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Although growing partisanship has characterized Congress for the better part of the last two decades, there is still one area where members of both political parties find ways to work together and that is education reform. Traditionally, bipartisan coalitions have been instrumental in crafting federal education legislation, whether that be the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the formation of the Department of Education in 1979, or the 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Last week, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate approved a reauthorization of the ESEA that had been left in limbo since 2007. The reauthorization bill – dubbed the Every Student Succeeds Act – will replace NCLB in the fall of 2017 and will give states more flexibility when designing assessments, measuring school performance, and evaluating teachers. In many ways, it is a repudiation of the top-down structure imposed by NCLB, which aimed to use testing to measure American schools and identify troubled ones. However, the bill will retain NCLB’s testing requirements, so the American education system’s culture of standardized testing is not completely going away.
This topic brief will explain the significant events that led to the creation of the Every Student Succeeds Act, compare the bill with the old NCLB Act, and then assess some of the criticisms that have been levied against the bill.
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Once heralded as one of the strongest emerging economies, Brazil has seen its economic fortunes wane over the past year as a result of corruption scandals, fiscal management, and bureaucratic incompetence. The nation is in the midst of a recession – the longest downturn since the 1930s – and unemployment is nearing double digits. As if this was not bad enough, Brazil’s Congress is moving to remove President Dilma Rousseff on charges that she violated Brazil’s fiscal management laws by manipulating government finances to aid her re-election campaign last year. Congress may also move to look into whether Rousseff played any part in a scandal at the state-owned oil company Petrobras, as she was Brazil’s energy minister in former President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva’s government. While some investors have welcomed the move to impeach Rousseff – viewing her as an obstacle to sound economic management – other analysts worry that the impeachment controversy will be an unwelcome distraction as Brazil attempts to correct its present economic trajectory. Rousseff’s defenders argue that her prosecution is politically motivated and that Speaker Eduardo Cunha only initiated the proceedings after Rousseff’s Worker’s Party (PT) moved to oust him on charges of bribery and money-laundering.
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