Washington Post: Distinguished Pol of the Week
It is the nature of the right these days that a major legislative victory goes almost unnoticed while failure to obtain unrealistic aims (e.g., repeal Obamacare while President Obama is still in office) is analyzed and discussed endlessly. (And inevitably denounced as another betrayal.) This past week, the GOP achieved something extraordinary — it reversed centralization of power in Washington, D.C.
The San Antonio Express reported:
No Child Left Behind, the sweeping federal education law with Texas roots, gave way Tuesday to a new measure that will give states more control over how to increase rigor, equity and accountability in the nation’s public schools. The U.S. Senate gave bipartisan approval to the new measure, the Every Student Succeeds Act, on a vote of 85-12. . . .
Wednesday’s vote was the culmination of years of work. It was lauded by nearly every participant in the process, from its Republican sponsor, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who called it “the biggest step toward local control in 25 years,” to Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of America’s largest labor union, the National Education Association: “The reason we are celebrating is because the national dark cloud that had hung over all of our 50 states for 14 long painful years of tests and punish mandates and not much else, that will be blown away, that will be gone.”
The overhaul will have a profound impact on public education policy in much of the country by giving state leaders control over evaluating teachers, testing students and improving failing schools.
It was telling that Alexander, regarded by the right-wing as some sort of squishy RINO, was responsible for the right’s biggest victory in years. The Tennessean recognized the importance of the achievement, a high point in Alexander’s career:
Wednesday’s vote was a defining moment for Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the lead Republican negotiator on the bill in the Senate and a former governor and U.S. education secretary. During the final roll call vote, Alexander stood shoulder to shoulder with the lead Democratic negotiator, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, and accepted congratulations from colleagues for the first major rewrite of elementary and secondary school policy since No Child Left Behind 14 years ago.
The vote also represented a rare case of cordial bipartisanship in Congress. Top negotiators ironed out their differences quietly and won over critics throughout the political spectrum.
For Alexander, chairman of the Senate education committee, the victory was in shrinking the federal government’s role in education.
“We’ve seen (that) too much Washington involvement has actually created a backlash against higher standards… and a backlash against teacher evaluations,” Alexander said in an interview after the vote. “Washington made it harder for Tennessee, for example, to have high standards. If Washington stayed out of it, Tennessee was doing very well on its own.”
States must still test students and take action to improve the bottom 5 percent of schools, but the means by which that is done remains with the states. And the new law “encourages schools to eliminate unnecessary state and local tests added during the No Child Left Behind years, and to explore alternative methods for assessing achievement.”
It was telling that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) voted against cloture on the bill, decrying the measure for supposedly perpetuating big federal government. This was nonsense but revealing of the element of the party that undertakes no legislative heavy-lifting and sits back to bash significant accomplishments of others. Intra-party conflict and self-advancement supersedes interest in attaining concrete results.
No amount of bellyaching from the far right, however, can diminish the significance of the accomplishment or obscure evidence of true bipartisan governance in pursuit of conservative goals. For all that we can say, well done, Senator Alexander.
Jennifer Rubin writes the Right Turn blog for The Post, offering reported opinion from a conservative perspective.
