With all the twists and turns in the last week, reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is looking more like the end of the major-league regular season than deliberation, which may be a good thing considering the tales of legislation and sausage. But it’s turning my lack of commentary on specifics into a virtue. At some point in the past few months you might have believed that
- Reauthorization was the type of bipartisan deal everyone would converge around
- Duncan’s waiver proposal was going to push everyone towards reauthorization in summer
- The waiver proposal was a poison pill for reauthorization
- Reauthorization was going to be broken up into bite-sized pieces in both chambers
- There was no chance to enshrine Race to the Top in reauthorization
- The Harkin bill was going to hew closely to the Obama blueprint
- etc.
And in the space of a week you get two proposals from Harkin who is obviously trying to win support from a broad range of senators on both sides of the aisle (as if that was never going to happen anyway). No, it’s not a goat rodeo, but it is unstable.