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WASHINGTON (AP) —
The way the nation's public schools are evaluated — teachers, students and the schools themselves — is headed for a major makeover, with a sweeping shift from federal to state control over school accountability and student testing.
The Senate on Wednesday voted 85-12 to approve legislation rewriting the landmark No Child Left Behind education law of 2002, now widely unpopular and criticized as unworkable and unrealistic. The White House said President Barack Obama would sign it Thursday.
The bill would keep a key feature of No Child: the federally mandated statewide reading and math exams in grades three to eight and one such test in high school. But it would encourage states to limit the time students spend on testing, and it would diminish the high stakes associated with these exams for underperforming schools.
The measure would substantially limit the federal government's role, barring the Education Department from telling states and local districts how to assess school and teacher performance.
There was strong bipartisan support for the measure, which had been endorsed by the nation's governors, teachers' unions, chief school officers and administrators.
Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who leads the Senate Education Committee, called it a "Christmas present" to 50 million children across the country.
Alexander, a former U.S. education secretary, said he hoped Obama "will wrap a big red bow around it ... and send it to the children and the 3.4 million teachers who are looking forward to it."
Alexander was a chief author of the bill along with Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington — and in the House, Education Committee Chairman John Kline, R-Minn., and ranking member, Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia.
Murray, a former preschool teacher, said the work must now begin in "our schools, in our communities, in our states," to find ways to make sure that all students achieve. "We expect them to live up to that, and that's the promise of this bill," Murray said after the vote.
States and districts will now come up with their own goals for schools, design their own measures of achievement and progress, and decide independently how to turn around struggling schools. Testing will be one factor considered, but other measures of success or failure could include graduation rates and education atmosphere.
States will still be required to intervene in the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools, in high schools with high dropout rates and in schools with stubborn achievement gaps — something Democrats have pushed.
The measure will end the waivers the Obama administration has given to more than 40 states — exemptions granted around the more onerous parts of No Child when it became clear that requirements such as having all students proficient in reading and math by 2014 would not be met.
Three of the presidential candidates missed the Senate vote — Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida and Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders.
On Common Core, education guidelines reviled by many conservatives, the bill says the federal government may not mandate or give states incentives to adopt or maintain any particular set of academic standards.
The Common Core college and career-ready curriculum guidelines were created by the states, but became a flash point for those critical of Washington influence in schools. The administration offered grants through its Race to the Top program for states that adopted strong academic standards for students.
No Child Left Behind passed with broad support in Congress and was signed by President George W. Bush in 2002.
It was praised for its main intent, which was to use annual tests to identify achievement gaps in learning and failing schools in need of support. But it was later criticized for a heavy-handed federal approach that imposed sanctions when schools came up short — leading teachers, administrators and others to worry that the high stakes associated with the tests were creating a culture of over-testing and detracting from the learning environment.
No Child has been up for reauthorization since 2007, but previous attempts to renew the law have been caught in a broader debate over the federal role in public education.
GROTON, Conn. (AP) —
States with large military bases are filling what is traditionally the federal government's role by picking up the tab for construction and repairs, saying they can't afford not to.
The number of states willing to spend taxpayer money to fix infrastructure in military facilities, and the scale of the projects, has increased steadily in the past five years. State officials argue the Pentagon keeps asking for base closings and they want to protect their bases and the revenue they bring in.
Essentially, states are treating bases like large corporations they want to keep within their borders, and at least one high-ranking Navy official says it's a good idea. Connecticut has been a leader, setting aside $40 million to improve aging infrastructure at the naval submarine base there, much like it's spending hundreds of millions of dollars to keep companies in Connecticut and create jobs.
"We are changing the ways we think about military bases," said Bob Ross, executive director of Connecticut's Office of Military Affairs. "These are big commercial enterprises. They are publicly financed, but there is so much commercial activity that goes on at these bases, you have to look at them the same way you look at a corporation."
Of the nearly two dozen states where the military has a major presence, slightly more than half have spent state money to fix infrastructure on military installations, the Association of Defense Communities has found. Most of the spending occurred after 2009, when the Defense Department's budget for military construction began shrinking, said Tim Ford, the association's chief executive officer.
Last year, Massachusetts authorized spending $177 million on its six bases. Cities are contributing, too: Huntsville, Alabama, paid to build houses on an Army post for high-ranking generals.
Most bases are a community's largest employer, and in many cases are the largest employer in a state, Ford said. They infuse capital into an area through salaries, expenditures and contracts, creating a vibrant economy and tax base and helping other business thrive, he added.
"So now you have this proliferation of other states looking to see how they can provide dollars for their installations," Ford said. "It has started to raise the question of, how far do you go? Where's the point by which you have to draw a line, where this is a federal action, this is our federal government, our military, and how much should states really invest?"
States are throwing their money away because these projects won't be enough to change minds in a future round of base closings, said Jerry Hendrix, of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank on national security and defense policies.
"States should spend money investing in the local community, in health and public safety, and what money they don't need should return to their people in the form of lower taxes," said Hendrix, a retired Navy captain and director of the center's Defense Strategies and Assessments Program.
