Education Law Changes

Posted on Dec 23, 2015 – 10:57am by Launch

Education is a vitally important issue that many people believe needs to be fixed. Over the past two presidencies, we have seen drastic changes in educational laws in an attempt to help improve a system that most agree is not operating as efficiently as it should be. The two key pieces of legislation under President Bush and President Obama have been the No Child Left Behind law and the adoption of the Common Core. However, both of those programs have been taken almost exclusively out of the hands of the federal government and put into the hands of the states with this most recent change.

One of the remarkable things about this new law is that, despite the political climate where there’s rarely any bipartisan support no matter what the topic is, this is one of the few times where a bill has received huge bipartisan support. President Obama even referred to the bipartisan bill as “a Christmas miracle,” while Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who leads the Senate Education Committee, called the legislation a “Christmas present” for 50 million children across the country.”
This law helps to ensure that the federal government does not have what many critics would call a one size fits all approach to education.

This undoes the incentives that the government put in place, along with the algorithms used to create those incentives, along with the punishments for states and schools based on scores. Furthermore, while there will still be some mandatory tests, the amount of tests that need to be completed will be drastically reduced. Overall this allows schools and states to have more control in how to properly deal with the students they are trying to reach and it’s great to see politicians coming together in order to try and help these kids the best they can.