Our guest blogger is Jeremy Ayers, Senior Education Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Last week, Rep. John Kline (R-MN), chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, released two bills to revise the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). NCLB certainly needs to be fixed, but the Kline bills would do more harm than good by returning almost all control of education to the local level. They would jeopardize important civil rights protections for disadvantaged students, reduce accountability for the use of taxpayer dollars, and promote partisan ideas that make it less likely NCLB actually gets reauthorized soon.

The first bill, the Student Success Act, would change how schools are held accountable. The bill would maintain the status quo in terms of standards and assessments, while asking states to come up with their own system for improving struggling schools. This seems reasonable enough on its face, but the proposal contains some big problems:

– States and districts would have no parameters or requirements for how they use federal funds to help struggling schools.

– States would not have to hold schools accountable for the performance of disadvantaged students if they don’t want to.

– School districts could put anyone in the classroom as a teacher, including those without a college degree or demonstrable knowledge of the subject they teach.

– States wouldn’t have to ensure poor and minority students get effective teachers. But they must ensure private school children receive the same funding, services, and even equipment that public school students do, including using taxpayer dollars to hire new staff.

– Congress could never significantly increase education funding, at least beyond the rate of inflation.

– States would no longer have to measure how well students do in science, a subject that is critical for 21st century jobs and maintaining American competitiveness abroad.

The Encouraging Innovation and Effective Teachers Act, meanwhile, would seek to improve the teacher workforce. Notably, the bill would require states and districts to create new teacher evaluation systems to rate teachers and then make personnel decisions. This is a step in the right direction, but fails to ensure that schools use evaluations to help teachers improve. One wonders if this is an attempt to make it easier to fire teachers, or worse, simply putting a finger in the eye of teachers’ unions.

There are other problems with the teacher bill, including essentially turning federal funds into block grants that would do little or nothing to ensure public money is spent wisely or fairly. And the bill would change funding formulas so that poor schools would have less priority in receiving grants.

In a press statement Kline said, “There is a strong sense of urgency that the heavy-handed law must be reformed to ensure more children have access to the quality education they deserve.” But the law he proposes actually weakens protections and programs for disadvantaged children while giving states and districts an almost blank government check.

In a telling move, the Kline bill wants to change the name of the biggest chapter in NCLB from “Improving the Academic Achievement of the Disadvantaged” to “Aid to Local Education Agencies.” That goes to show that House Republicans are unfortunately more interested in promoting local control than promoting the interests of disadvantaged students.

The credit rating agency Standard and Poor’s last week warned that “the United States is at risk of having its pristine credit rating lowered if politicians in Washington cannot agree on a plan to bring down the nation’s deficits over the long term.” This, of course, set off a predictable hue and cry from Congressional Republicans (despite S&P’s abysmal record leading up to the financial crisis).

“Today’s announcement makes clear that the debt limit increase proposed by the Obama Administration must be accompanied by meaningful fiscal reforms that immediately reduce federal spending and stop our nation from digging itself further into debt,” claimed House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA). House Education Committee Chairman John Kline (R-MN) even opined that one of the things Congress should cut to reassure the ratings agencies and global investors that the U.S. is serious about tackling its deficits is Pell Grants, which help low-income students pay for higher education:

U.S. Rep John Kline, R-Minn., said federal dollars being spent on the Pell Grant program have skyrocketed in recent years. Funding has increased from $16 billion in 2008 to $41 billion in the president’s 2012 budget proposal. Kline said lawmakers must act swiftly to scale back federal spending, referencing Standard & Poor’s recent decision to revise its forecast of the U.S. debt from stable to negative.

“The country is facing very, very serious problems — huge deficits, mountains of debt,” Kline said. “Markets globally are worried about what is happening in the United States. You have to take strong affirmative action to get us back on track.”…“When you are borrowing 42 cents of every dollar that the federal government spends, it’s pretty hard to justify a program that has tripled in costs in just a couple of years,” Kline said.

While the Obama administration has increased the maximum amount of aid available under the Pell Grant program, about 40 percent of the program’s growth in in the last few years is due to increased demand amidst the Great Recession. Reducing Pell Grants is also a pound-foolish way to cut the budget, as doing so hinders the country’s long-term economic competitiveness. America is now 12th worldwide in percentage of 25-to-34-year-olds with a college degree, and by 2025, according to estimates by the Lumina Foundation, our nation will be short 16 million college-educated workers.

If Kline and other Republican lawmakers were truly interested in a way to get the U.S. deficit under control they could look at CAP’s budget plan or the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ budget, which, according to the Economic Policy Institute, achieves a surplus almost two decades before the House Republican budget. Instead, they’re using Standard and Poor’s warning to advocate cutting aid for those who need it most.

Our guest blogger is Theodora Chang, Education Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Yesterday, President Obama called on Congress to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), currently known as No Child Left Behind, before the start of the next school year. “I want every child in this country to head back to school in the fall knowing that their education is America’s priority. Let’s seize this education moment. Let’s fix No Child Left Behind.”

However, House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline (R-MN) ignored the President’s sense of urgency, saying:

We need to take the time to get this right — we cannot allow an arbitrary timeline to undermine quality reforms that encourage innovation, flexibility, and parental involvement.

The start of the school year is far from an “arbitrary timeline.” Districts and schools plan several months ahead for the next school year, so failure to reauthorize the law will have very real consequences for students and teachers.

