Lamar Alexander is slated to take the reins of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.
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Lauren Camera, Education Week, Nov. 7, 2014 - After easily capturing the number of seats they needed take control of the U.S. Senate—and padding their majority in the House of Representatives—congressional Republicans have laid out an aggressive education policy agenda that includes overhauling the long-stalled No Child Left Behind law and the mammoth Higher Education Act.
.......
Meanwhile, Sen. Alexander will likely pick up where he left off on
the NCLB law, with a bill he introduced last year that garnered support
from every committee Republican but didn’t get a single Democratic
co-sponsor.
.......
The measure, which is similar to Mr. Kline’s, would significantly
scale back the federal role in K-12 policy. Among other provisions, it
would allow states to devise their own accountability plans and
eliminate the federal role in requiring states to set specific
student-achievement goals, or in identifying a certain percentage of
schools as low-performing.
Sen. Alexander is especially a critic of both Race to the Top and the
NCLB waivers—he is fond of saying they’ve turned the federal Department
of Education into a “national school board” and Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan into a “waiver-granting czar.”
Meanwhile, school choice policies have become signature issues
for a number of high-profile Republican senators widely seen as having
presidential aspirations, including Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and
Marco Rubio of Florida, both of whom have written or co-sponsored school
choice bills.
Sen. Alexander also has a school choice proposal, which would
allow states to take almost all of their federal K-12 funds and combine
them into one giant block grant aimed at creating scholarships for
low-income students that could be used at any school, private or public. (Read More)
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