InsideSources

In a move that angered Democrats, Congress passed legislation today that will repeal Obama-era education department school accountability regulations.

Rep. Dwight Evans, D-Pa., who represents northern and western parts of Philadelphia, called the move “an unfair attack on public education” in an interview with InsideSources.

The freshman Representative of Pennsylvania’s 2nd district ousted disgraced former Democratic Congressman Chaka Fattah in a primary challenge last year. Rep. Evans, who previously voted against the House’s version of the accountability measure, is a former schoolteacher, community activist, and state legislator.

One day after advancing a repeal of Obama-era teacher preparation rules to the White House, the Senate did the same with regulations aimed at holding states and local schools accountable. The vote on repealing the accountability measures was tight; the Senate passed the measure 50-49.

“I think that fundamentally what the Obama administration was attempting to do was to face up to the fact that we needed to make sure that kids are being educated—and I think that they are trying to go in the wrong direction,” said Evans of the Republicans who backed the repeal effort.

According to the Congressman, eliminating the accountability rules “puts our most vulnerable students at greater risk.”

Under the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), a landmark piece of bipartisan legislation that rebuked the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind policies, educational decision-making was largely returned to the states. When it was passed, the Wall Street Journal called ESSA “the largest devolution of federal control to the states in a quarter-century.”

That was before the Obama administration issued regulations that would determine how the law would be implemented. Citing federal overreach in the rules, Republicans used the Congressional Review Act on Thursday to recommend a wholesale repeal of accountability regulations. Using the Congressional Review Act would also bar the Department of Education from issuing rules that are “substantially the same” in the future.

Democrats, led by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the ranking member of the Senate’s education committee, argued that using the review mechanism to repeal the regulations would leave federal oversight of American schools toothless. Democrats also expressed concerns that mixed signals on accountability could throw state efforts to comply with ESSA into disarray.

In a speech on the Senate floor on Wednesday, Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., spoke out against the accountability rules finalized under former Education Secretary John King, saying the order “takes away responsibility from classroom teachers and local school boards. It does this in direct violation of the law that 85 senators voted for just 15 months ago.”

Sen. Alexander has argued against a “National School Board” and has indicated to state educators that they should expect their ESSA accountability proposals would be accepted by the federal Department of Education. According to a letter sent last month from new Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, the education department will continue to expect submissions of state plans on the original April 3rd and September 18th deadlines.

Rep. Evans disagreed that the passage of the accountability rules repeal aligned with the bipartisan spirit of the original ESSA legislation. No Democratic lawmakers in the House or Senate voted in favor of repeal. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, a moderate, crossed party lines to vote with Democrats over concerns that marginalized students could be put at risk.

Other right-leaning groups also came out against the proposal to scrap the rules. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce joined a letter with civil rights activists to oppose repeal of the regulations. Similarly, the Fordham Institute’s, Michael Petrilli, a prominent backer of the standards movement that brought about the Common Core, expressed concerns with the Obama-era accountability regulations, but ultimately argued that repeal under the Congressional Review Act would be unwise.

“Senate Republicans have a sledgehammer; Betsy DeVos has a chisel. They should let her use it,” wrote Petrilli.

Weakening the federal education department’s influence over how state education agencies and local school districts operate is a major source of concern for civil rights advocates like Rep. Evans, who is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

While Evans agreed in principle that educational decisions are best made at the local level, he said that the Great Society-era federal educational law that ESSA amended is fundamentally a civil rights protection.

“We shouldn’t take that lightly,” said Rep. Evans.

Groups that lobbied in favor of the repeal efforts, such as the School Superintendents Association, or AASA, have bristled at the insinuation that local educational leaders don’t have the interests of all of their students at heart.

“I’ve never had a superintendent tell me they are opposed to equity,” Noelle Ellerson Ng, the associate executive director for policy and advocacy for the AASA, had previously said to InsideSources.

President Trump has indicated that he will finalize the repeal of his predecessor’s accountability and teacher preparation regulations, over Democratic objections. Other reports suggest that the Department of Education is already preparing to issue new non-binding guidance to assist states as they craft their ESSA accountability proposals under a new, more permissive, regulatory regime.

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Obama-era teacher preparation regulations are the latest set of rules to be placed on the Senate’s chopping block.

Congressional Republicans have moved quickly to advance legislation under the Congressional Review Act, (CRA), that would roll back the former administration’s rules in areas like environmental protection, banking regulations, telecommunications, and education.

In the education policy world, the move to scrap state accountability regulations under the Every Student Succeeds Act, (ESSA), has taken up most of the oxygen in the room. Groups like the School Superintendents Association have backed the accountability repeal, while other groups, like the right-leaning Fordham Institute have landed on the same side as civil rights groups and teacher’s unions to oppose that CRA.

The discussion over a separate repeal effort, targeting a set of teacher preparation regulations released last October, has been more muted, said Elizabeth Mann, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy.

On Thursday, Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., introduced a resolution to the Senate that would send a repeal of the teacher preparation regulations to President Trump’s desk. The House passed their version of the resolution by a nearly party-line vote in early February, (five Democrats joined a unified Republican caucus on that vote).

When Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., introduced the CRA targeting the ESSA accountability regulations, the education committee he chairs issued a press release explaining the Republican opposition, perhaps in anticipation of a contentious debate.

Mann speculates that the teacher preparation CRA may have been introduced with less fanfare because Republicans may be anticipating that “fewer people are going to go to bat on teacher prep.”

