It didn't take long for the political jockeying to escalate around the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. Last Thursday, a group of over 50 Republican members of the House and Senate introduced legislation that would effectively gut the law of its boldest measures by giving states the choice to opt out of its testing and accountability mandates and yet still remain eligible for federal Title I funding.

The proposed bill is notable not because it is likely to pass (it won't), but rather because it represents a sharp division within the winning coalition of legislators that supported NCLB in 2001 when it was first authorized. A total of only 41 congressmen (R's and D's combined) voted against the law six years ago, and the fact that this number is already exceeded in one party's opposition legislation already foretells a much more complicated and difficult road to reauthorization. And as other qualified observers have noted, a key shift that this new bill marks is the GOP leadership in the house's opposition to the president on education - Minority Whip Roy Blunt is a co-sponsor of the new bill, whereas the House Whip in 2001, Tom Delay, voted for NCLB and shepherded a huge number of R's to do so as well.

The Washington Post editorial board had this scathing opinion of the new bill.

On the other side of the aisle, the big news this week is a decision by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation's second largest teachers union with 1.3 million members (the National Education Association and its 3.2 million members is the only larger union) to join a coalition with the NEA recommending serious revisions of the accountability provisions of NCLB. Previously, the AFT, whose members are mostly teachers in urban districts, had been much more reserved in its opposition to NCLB, with the official position instead of supporting the law's goals and the notion of test scores as the key accountability metric, but suggesting that important changes were need to ensure more effective implementation. But as this Education Week story explains, the AFT's decision to join the NEA (who is outright opposed to NCLB) in endorsing the Forum on Educational Accountability's proposals for re-working the law indicates that a shift is either a.) already here, or b.) officially forthcoming in how the AFT approaches NCLB.

My colleague Ethan makes a strong point about the bottom-line that this AFT re-positioning indicates. Is it the case that the unions are just unwilling to admit under any scenario that by and large, our schools aren't offering children the quality of educational opportunity they'll need to succeed? If that's so, then any call for more funding will sound awfully hollow next to a declaration that our schools are actually doing great. And, of course, any claim that our schools are actually improving without reference to proof that students are learning more and reading and doing math more proficiently may be tough to take seriously...