Debating NCLB

As Elena notes below, the House Committee on Education and Labor had a big full-committee hearing today on No Child Left Behind reauthorization, focusing on the recent discussion draft which we've been discussing at length (here and here) at Q&E for the last week. I had a chance to testify on the first panel (there were four more as the day went on) along with John Podesta from CAP, Jack Jennings from the Center on Education Policy, Standford's Linda Darling-Hammond, and others.

It was fun; committee member attendance was high and there's always a lot of energy in a hearing with a packed audience and many more waiting in line outside to get in. You only get five minutes to talk, though, and there's this little backwards-counting digital clock thing (like the ones they use for bombs in the movies) on the desk in front of you that lights up red when your time is up. Stressful! So my comments were a very abridged version of this, but with many more uses of the word "Um."

There's definitely a middle-groundedness to the proposal; when you read the statements of advocates like Ed Trust and CCCR on the one hand, and the NEA on the other, they read like mirror images: everything the one likes the other hates, and vice versa. I'm generally not a fan of the "if we're getting it from both sides we must be on track" trope--a lot of times that just means you've split the difference in the worst possible way--but in this case I think there's truth in that, particularly as a starting point for the politically perilous negotiations to come.