Can lawmakers finally fix No Child Left Behind?

One optimistic legislator hopes to get a revised No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law signed by President Barack Obama early next year.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said his top priority as incoming chairman of the Senate committee overseeing education is to renovate the landmark Bush-era law. And he’s got more than enthusiasm—Alexander possesses plenty of real-life experience. In addition to serving in the Senate since 2002, he was education secretary under President George H. W. Bush, is a former president of the University of Tennessee, and served two terms as Tennessee governor.

NCLB in its current form has become deeply unpopular with school administrators and teachers alike since its inception in 2001. The law requires schools to show annual growth in student achievement or face consequences—primarily financial penalties. Its intent was to provide greater accountability and raise the bar for the quality of education poor and disadvantaged students receive.

While all that sounded promising, what has ensued over the last decade and a half is a bureaucratic quagmire.

States quickly realized the requirements were unrealistic and that to prepare students for the standardized tests measuring state compliance with the law, teachers needed to “teach to the test.” Penalties often lacked real bite as well.

Recognizing states would never be in full compliance, the Obama administration began issuing NCLB waivers in 2012. As long as states agreed to certain conditions—including adopting Common Core and implementing teacher evaluation systems with real teeth—they could be exempted from some of the law’s more stringent requirements.

For example, the law requires every single student to be proficient in reading and math by this year. That includes students who struggle, or who come to school hungry and distracted, or who simply lack sufficient language skills to show proficiency as the standardized test measures it.

While more than 40 states currently hold waivers, some states lost theirs recently due to pitched battles over Common Core adoption. Washington state was forced to send letters to parents in nearly all of its public school districts prior to the start of school letting them know their school was rated as “failing.” Nothing substantive had changed since school let out in June, other than the state opting out of Common Core implementation. As a result, it lost its NCLB waiver, which quickly put schools out of compliance and put the state's federal funding at risk.

While NCLB is universally unpopular, Alexander has a tough fight ahead of him. Even with an incoming surge of like-minded colleagues in both the House and Senate, he still needs bipartisan support to craft legislation the president will sign.

Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., is a former superintendent of schools in Denver who sits on the Senate committee with Alexander.

“It’s challenging because a lot of the decisions are made at the local level, and No Child Left Behind built in some ways a huge federal incursion into what has been a state and local set of issues,” Bennet said. “Figuring out how to get that calibrated correctly is going to be the tough work of the committee, and that’s what we got to do.”

In the mean time, the Education Department has told states they can apply for an extension to their current waiver that will last to 2018 or beyond.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.