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John Kline does not miss a vote in 2011
Lake Region Life, Chanhassen Villager
Minnesota Congressman John Kline was one of just 12 members of the 435-person U.S. House of Representatives who did not miss a vote in 2011, casting all 948 recorded votes in Congress.
This marks the fourth year Kline posted a perfect voting record. (Kline demonstrated perfect voting records in 2004, 2005, and 2006). Kline’s commitment to his constituents in 2011 was not limited to his responsibilities in Washington. In addition to making every recorded vote, Kline returned home regularly to meet with local officials and constituents, hear their concerns, and work on their behalf in Washington.
In his fifth term, Kline is the Chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee. He also serves on the House Armed Services Committee.
House’s ‘No Child’ Bill Reflects Significant Split from Senate
By Lauren Smith
CQ Staff
House Republicans may have opted to adopt the Senate’s more comprehensive approach to overhauling the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind, but the proposals show significant policy gaps between the chambers.
House Education and the Workforce Chairman John Kline, R-Minn., introduced two draft bills last week that would replace the law’s school accountability system and establish teacher-effectiveness measures. But in doing so, he abandoned bipartisan talks for rewriting the decade-old law (PL 107-110), saying negotiations on his committee had stopped making progress and that continuing the talks would only stall the process further.
On the Senate side, Democrats and Republicans produced an 868-page draft bill that the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee approved in October. The House and Senate measures overlap in some areas, such as entirely eliminating the law’s signature accountability system known as adequate yearly progress (AYP) and largely keeping in place current requirements for the student-testing schedule and collecting data on student performance.
But the House proposals represent a departure from the Senate bill in other areas, most notably by mandating teacher evaluations and scrapping federal intervention in low-performing schools.
“The big surprise for me was teacher evaluations. I didn’t expect them to go there,” said Michael Petrilli, vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank. “This is the one area where they decided their school reform impulses trumped their federal impulses.”
The draft language would require districts to craft teacher evaluations based in part on student outcomes, a controversial metric that splits lawmakers in both parties and is loathed by teachers unions, a powerful special interest group. Districts would also be required to use the evaluations when making personnel decisions.
Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, has said he would have liked to include a form of teacher evaluations in the Senate bill, but that he gave up on the idea in order to keep the measure bipartisan. No Child does not set teacher effectiveness mandates, and Democrats are split on whether to seek a standardized federal system for evaluations, while Republicans prefer to allow the systems to be created on the local or state level.
Unlike the current law and the Senate bill, Kline’s proposals would not require states to select from a list of intervention strategies set by the federal government to try to improve the lowest performing schools. Instead, Kline would leave it to the states to address them.
“No one knows what to do with these schools,” Petrilli said. “We have no compelling evidence of what works. The federal government just cannot effect the kind of change that you need to turn around these failing schools.”
But Bob Wise, president of the progressive Alliance for Excellent Education and a former House member and West Virginia governor, said removing the federal check on low-performing schools would be dangerous — particularly because the bills would also eliminate the School Improvement Grant, which helps more than 500 low-performing schools to reinvent themselves. The combination has the potential to allow chronically failing schools to continue to founder, he said.
Both bills would eliminate the Adequate Yearly Progress school accountability system, which requires all students to be 100 percent proficient in reading and math by 2014, including students who are learning English and those with disabilities. But in another striking difference between the drafts, the House proposals would allow states to craft their own school accountability systems within certain parameters, while the Senate bill would use a set of common core standards and require that students to be “college or career ready.”
In addition, the House proposals would eliminate mandates that students can obtain extra tutoring or change schools if their school has been labeled as “failing” for two or more years. It would also eliminate the requirements that teachers be “highly qualified” and limit how much money could be spent on class-size reduction. The Senate bill would keep those provisions of No Child in place.
House Progress ‘Very, Very Important’
Despite the differences, stakeholders and education policy experts said that introducing a more comprehensive approach to rewriting No Child in the House, rather than the piecemeal approach that the committee had been taking, was a good step forward. If lawmakers are not able to tackle the reauthorization this year, they said, Kline’s draft language at least provides markers for a bill in 2013.
“I think it’s significant that the chairman put a draft out,” Wise said. “The fact that there’s a recognition for the need for comprehensive NCLB in the House is very, very important. That can’t be understated.”
“I think at this point we need the process to move forward,” said Mary Kusler, federal advocacy manager at the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union. “Stopping the process does not help. Whether we like the policies coming out or not, we still have to move forward to try and find a way.”
Democratic lawmakers and the administration were quick to point out that Kline’s effort is not the same as moving forward with a bipartisan solution.
“While I have not had a chance to fully review Chairman Kline’s bill, I am disappointed that he has abandoned the longstanding tradition of bipartisanship when it comes to the education of our kids,” Harkin said through his spokeswoman.
“The fact that our committee was able to come to bipartisan agreement on a strong bill to fix NCLB demonstrates that consensus is possible, even in this hyperpartisan environment,” Harkin continued. “I hope that our counterparts on the House Education and the Workforce Committee will follow this lead and pass a bipartisan bill.”
The administration agreed.
“I appreciate the effort, but this bill retreats from reform, accountability and bipartisanship,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said. He added that until Congress passes “a real bipartisan reform bill that the president can sign,” he will continue offering states relief from the most burdensome parts of the law through a waiver process.
Early Stakeholder Reaction
With Congress still in recess and businesses and organizations understaffed while some employees take holiday leave, stakeholders were slow to respond to Kline’s proposals. Both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers were still reviewing the language Tuesday and were not taking public stances.
Kusler said the measures included language the union likes, as well as mandates it does not. She would not provide examples, but teachers unions have recoiled in the past from mandated teacher evaluations, especially those that factor in student test scores. They have also criticized federal intervention models for poorly performing schools and attempts to remove “highly qualified teacher” language from the law.
Reginald Felton, director of federal relations for the National School Board Association, said he was happy to see the House and Senate measures emphasize student growth and gains in their school accountability systems, rather than the static achievement score that the current law replies upon, and he welcomed language that would allow states and school districts to decide the best way to test students with disabilities and those learning English as a second language.
He said he liked that Kline’s proposals would mandate a teacher evaluation system and that its school accountability system would continue reporting requirements that disaggregate student test scores by subgroups like race, gender and family income.
Felton said he was concerned, however, about the language in the House proposals that would limit funding authorizations to the fiscal 2012 appropriated levels.
“I understand that they’re frustrated with figuring out how to reduce costs, but our concern is that is too arbitrary,” he said, adding that a better option would be to require states to maintain the current percent of their budget that goes to education.
He also criticized the elimination of language requiring states to maintain a certain level of education funding to be eligible for federal grant funding.
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