and a mark-up was held just weeks after the announcement of the Administration’s waiver package. And the discussion over the past few days makes it clear that Senators on both sides of the aisle are motivated to get their job done to stave off the waivers from taking effect. So while I’m not a fan of conditional waivers as a policy, I must admit that it was an effective tool for waking the Senate out of its slumber.

3. Republicans are in the driver’s seat. Last week’s unanimous Democratic vote might have been a display of party unity, but it also demonstrated a willingness to vote for almost anything. The Democrats want to send a bill to the President, and they will need Republican votes in order to do that. So expect GOP senators like Lamar Alexander to make their support contingent on key changes to the bill–and to get a lot of what they want. Meanwhile, the House bills (which are being put together in pieces) will surely come out to the right of the Senate. If Democrats want to get something across the finish line, they are going to have to accept something that looks a lot more like Alexander-Burr than Harkin-Enzi.

4. The civil rights groups and lefty reformers are getting rolled. What became clear from the mark-up is that there’s very little support in Congress for federal oversight of state accountability systems. Except for Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, nobody seemed interested in getting “annual objectives” or achievement-gap-closing metrics back into the bill. And where do the aggrieved lefty groups go from here? They won’t be able to get an accountability amendment passed on the Senate floor. There’s no way a House bill will include it. So then what? Try again in 2013? Why would anyone think the politics will be any better? (Same goes for federal intrusion into teacher evaluation.) The bottom line is that federal accountability hawks have lost this argument. It’s time to move on.

5. Let’s admit it: Harkin-Enzi is better than current law. I’ve still got a lot of beefs with it (especially around its high school interventions and inclusion of the highly-qualified teachers mandate). But for Reform Realists, it represents several steps in the right direction. It focuses the federal role on transparency instead of accountability. It encourages a look at student growth instead of a one-time snapshot. Thanks to Lamar Alexander’s work over the past weeks, it shows a willingness to let states take the lead on key issues like teacher evaluation and school turnarounds. Assuming that the House bills will be even better, I would claim that reauthorization is finally heading in a hopeful direction.

This week's developments have been notable-- less because the reauth effort is likely to go anywhere, and more because they offer a clarifying look at where things stand. The more the Ed Trust and Center for American Progress view mandates as the measure of "reforminess," the more they ensure that they will not find common cause with even sympathetic Republicans. Whereas Ed Trust was central to the NCLB negotiations a decade ago, today they're standing outside the emerging consensus that spans from Harkin-Enzi on the center-left, to Alexander-Burr on the center-right, to the House Republican caucus (and the NEA!) on the right.

The concern on the right, for many who embrace charters, test-based accountability, and overhauling teacher tenure, evaluation, and pay, is not, as Senator Alexander ably explained, these policies, but the hubris of those who think they can be effectively prescribed or policed from Washington. NCLB illustrated how self-proclaimed "reformers" can drive past the bounds of common sense and a well-ordered federal role. One result, which should not surprise, is that Republicans seeking to bring the feds back in line are finding much common ground with the unions.

State-level action this year, from Indiana to Wisconsin to Ohio, has shown that tea party-inspired Republicans are eager to battle teacher unions, promote accountability, and advance school choice. A coalition of such R's and Democratic reformers is entirely possible in theory, but it's foundering on their very different orientations towards federal action. The administration and the reform Dems need to find a way to bridge this divide. Otherwise, after years of being at the white hot center of the education debate, reform-minded Dems in Washington may well find themselves on the outside looking in.

Finding sixty votes for some version of Harkin-Enzi in the Senate will prove enormously difficult, if not impossible. Most of the Senate Republicans are going to resist anything that includes much in the way of categoricals, HQT, and mandated improvement strategies; Ed Trust Dems will insist on those things; and NEA Dems are going to want more money and less accountability. How you assemble sixty votes there is tough to see. And, even if you do, it's hard to see how one reconciles whatever emerges with what House Republicans are hoping to do.

This all means that the odds of a reauth before the 2012 election may have edged up a few ticks from 1-in-100, but they haven't moved much more than that. The maneuvering and fighting are less important becuase they're likely to produce a new law, and more because they are backlighting the landscape, forging alliances, and fixing markers and default language for the next go-round, in 2013.

AASA is cautiously optimistic that the US Senate will produce a bill on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that we can enthusiastically support. Improvements in the assessment and accountability provisions of ESEA have addressed nearly every issue. The improvements make the accountability system more accurate and fair by eliminating the utopian NCLB goal of 100% of students meeting proficiency on state tests by 2014 and requiring that all schools make adequate yearly progress in a system designed to ensure that eventually all schools would be failing. The assessment improvements shift from snap shots to growth and incorporate the latest in assessment technology. Assessment improvements also recognize the need to more accurately measure achievement growth for special education students and students who are just learning to speak English.

The shift to greater state authority over critical educational decisions is also an improvement.

However, several proposals to add complex new federal mandates requiring the spending of local and state dollars, and the student discipline and teacher qualifications issue, could derail our support. One costly, administratively complex, new unfunded mandate places on school districts the responsibility for tracking and transporting foster children back to their original communities. Such mandates completely overlook the precarious funding of schools that have laid off almost 500,000 people over the past three years due to deep cuts in state and local revenues. Worst of all is the fact that there is no evidence that the new foster care mandate is needed because the new federal program for foster children through state child welfare departments has only had one year of full implementation.

AASA is pleased with the Senate’s progress toward a new ESEA, and congratulate Senators Harkin and Enzi on the bill to this point. But adding new costly and complex unfunded mandates would cause AASA to oppose the bill. Districts have less money and less staff with which to implement more unfunded mandates.

No Child Left Behind is the worst piece of education legislation ever passed by Congress. Secretary Duncan said recently that the law will cause more than 80% of all of our nation's public schools to be labeled failures this year. By 2014--the law's target date--nearly 100% of American public schools will be stigmatized as failing.

Is there any other national legislative body in the world that has ever passed a law that caused almost every one of its schools to be labeled a failure? NCLB is a giant wrecking ball, setting up public schools for failure, incentivizing cheating, and encouraging districts and states to game the system by lowering their passing mark, lowering their standards or other strategies.

NCLB has set the stage for large-scale privatization of public schools, no doubt cheering the emerging entrepreneurs of the education industry, but doing incalculable harm to one of our most important democratic institutions. Of course, it has been a bonanza for the testing industry, which now rakes in billions for test and test-preparation materials.

We have become a nation engorged with data, some of it meaningless, some of it fraudulent, but all accepted as credible. We have become a nation bent on punishing educators for low test scores, closing schools for low test scores, and recklessly pretending that test scores--no matter how they were obtained--are the same as academic achievement.

Meanwhile, schools and districts are reducing the time available for the arts, history, civics, foreign languages, recess, physical education. Does anyone truly believe that this is the route to better education?

NCLB should not be revised. It should be sent to the scrap-heap of history. The federal role in K-12 education should return to what Congress envisioned in 1965: providing additional resources for the neediest children; supporting basic and applied research; providing useful information about the condition and progress of American education; and protecting the civil rights of students.

These are not modest goals, but they are within the proper scope of federalism. Our current national obsession with testing and accountability is undermining the quality of American education.