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Pulling back the curtains on wage-theft enforcement in MN; Trump's latest attack is on RFK, Jr; NM LGBTQ+ equality group endorses 2024 'Rock Star' candidates; Michigan's youth justice reforms: Expanded diversion, no fees.

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says rebuilding Baltimore's Key Bridge will be challenging and expensive. An Alabama Democrat flips a state legislature seat and former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman dies at 82.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

Montana Educators Cheer Passage of Bill to Replace No Child Left Behind

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Thursday, December 10, 2015   

HELENA, Mont. - Montana education advocates are praising the passage on Wednesday of a bill to replace No Child Left Behind. The Every Student Succeeds Act sailed through the U.S. Senate in a landslide and is expected to be signed by President Obama.

Democratic Senator Jon Tester supported the bill, while Republican Steve Daines was one of just 12 senators to reject it. The bill transfers much of the policy-making power back to the states.

Eric Feaver, president of the Montana Education Association - Montana Federation of Teachers, says the focus on high-stakes testing was hurting the schools.

"We were measuring kids a lot but we weren't necessarily teaching kids a lot," he says. "And it did narrow the curriculum we saw music, art, P.E. and those things began to get kind of shoved to the side."

Feaver says Montana has diverged from other aspects of federal policy for years. For example, the state never used student test scores to evaluate teachers, it adopted Common Core on its own with a few changes, it never required teachers to have a degree in every subject they teach, and it didn't accept federal money to establish charter schools.

Feaver adds the demise of No Child Left Behind means more flexibility from onerous standards that went up every year and as such were impossible to achieve.

"We thought it was an abusive act to establish benchmarks for student performance that no school would ever reach," he says. "It effectively was an act of Congress that guaranteed everybody would fail."

The new law still requires math and reading tests every year from grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. Feaver would like to see that reduced to once each in elementary school, middle school and high school.


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