Dive Brief:

• This week, education-minded representatives from both parties and chambers of Congress will convene to hash out how to reconcile the partisan provisions of the House's Student Success Act, which failed to garner any Democrat votes, and the mandates of the Senate's Every Child Achieves Act, which received overwhelming bipartisan support.
• The central concerns in the dual rewrites of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act revolve around accountability: Democrats want to ensure tight monitoring of how schools serve historically disadvantaged students, while Republicans want more local control of accountability and schools.
• Debate is likely to last multiple weeks, even as Congress wraps up its current session on July 30.

Dive Insight:

Although the current process seems the most likely to pass an ESEA rewrite in over a decade, the law's first reauthorization since the maligned No Child Left Behind faces daunting hurdles. Any bill that comes out of the conferencing process will have to garner enough support from both the Senate and the House to make it to President Barack Obama’s desk. Senate Democrats have already signaled that they have the power, along with the guaranteed no votes from some Republicans, to block a bill without strong accountability provisions. In the House, partisan divides make it challenging to muster support from both sides of the aisle, and an earlier bill failed to garner enough support even from Republicans.

As for how accountability measures are likely to fare in the conferencing process, Sen. Lamar Alexander, one of the architects of the Senate bill and chair of that chamber's education committee, seemed unconvinced about an increased federal watchdog presence.

"My goal and the goal of the bill is to keep the important measures of accountability — keep the report cards, keep the tests — so we'll know how the children are doing, but turn over what to do about the tests and the accountability for getting a result to the states and local school board," Alexander told Education Week. "The president would like to have more federal involvement in that accountability process. I understand that. We'll just have to discuss that."