EDUCATIONAL EXCELLENCE

Educational Excellence for all Children Act 1996-1997



Educational Excellence for all Children Act 1996-1997

Introduction

In order for our children to succeed in life they need an education. With the need to improve education in the United States, the government saw a need to improve the national educational achievement rates. The best place to start when improving the national educational achievement rates is when the children first begin school. In a 1983 report, titled A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, helped create a public demand for change in the public schools (Berns, 2010). This report is what encouraged the government to make the change. “To address the charges made by the report, government, business, and educational leaders developed six national educational goals, announced in 1990 and reconfirmed in 1999 in the Educational Excellence for All Children Act” (Berns, 2010). The Educational Excellence for All Children Act (1997) stated that by the year 2000 they wanted to achieve what they created.

In May 1999, Democrats introduced the Educational Excellence for All Children Act in both houses of Congress. The act would reauthorize the ESEA for fiscal year 2000 and also proposes a number of reforms that would hold schools more "accountable" for providing a quality education to students. Clinton outlined some of the bill's major points in his January 1999 State of the Union address. Among other things, the act would:

Require schools to end "social promotion," the practice of advancing students to the next grade level even if they have not mastered crucial material.

Require states to improve or shut down their worst-performing schools.

Require teachers to pass licensing exams in the subjects they plan to teach.

Require all school districts to allow low-income parents to send their children to any school in their town.

Require all schools to adopt "sensible discipline policies."

Clinton says those measures would promote high-quality education for all U.S. schoolchildren. Clinton also pushed for legislation, which he signed in October 1998, that provides $1.2 billion in federal money to hire 100,000 new teachers for the nation's public schools, in an effort to reduce class sizes.

Although the Democratic proposal would impose new federal mandates on schools receiving federal money, Clinton signed legislation in April 1999 that paves the way for fewer restrictions on how states can spend federal education dollars. That act, the Education Flexibility Partnership Act, known as "Ed-Flex," allows school districts to apply for permission to bypass federal regulations and spend federal grants in virtually any way they see fit. States, rather than the federal government, will make the decision on whether to approve or reject such applications.

Discussion

The final version of the bill enjoyed bipartisan support, congressional discussion of Ed-Flex sounded familiar themes in the debate on the federal role in education. Republicans, in general, supported the bill because it gives the states and school districts greater authority on what education programs to support. States would now be free to spend the money on innovative new reform efforts, backers said, rather ...