EdWeek: We won't see NCLB reauthorized anytime soon

A few snippets from the article:

• ...efforts to revise the law are mired in backroom negotiations in both the House and the Senate and show no signs of gaining the momentum necessary to ensure completion of the reauthorization in 2008. With Congress’ agenda filled with other tasks...it will be difficult for lawmakers to meet their self-imposed goals of ensuring passage of NCLB bills in both the House and the Senate this year, followed by a compromise version the two chambers can approve in early 2008.
• “It is unlikely that we will be able to get a bill off the House floor this year,” Tom Kiley, a spokesman for Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said in an e-mail last week.
• In the Senate, there is more optimism about passing an NCLB bill in 2007.
• If Congress doesn’t act soon, the current version of the law could stay in place for another three years.
• In addition to the headaches of implementing a law they consider flawed, local officials fear that large numbers of schools would be declared in need of improvement under the current NCLB accountability system. Many of them wouldn’t deserve that label, argued Reginald M. Felton, the director of federal relations for the National School Boards Association, in Alexandria, Va.