K12> U.S. Set to Ease Some Provisions of School Law

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Net Happenings - From Educational CyberPlayGround
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Date:         Sun, 14 Mar 2004 07:47:05 EST
From:         Bonnie Bracey <BBracey@xxxxxxx>
Subject:      U.S. Set to Ease Some Provisions of School Law
To:           K12ADMIN@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

By SAM DILLON

Published: March 14, 2004

Education Secretary Rod Paige says the Bush administration is working to
soften the impact of important provisions of its centerpiece school improvement
law that local educators and state lawmakers have attacked as arbitrary and 
unfair.
Tomorrow, the Education Department will announce policies relaxing a
requirement that says teachers must have a degree or otherwise certify 
themselves in
every subject they teach, Dr. Paige said in an interview on Friday. Officials
are also preparing to offer new flexibility on regulations governing required
participation rates on standardized tests, he said.
Those changes would follow the recent relaxation of regulations governing the
testing of special education students and those who speak limited English.
They appear devised to defuse an outcry against the law, known as No Child Left
Behind, in thousands of local districts, especially in Western states where
powerful Republican lawmakers have called the law unworkable for tiny rural
schools.
Legislatures in Utah, Virginia and a dozen other states, many controlled by
Republicans, are up in arms about what they see as the law's intrusion on
states' rights. They have approved resolutions in recent weeks protesting or
challenging the law.
"Education is a state responsibility, so we have to fit the law to what the
states are doing," Dr. Paige said in the interview. "I've heard the president
say any number of times that we want to respect the states. The law must not be
unreasonable."
Dr. Paige said the administration would fiercely resist any effort to amend
the law itself. But he said his aides, working closely with White House
officials, had been seeking to "wring every ounce of flexibility out of the 
existing
language" to make it workable for local educators.
The law, which President Bush signed in 2002, seeks to raise nationwide
achievement by penalizing schools where scores on standardized tests do not 
improve
rapidly enough.
"In the last few months, there have been audible cries from some states and
districts," Dr. Paige told state legislators on Thursday in Washington at a
meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures. "Believe me, we've
heard you. I hear you."
"I'm sure they will please you," Dr. Paige told the legislators, speaking of
the changes to the teacher qualification provisions scheduled for announcement
tomorrow. In the interview Friday, Dr. Paige declined to be more specific
about the nature of the changes.
That section of the law, which would require a science teacher offering
classes in biology, chemistry and physics to have a degree or some other
certification in all those subjects, has been especially unpopular in rural 
states,
where teacher shortages are acute and instructors pitch in to teach multiple
subjects.
Under the law's regulations governing test participation rates, which Dr.
Paige said were also slated for change, hundreds of schools have been placed on
academic probation because one or two students less than a qualifying threshold
of 95 percent have shown up on testing day.
Under the law, schools that miss academic targets for one year are put on a
watch list. Those that miss targets in subsequent years face sanctions that
include requiring districts to provide transportation for students transferring
to higher-performing schools and can escalate to the removal of staff members.
About 28 percent of the nation's 93,000 schools are already on probation, and
experts say that within a few years the vast majority of all schools will be
forced to undertake costly remedial measures. State officials across the
country are complaining that they lack the money to mount improvement efforts.
President Bush is seeking to use the law as a centerpiece of his re-election
campaign. Some experts said the administration's emphasis on flexibility was a
new posture contrasting sharply with its stance last year, when officials in
many states reported that federal officials were brushing aside complaints
that some provisions were unreasonable. 

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