By Della B. Cronin

NCTM and education advocates are chasing rumors on action on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act all over Washington—and have been for weeks. Both the House and Senate passed their proposals to reauthorize ESEA earlier this year. The next step in the legislative process is a House-Senate conference negotiation to develop a single proposal from the two disparate ones. That requires negotiations of legislative language and debate of complex issues. Staff for the House and Senate education leaders have been meeting daily for weeks—including a marathon 4 a.m. session or two. The latest rumors suggest they are getting close to completing an agreement on most of a would-be bill. That means that there will soon be a handful of “big issues” for members of Congress to debate and decide; then a conference report could be on the floor of the House or Senate in the next few weeks. The plans are ambitious, but it’s been reported that some deeply invested in this process do not want the bill to be on the floor of either chamber of Congress at all in 2016—a presidential election year. That gives all involved an immovable deadline, which can be the greatest of motivators on Capitol Hill.

NCTM, the STEM Education Coalition, and dozens of groups that want a new law to include a program for STEM education and educators have written letters asking legislators to include provisions from the Senate’s Every Child Achieves Act (S. 1177) that preserve, but update the Math Science Partnerships. The community strongly prefers that proposal to the House’s approach to spending federal professional development funds for teachers. The House bill (HR 5) proposes sending the funds to the states and letting them decide how to spend them—without any direction at all. NCTM has also voiced support for early childhood education provisions in the Senate bill and the proposal in both bills to maintain testing in math annually in grades 3-8 and once in high school. 

While the White House waits for Congress to act on revising the 13-year old ESEA law, they have gone ahead and called for a limit on standardized testing. The “Testing Action Plan” released by President Obama calls for changes to assessments in schools nationwide. “In too many schools, there is unnecessary testing and not enough clarity of purpose applied to the task of assessing students, consuming too much instructional time and creating undue stress for educators and students. The Administration bears some of the responsibility for this, and we are committed to being part of the solution,” said the Administration as they laid out “Principles for Fewer and Smarter Assessments.”

There have been other legislative issues to tend to recently as well. In the wake of a budget agreement that avoided a default on the country’s borrowing authority and increased the spending caps in place due to sequestration, House and Senate appropriators have to decide funding levels for education and other programs before December 11. That’s when the current temporary spending bill will expire. NCTM and the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) wrote a letter to appropriators asking for adequate investments in the Department of Education’s Math Science Partnerships earlier this year and recently reminded lawmakers of that request.

The Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education program—the largest single federal investment in the country’s secondary schools—is also keeping advocates busy. There was a hearing on the law and how it gives young people skills that employers need in the House recently, and the Senate is gearing up to develop a bipartisan proposal to update the law, which hasn’t been done since 2007. There has even been some activity around a Senate proposal to reauthorize the America COMPETES Act, which governs research and STEM education programs at federal research agencies

All of this activity stretches advocates, but what it really means is that Congress sees a deadline ahead and wants to get done what it can before then. The deadline? That undefined time in early 2016 when Congress will take fewer votes and spend more time at home as all members of the House, one-third of the Senate and at least half a dozen presidential candidates focus on the November races. Election Day is a little less than a year away, but it’s top of mind all over Washington already. 

Della B. Cronin is a principal at Washington Partners, LLC.