There also isn't the political will to close bases now, Hendrix said, so states are spending money to "compete in a competition that hasn't been declared."
Dennis McGinn, assistant secretary of the Navy for installations, said he would encourage states to invest in bases to jumpstart projects. Limited military construction funds are being prioritized, he added.
"It is a great win-win partnership. There's benefit to the state and the local communities. There's benefit, certainly, to the United States Navy and the Marine Corps where states are doing that," McGinn said in an interview when he visited the submarine base in Groton last week.
Connecticut presented McGinn with a $2.2 million offer for two more projects at the base, and McGinn helped open a new facility for Navy divers, commonly referred to as a dive locker, another project Connecticut paid for.
McGinn said he thinks Connecticut's spending will "absolutely" better position the base if there's another round of base closings. The base was nearly shuttered during the 2005 round, largely because of its aging infrastructure.
"The No. 1 criterion for maintaining a base, instead of closing it or realigning it, is military value," McGinn said. "And the military value of the naval submarine base is enhanced by having, in this particular case, a dive locker."
While Congress has denied the Defense Department's recent requests for base closings, many say more are inevitable. To prepare, Massachusetts is reducing energy costs at its bases to make them more valuable.
Rhode Island copied Connecticut's approach and passed legislation in 2014 to invest in Naval Station Newport but hasn't spent money yet. State Sen. Louis DiPalma said Rhode Island values the economic impact but is balancing competing funding priorities.
Most states with a major military presence have paid for improvements to schools, roads or housing just outside bases.
In Virginia, military installations are in good shape, but the state and local communities have spent more than $140 million to prevent development close to them by purchasing land, said John C. Harvey Jr., Virginia's secretary of veterans and defense affairs. The legislature also passed a bond authorization in case infrastructure improvements are needed, he added.
WASHINGTON (AP) —
The two San Bernardino shooters were radicalized at least two years ago — a year before one of them came to the U.S. on a fiancée visa — and discussed jihad and martyrdom as early as 2013, FBI Director James Comey said Wednesday.
Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee investigators believe that Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, were radicalized even before they began their online relationship and that Malik held extremist views before she arrived in the U.S. last year.
The comments suggest that the government's vetting process apparently failed to detect Malik's radicalization when she applied for the visa. Comey said he didn't know enough to say whether weaknesses in the visa process enabled her to enter the U.S.
The couple, who lived quietly in a two-bedroom townhouse with their 6-month-old daughter and Farook's mother, killed 14 people and wounded 21 last Wednesday before dying in a shootout with police in San Bernardino, California, about four hours later.
Malik came to the United States in July 2014 from Pakistan after being approved for a K-1, or fiancée visa. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has said the Obama administration is now reviewing the program. He did not say what changes were being considered.
Malik married Farook the following month. Farook was born in Chicago in 1987 and raised in southern California.
FBI officials had previously said that the couple had been radicalized for "quite some time," but the disclosure Wednesday was the most specific yet about the timeline of their relationship and progression toward extremism.
Comey said the two "as early as the end of 2013 were talking to each other about jihad and martyrdom before they became engaged and married and were living in the U.S." He said the couple was clearly inspired by a foreign terror organization, but that investigators did not yet know whether their online courtship was arranged by such a group or developed naturally on its own.
"It would be a very, very important thing to know," he said.
The FBI director described the couple as an example of homegrown violent extremists who appear to have radicalized "in place," drawing a distinction between the San Bernardino attack and the one last month in Paris that officials suspect involved planning and training in Syria.
While evidence shows that the couple was "at least in part inspired" by the Islamic State, Comey said officials had not ruled out other sources of inspiration in part because the radicalization process took place before the terror group had become the global presence that it is today.
"We're trying to sort out what other contributions there may have been to their motivation. At least in part, we see an ISIL inspiration," Comey said, using an acronym from the terror group.
He also declined to say what role, if any, encrypted communications played in last week's massacre.
Comey said he remained concerned that criminals, terrorists and spies were using technology to evade detection. "Increasingly, we are unable to see what they say, which gives them a tremendous advantage," he said.
For example, Comey said one of the gunmen in last May's shooting outside a Prophet Mohammed cartoon contest in Garland, Texas had exchanged more than 100 messages with an overseas suspected terrorist prior to the attack that investigators still had been unable to access.
"We have no idea what he said because those messages were encrypted," Comey said. "And to this day, I can't tell you what he said with that terrorist 109 times the morning of that attack. That is a big problem. We have to grapple with it."
The FBI has revealed little else of what it's learned about Farook and Malik and their planning, except for details about the weaponry they had, materials they had to make more pipe bombs and that both had been taking target practice. A U.S. official said Tuesday authorities are looking into a deposit made to Farook's bank account before the shooting. The official, who had been briefed on the investigation but was not authorized to discuss it by name and spoke on condition of anonymity, would not further characterize the nature of the deposit or what was suspicious about it.
America's counterterrorism infrastructure has had success flagging individuals who try to travel abroad to fight alongside militants, fund operations overseas or who communicate online with overseas terrorists. But it's been far more challenging for law enforcement to identify each individual who self-radicalizes online.