The law’s accountability requirements, for example, have not kept pace with local efforts to meet higher achievement standards. McPherson School District in Kansas received a waiver earlier this month from the U.S. Department of Education because it wanted to develop student assessments that were more rigorous than the state assessment required under NCLB.

The law is also overdue for an overhaul of its Title I provisions. New research shows that several pieces of the Title I program are not serving the disadvantaged students they were meant to help. One key example is the “supplemental education services” provision, which mandates tutoring for students in schools that do not make adequate yearly progress. Although hailed as a central tenet of NCLB, studies now show that these tutoring programs are minimally effective, with small improvements for a small fraction of students who receive at least 40 hours of tutoring.

Thoughtful proposals from President Obama and several lawmakers acknowledge the limitations of the current law and identify specific revisions. Many of these ideas were first introduced back in 2010, and students should not have to wait any longer for Congress to act. It’s time to regain momentum and tackle reauthorization now — before the outdated provisions of the law render it entirely arbitrary and obsolete.

The for-profit college industry — which is composed of schools like the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University — has been going all out to prevent new regulation proposed by the Department of Education from ever coming online. They have bought a phalanx of high-profile lobbyists and have been running a slew of ads.

But no public policy offensive is complete without some allies in the halls of Congress. And as the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported, for-profit schools have found a friend in House Education Committee Chairman John Kline (R-MN):

In the 2009-2010 election cycle the industry donated millions of dollars to the campaigns and political action committees of nearly 100 Democratic and Republican congressional candidates. More than $100,000 went to Rep. John Kline of Minnesota’s Second District, the new Republican chairman of the House Education Committee. “Congressman Kline is deeply involved in these issues,” said Kent Jenkins, communications chief of Corinthian Colleges Inc., a publicly traded for-profit college group that gave $15,750 to Kline’s political action committee. [...]

Kline vows to pass legislation with bipartisan support to undo or neuter gainful employment regulations if the U.S. Department of Education implements them. “We’ve looked at the regulations, and they’re not just aimed at bad actors,” he said. “They’re aimed at everyone.”

The proposed regulations would cause for-profit schools to lose their access to public money if their graduates fail to meet a certain debt-to-income ratio or have high rates of student loan default. The proposals arose because students who attend for-profits are using an increasing amount of federal student aid, while accounting for a disproportionate amount of student loan defaults (even as the schools reap profit margins of 30 percent and pay their executives huge salaries).

Evidence suggests that the schools mislead students with outsized promises of future earnings, while actually leaving them buried in debt and with bleak job prospects. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) even put together a report finding that for-profit colleges scammed $521 million from U.S. taxpayers “by recruiting armed-services members and veterans through misleading marketing.”

A new report released this week by the National Consumer Law Center also notes that for-profit schools are making in-house loans to students, even though the schools know will never be repaid, as a gambit to keep federal funding flowing:

Many for-profit (or proprietary) schools have begun making costly private student loans knowing in many cases that more than half of these loans will never be repaid...The schools seem to view these “institutional loans” as loss leaders to keep the federal dollars flowing. Among other reasons, proprietary schools must show that at least 10% of revenues come from sources other than Department of Education federal student assistance. Schools make unaffordable loans as a way of filling up the 10% category with vapor revenues derived from loans that will never be repaid.

The NCLC said that these in-house loans are essentially predatory. The regulations propose by the Department of Education would require this industry to clean up its act, but instead of simply complying, they’re attempting to push the levers of power in the Capitol to prevent the regulations from being enacted.

One of the Obama administration’s higher education initiatives has been to take a hard look at for-profit colleges like Strayer University and the University of Phoenix. This scrutiny is well-founded, as for-profit colleges are taking in a growing number of students and an ever increasing amount of federal student aid, while also accounting for a disproportionate amount of student loan defaults.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) — who chairs the Senate Education Committee — has said that he is going to try and implement stricter regulations against these schools. But the incoming GOP chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, Rep. John Kline (R-MN), told Reuters that “he would oppose such an effort”:

“I would push back really hard against a bill that might come out of Chairman Harkin’s committee.” Asked if such a bill could succeed, Kline said: “I don’t think so.”

For a sense of what kind of an industry Kline is protecting, consider that, currently, “eleven percent of all higher-education students are enrolled in for-profits, but they receive 26 percent of federal student loans and account for 43 percent of defaulters.” The graduation rate for first-time, full-time candidates at for-profit colleges is 22 percent; it’s 55 percent at state colleges and 65 percent at private non-profit universities.

As McClatchy reported, for-profit schools have been accused of “recruiting students with inflated promises, fudging financial-aid applications and leaving graduates with crushing debt and bleak job prospects.” According to the Pew Research Center, “one-quarter (24%) of 2008 bachelor’s degree graduates at for-profit schools borrowed more than $40,000, compared with 5% of graduates at public institutions and 14% at not-for-profit schools.”

Not only are some for-profit colleges leaving students crippled with debt and unemployed, but they’re doing it while lining their executives’ pockets with taxpayer dollars. Harkin put together a report finding that for-profit colleges even scammed $521 million from the U.S. taxpayer “by recruiting armed-services members and veterans through misleading marketing.”

For the record, before he’s even picked up the Education and Labor Committee gavel, Kline has expressed a desire to deny unemployed workers jobless benefits, punt on new mine safety regulations, and cut student loans. Ignoring abuses in the for-profit college industry would just be icing on the cake.