Students First – Aaron Guerrero
“When Congress returns next week from recess, it faces a critical choice in the weeks ahead. It will either ensure that we continue to evaluate how our schools perform through testing, or adopt previously proposed opt-out amendments that water down the provision to irrelevancy. We’re hoping that lawmakers stay on the current path and choose the former over the latter. By a whopping vote of 81-17, the U.S. Senate in July passed its version of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the national K-12 education law. That vote came on the heels of the House passing its own, much more partisan version. With both chambers having approved the measure, there’s real hope that Congress can do something that’s become a rarity in Washington these days: Go to conference and work in a bipartisan fashion to send a major piece of legislation to President Barack Obama’s desk. While plenty of provisions in the bill have created intense debate between both parties and within them, the annual testing measure has come under fire from all sides of the political spectrum.”(more)