Unlike the ESSA accountability regulations, the teacher preparation rules were issued under the authority of Title II of the Higher Education Act, but the histories of how the two education-related regulations came under Congressional fire are similar, said Mann.

Both sets of regulations took heat when they were first proposed as being outside the education department’s bounds, and both sets of rules walked back some of their more controversial provisions when the final versions were released, she said. In both cases, the softened finalized rules may not have sufficiently watered down the federal education department’s reach to save them from repeal.

According to an education department release from when the teacher preparation rules were finalized, the goal of the regulations, which took years to craft, is to “bring transparency to the effectiveness of teacher preparation programs, provide programs with ongoing feedback to help them improve continuously, and respond to educators across the country who do not feel ready to enter the classroom after graduation.”

The regulations did this, said Mann, in part by pushing for evaluations of colleges and teacher accreditation programs on the basis of teacher’s abilities to create gains in student learning. Such regulations would appear to reopen the No Child Left Behind-era debates over “what is teacher effectiveness?” she said.

The subject is “full of land mines” for teachers unions who tend to oppose assessment-driven teacher evaluations, said Mann. When the regulations were first announced, the leaders of both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association took to the press to criticize the move to evaluate teacher preparation programs based on student achievement.

The American Council on Education, a Washington D.C.-based organization that advocates on behalf of many of the nation’s colleges and universities, sent a letter to Congress in tandem with other groups urging support for repeal of the teacher preparation rules.

Terry Hartle, a senior vice-president for the American Council on Education, told InsideSources that the regulations represent a massive unfunded mandate that would overburden states, colleges, and schools. He said that Obama’s education department badly lowballed the cost of compliance.

“We think they used a Ouija board,” he quipped in reference to how the department compiled the estimated cost for adherence to the regulations to affected organizations.

With little expected opposition from teachers unions and a larger fight brewing over the accountability CRA, the teacher preparation regulations appear ripe for repeal.

Once they are introduced to the Senate floor, up to ten hours of debate ensues over a CRA, and then the legislation faces an up or down vote. Republicans driving the effort only need 51 Senate votes to get the repeal proposals to the Oval Office.

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Emboldened House Republicans moved quickly this week to advance legislation under the Congressional Review Act that would force a repeal of Obama-era education department rules.

There are two sets of regulations in question: one dictates the way states and local school districts are held accountable for school quality and student learning under the Every Student Succeeds Act.

The other monitors teacher preparation systems and was technically issued under the authority of the Higher Education Act—though the regulations also impact K-12 systems.

The Congressional Review Act permits Congress to act within 60 legislative days from when a rule issued by a federal agency takes effect.

As is often the case when power shifts in Washington, the window to review the outgoing administration’s lame duck, or “midnight” rules, has been extended, making the late autumn Obama administration rules fair game for repeal.

The upshot is that the Senate has until early May to send the proposed repeals to Trump’s desk, otherwise the regulations will remain in full effect.

On the House side, Subcommittee Chairman Todd Rokita, R- Ind., introduced the proposal to change the ESSA accountability implementation blueprint, while Subcommittee Chairman Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., introduced the resolution targeting the teacher preparation regulations.

The House adopted the resolutions on two largely party line votes on Tuesday.

“These resolutions will help protect local control and ensure every child has the best chance to receive a high-quality education,” said education committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., in a committee release.

The largely partisan nature of the House votes could make quick passage challenging in the more deliberative Senate. Democrats have raised concerns that if the rules were to be repealed under the CRA, the education department would be barred from issuing any “substantially similar” rules in the future.

In other words, depending on how broadly the statute is interpreted, Democrats argue that states could end up with minimal, if any, federal oversight of their accountability and teacher preparation systems.

For Republicans, such an outcome is part of the appeal of rolling back the rules. A big part of ESSA, they argue, was limiting the federal role in education, and they see the Obama era regulations as an attempt to circumvent the spirit of the law.

Republicans also dispute the idea that repeal under the CRA would prevent federal education officials from issuing other, less prescriptive, rules in the future.

Additionally, Democrats have questioned whether it makes sense to change federal expectations of states at the same time that many are entering the final phases of submitting their ESSA plans for DoED review.

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Ore., the vice-ranking member of the House education committee, said in a statement that Republicans were “creating uncertainty and risking the good work of states around the country to provide locally tailored, equitable education to all their students.”

In an interview with InsideSources, Diane Stark Rentner, the deputy director of the Center on Education Policy, an independent research and education advocacy group, said she believes the repeal efforts, even if they pass the Senate and are approved by President Trump, are unlikely to substantially affect state ESSA proposals.

Many state officials have already spent months on long listening tours to get stakeholder input for their plans—some of those efforts started before the education department regulations were even issued.

“Most states will stick with what they have” said Rentner. Though she also added that if the regulations are successfully repealed and the education department doesn’t jump in with new guidances quickly, state legislatures may move to fill the regulatory vacuum.

From a broader perspective, the partisan skirmishes over the Obama-era regulations reflect an unusually tense atmosphere in education policymaking circles.

The bitterness surrounding the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as education secretary has yet to abate. News broke Friday that protesters attempted to physically block Sec. DeVos from entering a D.C. school she had arranged to visit.

The education department website currently has information posted about both the accountability rules and the teacher preparation regulations that House Republicans have formally objected to.

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