A day after blocking legislation to approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline, President Obama on Wednesday continued to issue veto threats at a record pace, this time vowing to stop a Republican-backed education reform bill.
In a statement, the White House said Mr. Obama’s advisers will recommend he veto the Student Success Act, the latest GOP attempt to replace the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law. Wednesday’s veto threat is the president’s 13th since Republicans gained full control of Congress in January.
No other president has issued this many veto threats during the early weeks a new Congress. President Reagan came closest in 1987, threatening to veto seven bills between the start of a new congressional session and Feb. 25 of that year.
The White House has come out hard against the Student Success Act, claiming it would divert money away from districts that primarily serve minority students.
The measure “abdicates the historic federal role in elementary and secondary education of ensuring the educational progress of all of America’s students, including students from low-income families, students with disabilities, English learners, and students of color,” the White House said. “It fails to maintain the core expectation that states and school districts will take serious, sustained, and targeted actions when necessary to remedy achievement gaps and reform persistently low-performing schools.”
On Tuesday, the administration released estimates predicting the bill would impose major funding cuts on the largest 33 school districts with high concentrations of black and Hispanic students.
Republicans counter that the bill would remove the most onerous federal requirements under No Child and would provide states and districts the flexibility to use federal money as they see it.
“After years of an outsized — and unsuccessful — federal role in education, the Student Success Act gets Washington out of the business of running schools and restores responsibility for providing an effective education to states and school districts,” Rep. Todd Rokita, Indiana Republican and chairman of the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education, wrote in an op-ed Tuesday for The Examiner.
The full House will vote on the measure this week.
• Ben Wolfgang can be reached at bwolfgang@washingtontimes.com.
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