How likely is it Congress will be able to fix No Child Left Behind now that Speaker John Boehner is retiring? Not likely, according to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
“I’m very concerned with Speaker Boehner stepping down, that the odds of it being fixed went down, not up,” Duncan said Thursday at the 2015 Washington Ideas Forum. “To get to a good bill that the president can support, it has to be a bipartisan bill that stays strong on accountability and helps us turn around underperforming schools. … I really, really, really hope and pray I’m wrong, but I think it’s difficult for the next leader to work in a bipartisan way given the pressure of the extreme right.”
Both the Senate and House have passed K-12 education reform bills, but the conference committee to resolve the difference between the two has yet to convene. The White House issued a veto threat against the more conservative House bill. On the Senate bill, the White House called for further improvements but stopped short of a veto threat.
Boehner’s announcement threw education reformers into a debate over whether his exit makes a fix for No Child Left Behind became more or less likely to pass.
“This brings passage of a bill that can get signed by Obama from ‘very likely’ to ‘somewhat doubtful,’ ” Charles Barone, policy director at Democrats for Education Reform, told the Washington Post.
On the contrary, Rick Hess, the conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Director of Education Policy Studies, says Boehner’s resignation changes little. “The odds of ESEA reauthorization weren’t good before Boehner’s announcement,” Hess wrote in Education Week. “The likelihood a bill would get done was probably no better than about 25-30%. After Boehner’s announcement, not a lot has changed.”
As House Education chairman, Boehner was one of the architects of No Child Left Behind when it became law in 2002.
Duncan also commented that he would not want to stay on as secretary of Education for the next president.
