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After a long stalemate, a bipartisan team of congressional negotiators has agreed to overhaul the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The law, currently known as No Child Left Behind, sends roughly $14 billion a year to schools that serve mostly low-income students.
Here's what we know about the rough agreement. First, annual testing — a major feature of NCLB — would remain for grades three through eight and at least once in high school. Schools would still have to test 95 percent of their students and report the results by race, income and special need.
Delia Pompa, former vice president with the National Council of La Raza, says this requirement is crucial.
"It is the mechanism that brought to light how children in subgroups — I'm talking about Latinos, African-Americans, children in poverty, limited English-proficient children — how they're doing."
As for what would change, the U.S. education secretary could no longer push for academic standards like the Common Core or mandate that teachers be evaluated based on things like student test scores.
But the biggest change lawmakers are proposing is this: They want the federal government out of the business of identifying failing schools, leaving that tough job to states. Each state would come up with its own plan to help schools improve, its own deadlines and its own metrics to measure that improvement. If schools don't improve, states would have to figure out what to do.
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