NY Times: Rep. Miller Outlines NCLB Changes

The first few paragraphs from the article in today's NY Times are pasted below. You can read the entire article at the Times website, which requires free registration. You can read Margaret Spellings' press release -- issued in response to Rep. Miller's remarks -- here.

From where we sit, it looks as though we're going to get a battle of press releases long before we get revisions to the law.

Interestingly, Education Week's lead paragraph on this story focused on Miller's statements that "...the law was not working as well as it should, and that there was no support among lawmakers for continuing the law without significant changes."

The chairman of the House education committee, an original architect of the federal No Child Left Behind law, said Monday that he wanted to change the law so that annual reading and math tests would not be the sole measure of school performance, but that other indicators like high school graduation rates and test scores in other subjects would also be taken into account.

“Our legislation will continue to place strong emphasis on reading and math skills,” the chairman, Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, said at the National Press Club. “But it will allow states to use more than their reading and math test results to determine how well schools and students are doing.”

In the speech, Mr. Miller described an array of criticisms that have emerged over the past year in hearings on renewing the education law. But he repeated his commitment to the law and spoke passionately of its goal of raising the achievement of poor and minority students.

His comments were the first public disclosure of changes he would make to the law, which was put together by President Bush with strong bipartisan support in 2001. Although business leaders and education and civil rights advocates praised Mr. Miller’s vision for renewal, they also said they would reserve judgment until an actual bill appeared. Mr. Miller said that would probably occur in September.

In response to questions about his proposal for broadening the measures of student achievement, Mr. Miller said additional indicators of progress could include participation in Advanced Placement or college preparatory curriculums, high school graduation rates and statewide tests in subjects other than reading and math.

....

In his speech, Mr. Miller acknowledged the many complaints about the No Child Left Behind law from school districts nationwide, saying: “Throughout our schools and communities, the American people have a very strong sense that the No Child Left Behind Act is not fair. That it is not flexible. And that it is not funded. And they are not wrong.”

Mr. Miller said he would also propose so-called pay for performance, which would pay teachers more based in part on how much their students improved, and a system to reward schools if students were on a trajectory to reach proficiency within a few years, even if they were not actually on grade level. He also said a new law would differentiate between schools that failed on a broad scale and those in which only one or two groups of students came up short, allowing solutions tailored to each school’s specific deficiencies.