The bizarre alliance between Republicans and teachers unions, explained

Hidden behind Thursday’s overwhelmingly bipartisan Senate vote to get rid of No Child Left Behind is one of the strangest alliances in politics: Teachers unions have joined hands with Republicans.

That’s because they share two goals. They both want to get rid of the testing and accountability regimen of No Child Left Behind, and they want to cut back on Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s influence. Meanwhile, the Obama administration and national civil rights groups are on the opposite side of the argument.

Republicans and teachers unions aren’t enthusiastically embracing one another; don’t expect teachers unions to suddenly cut their historic ties with Democrats and start supporting Republicans instead. But the unusual alliance is evidence of how much the Obama administration has mixed up the traditional politics of education so that it no longer conforms to party lines.

No Child Left Behind is part of President George W. Bush’s legacy, but it was never very popular with conservatives.

The law required schools to test students on reading and math every year from third to eighth grade, and once in high school. Because the idea was to make sure all children were learning, regardless of racial or socioeconomic background, it meant that overall scores alone weren’t enough.

Schools would suffer consequences even if subgroups of students, such as black or Hispanic students, English language learners, or children living in poverty, weren’t progressing quickly enough.

And the law dictated the consequences for schools that weren’t making “adequate yearly progress.” Congress, not states, decided what “adequate yearly progress” meant and what states would have to do if schools weren’t making it.

This was a huge expansion of the federal role in education, one that conservatives viewed with skepticism from the beginning. They thought states could hold schools accountable without intrusion from the federal government.

Teachers unions didn’t oppose No Child Left Behind when it was passed. But they’ve always hated the testing requirement, saying it made standardized testing too important for students and teachers. They decried its approach as “test and punish,” saying it labeled schools as failing that really weren’t because of the requirements that subgroups make progress.

They argued that schools shouldn’t be judged on a test score, and that the emphasis on reading and math narrowed the curriculum and took creativity and joy out of teaching. More recently, they’ve also opposed systems that would link teachers’ pay and promotion to students’ performance on standardized tests.

“Schooling must be more about teaching and learning than testing and measuring,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement Thursday praising the Senate bill.

Teachers unions and Senate Republicans might not have shared the same rationale — unions were defending their members’ interests, while Republicans were arguing in favor of small government. But they wanted the same result: an end to the federal accountability system for K-12 schools.

The Senate bill, the Every Child Achieves Act, passed the Senate in an 81-17 vote. It keeps the standardized tests that were the highlight of No Child Left Behind. But it allows states to decide how they’ll use the results of those tests to hold schools accountable for how children learn.

Both Republicans and teachers unions are hailing this as a victory.

“There is nothing bigger in the last 13 years for K-12 public schools than what just happened in the last hour in the Senate,” said Lily Eskelsen García, the president of the National Education Association, on Thursday afternoon. “This is a seismic shift, in a very good way.”

The best example of the unusual alliance wasn’t the final bill, which got broad bipartisan support. It was a vote Wednesday afternoon on an amendment from five Democratic senators that would have brought back some elements of No Child Left Behind.

The amendment would have required states to intervene in schools if subgroups of students were lagging or if test scores or graduation rates were too low and not making progress. The federal Education Department also would have determined how much test scores should count in judging schools.

The National Education Association, one of the two major teachers unions, urged senators to vote against the amendment, saying it would “continue the narrow and punitive focus” of No Child Left Behind. (The American Federation of Teachers did not take a position on the provision.) The vote, the union said, would be included on its annual legislative scorecard.

And plenty of senators did what the NEA wanted: The amendment failed. But the opponents were almost all Republicans.

Forty-three Democrats voted in favor of it. They sided with national civil rights groups that argue a bigger federal role is essential to ensure that all students, particularly those from historically disadvantaged backgrounds, get a good education. The Obama administration also strongly supported the amendment.

“We left no politician behind,” Eskelsen García said when asked about the unusual alliance. She pointed to local civil rights groups that have been speaking out against standardized tests: “These are the community groups that say we know these kids. We do not feel alone. We are not isolated.”

Republicans and teachers unions have another reason to support the bill. They’re tired of how the Obama administration has used No Child Left Behind to shape its own education policies.

Education Secretary Duncan turned a looming crisis — 2014 was almost here, and American students were nowhere near fully proficient in reading and math — into an unprecedented opportunity to shape education nationwide. States could escape some of No Child Left Behind’s consequences if they adapted new policies supported by the Obama administration. Most states eventually got some kind of waiver from the law.

The waivers, like the law itself, united small-government conservatives and teachers unions. Unions didn’t like the policies the Obama administration has supported, particularly their push for states to evaluate teachers based at least in part on students’ test scores.

Conservatives characterized the waivers as a way for Washington to dictate education policies that used to be left up to state and local governments.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican who now leads the Senate education committee, has a favorite epithet for how Duncan has used his power. Alexander is fond of saying that Duncan created a “national school board.”

Eskelsen García echoed Alexander, hardly an ideological ally, in a Thursday interview. “Nobody elected the education secretary to be the national superintendent of schools or the national school board,” she said.

If Obama signs any law replacing No Child Left Behind, the implicit threat behind the waivers — that hundreds of a state’s schools could be declared failing — would vanish. It would be much easier for states to get rid of their teacher evaluation systems without consequences. The Senate bill, in particular, would go even further to ensure that the education secretary stays as far away from state education policy as possible.

Like getting rid of No Child Left Behind itself, that would make two very ideologically different groups — unions and Republicans — very happy.