Shawn Vestal: Give Murray an ‘A’ for bipartisanship

So, have we seen the last of those horrid letters – the ones informing us that our kids’ school is lousy?

“Simple answer: Yes,” said Sen. Patty Murray this week. “Those letters didn’t improve education for any child.”

For those of us in Washington, that may be the biggest takeaway from the sweeping new education law that passed the Senate this week and was signed Thursday by President Barack Obama. The bill deposes the No Child Left Behind Act, and weakens the flawed federal approach that misidentified nearly 90 percent of Washington’s schools as failing.

Murray, the West Side Democrat who has served in the Senate for nearly a quarter-century, played a key role in drafting and shepherding the Every Student Succeeds Act – another instance of her ability to make concrete progress with Republican partners.

That’s believed to be impossible in Washington, D.C., these days but Murray has attracted attention for being a living, breathing practitioner of that mythical quality: bipartisanship. Murray’s work with House Speaker Paul Ryan on the budget in 2013 was hailed by many as a model of how a broken Congress might find a way to work again. An analysis of the negotiation by the Brookings Institution called it a pioneering agreement that “provides a hopeful template for future negotiations.”

Murray collaborated with Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and the result has drawn similar praise – though it has also attracted its share of criticism, including complaints that it was drafted more or less in secrecy. In truth, it was the Tennessee senator, whose party has a 54-vote majority, who took the biggest step. Early this year, Alexander was on a course to try and cram a hardball bill down the throats of the Democrats. But Murray proposed working together and he agreed.

“It’s an important first step,” Don Wolfensberger, a congressional scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., told the Christian Science Monitor in February. “There’s a need to take the baby steps first in order to build relationships and build trust.”

Their initial bill included many of the elements of the final bill that passed this week. It shifts authority to states to design and oversee their own systems for measuring student achievement and addressing shortfalls, within federal “guardrails”; allows the use of additional measures beyond standardized tests for such accountability; increases grants for early learning; and preserves programs intended to help poor, disabled and otherwise challenged students.

Kerry Arndt, Murray’s press secretary, said the Senate bill stood in stark contrast to the House approach: passing a bill with no support from Democrats that, like most House legislation, stood no chance of actually becoming a law.

The Murray-Alexander bill passed with an 81-17 majority in July. At the time, the National Journal wrote, “The bill’s passage shows again how Murray, who has recently untangled knotty disagreements over high-profile budget and human-trafficking issues, is perhaps the best Democratic negotiator on Capitol Hill.”

After it was reconciled with the House version of the bill, the Every Student Succeeds Act passed the Senate on Wednesday, 85-12.

Murray has become the anti-Harry Reid.

Some of the key reasons for this are pretty simple. The Brookings Institution analysis focused on several seemingly simple but important characteristics of the budget negotiations: using shared facts, taking impossibilities off the table, talking frequently and privately, not slagging each other in the press.

Murray said an important first step was to stay out of the political fray. “I don’t go on the Sunday talk shows and yell, to start with,” she said this week in an interview.

The issue in question is also important. The best negotiator in the world wouldn’t have much luck developing an agreement on, say, gun control.

“I think you have to pick issues you know people want to work on,” Murray said.

Everyone wanted to work on throwing out the No Child Left Behind Act, though Democrats and Republicans wanted to throw out different parts of it. In the end, the new law will grant more state flexibility in determining how to measure achievement and hold schools accountable, and allow them to use a wider range of measures. Critics have gone after the bill on a variety of fronts, saying it lowers teacher standards, retains too much federal control, gives away too much federal control, does too little to eliminate the test regime, etc.

But it seems, broadly, to make important fixes to the law that gave us a flawed test-mania that distorted the entire educational system. We felt the impact bluntly in Washington. Most states had obtained waivers from the accountability provisions that requires districts to inform parents their schools were failing. Washington lost its waiver because of a refusal to accede to a federal requirement linking test scores to teacher evaluations, a union-backed line in the sand that helped bring down the rain of letters to parents in the last two years.

These letters were the futile endpoint of the entire No Child Left Behind process – the proof of its failure to do what it said it would do. The law’s goal – 100 percent test success – was noble but impossible. Nine out of 10 schools in Washington state were assessed as failing, even if they showed improvement on the tests.

“The letters achieved nothing,” Murray said.

Shawn Vestal can be reached at (509) 459-5431 or shawnv@spokesman.com. Follow him on Twitter at @vestal13.