Knoxville News Sentinel: Leadership, experience enabled Alexander to achieve bipartisanship

U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander deservedly is receiving a lot of credit for guiding through Congress the education reform measure that replaces the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 during the first year of President George W. Bush.

Alexander, the Tennessee Republican, former Secretary of Education and former two-term governor, was one of the primary architects of the bill that gives states more leeway to decide how schools, teachers and students will be held accountable to education standards.

The bill that passed both houses by overwhelming margins and was signed by President Barack Obama last week is named the Every Student Succeeds Act. It is a compromise measure that resulted from frustrations at the state and federal levels; with teachers, parents and school boards; and with conservatives and liberals.

Among other issues, this act is a reaction to what many complained of as "overtesting." Alexander said that, in one Florida school district, students were given 183 standardized tests between kindergarten and the seventh grade, even though the federal government required only 17 tests during that time.

The legislation recently passed does not eliminate testing; it will be required yearly in math and reading. However, under the new bill, states will decide how to use students' performance on the tests to assess teachers and schools.

Indeed, the new bill might be better identified by what is missing: the government's authority to require school districts to adopt specific academic standards such as Common Core. Also missing is federal power to penalize schools when students do not improve their test scores.

The bipartisan effort deserves praise, but most observers name Alexander as the point man on the legislation, from the draft bill to the presidential signing. Alexander used his experience in education and skills in politics to shepherd the bill through. He wrote the draft legislation with Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, ranking Democrat on the Senate Education Committee. That draft served as the launching point for discussing the issue.

Throughout the debate over the bill, Alexander ensured that all 22 members of the committee had an opportunity to help write the legislation, giving them a deeper investment in the bill. He also kept the White House informed on the bill's progress.

Critical to the bill's passage by Congress was a promise Alexander received from Obama on his trip to the Knoxville area to visit Pellissippi State Community College earlier this year. Alexander said he asked Obama not to threaten to veto the legislation, and the president agreed.

Alexander and the committee also worked to accommodate the president's concerns on some issues, such as requiring states to intervene in the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools but preventing the federal government from dictating terms of the intervention.

Alexander said the Every Student Succeeds Act will "bring certainty to federal education policy for the next couple of decades. I think it will be very hard to change."

We hope that is not overly optimistic. Nevertheless, this is landmark legislation, and Alexander's ability to forge a bipartisan measure that stands to benefit all students is a tribute to his experience and leadership in the U.S. Senate.