Obama sends education reform bill to Congress

WASHINGTON, March 15 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday sent to Congress his blueprint for approval of a reform on the Bush-era No Child Left Behind education program.

Obama's bill retained such Bush law features as requirement for annual math and reading tests, but he suggested moving away from relying solely on test scores to judge the academic achievement by students and to rate schools.

Obama proposed a combination of school attendance, graduation rate and learning environment as gauges to judge schools by.

The new bill was seen as replacing such absolute requirements as the one under which all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014 and all students graduating from high schools be prepared for either college or a career.

"We want to create the next generation of great assessments," said Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Monday.

The proposed standards also moved away from punishing schools for not meeting federal benchmarks. They instead focused on rewarding progress, especially with top performing schools, which was expected to decrease interference with reasonably well-run schools in the middle.

As for worse performing schools, the Obama bill called on states to identify their lowest performing 5 percent of schools, and to take strong measures to upgrade them.

With the old version of the education law, nearly a third of the 100,000 public schools were labeled as failing, to face loss of federal funds.

Critics have been blaming the old law as encouraging teachers to teach for tests by narrowing curricula.