By Lauren Smith, CQ Staff

House Republicans may have opted to adopt the Senate’s more comprehensive approach to overhauling the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind, but the proposals show significant policy gaps between the chambers.

House Education and the Workforce Chairman John Kline, R-Minn., introduced two draft bills last week that would replace the law’s school accountability system and establish teacher-effectiveness measures. But in doing so, he abandoned bipartisan talks for rewriting the decade-old law (PL 107-110), saying negotiations on his committee had stopped making progress and that continuing the talks would only stall the process further.

On the Senate side, Democrats and Republicans produced an 868-page draft bill that the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee approved in October. The House and Senate measures overlap in some areas, such as entirely eliminating the law’s signature accountability system known as adequate yearly progress (AYP) and largely keeping in place current requirements for the student-testing schedule and collecting data on student performance.

But the House proposals represent a departure from the Senate bill in other areas, most notably by mandating teacher evaluations and scrapping federal intervention in low-performing schools.

“The big surprise for me was teacher evaluations. I didn’t expect them to go there,” said Michael Petrilli, vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank. “This is the one area where they decided their school reform impulses trumped their federal impulses.”

The draft language would require districts to craft teacher evaluations based in part on student outcomes, a controversial metric that splits lawmakers in both parties and is loathed by teachers unions, a powerful special interest group. Districts would also be required to use the evaluations when making personnel decisions.

Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, has said he would have liked to include a form of teacher evaluations in the Senate bill, but that he gave up on the idea in order to keep the measure bipartisan. No Child does not set teacher effectiveness mandates, and Democrats are split on whether to seek a standardized federal system for evaluations, while Republicans prefer to allow the systems to be created on the local or state level.

Unlike the current law and the Senate bill, Kline’s proposals would not require states to select from a list of intervention strategies set by the federal government to try to improve the lowest performing schools. Instead, Kline would leave it to the states to address them.

“No one knows what to do with these schools,” Petrilli said. “We have no compelling evidence of what works. The federal government just cannot effect the kind of change that you need to turn around these failing schools.”

But Bob Wise, president of the progressive Alliance for Excellent Education and a former House member and West Virginia governor, said removing the federal check on low-performing schools would be dangerous — particularly because the bills would also eliminate the School Improvement Grant, which helps more than 500 low-performing schools to reinvent themselves. The combination has the potential to allow chronically failing schools to continue to founder, he said.

Both bills would eliminate the Adequate Yearly Progress school accountability system, which requires all students to be 100 percent proficient in reading and math by 2014, including students who are learning English and those with disabilities. But in another striking difference between the drafts, the House proposals would allow states to craft their own school accountability systems within certain parameters, while the Senate bill would use a set of common core standards and require that students to be “college or career ready.”

In addition, the House proposals would eliminate mandates that students can obtain extra tutoring or change schools if their school has been labeled as “failing” for two or more years. It would also eliminate the requirements that teachers be “highly qualified” and limit how much money could be spent on class-size reduction. The Senate bill would keep those provisions of No Child in place.

House Progress ‘Very, Very Important’