Chief Architect of ESSA, Sen. Lamar Alexander, to Retire
December 17, 2018
Alyson Klein and Andrew Ujifusa report for Education Week that “U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who has been Capitol Hill’s leading Republican on education issues for years” announced that he’s retiring in 2020. Sen. Alexander was a chief architect of the bi-partisan Every Student Succeeds Act which passed in 2015. During ESSA’s passage, Alexander managed to bring “the National Education Association, a union with 3 million members typically aligned with Democrats,” into the fold “to get the bill across the finish line.” Alexander said in an interview shortly after the bill’s passage that the law was able to attract such broad, bipartisan support in part because “everybody was really fed up with Washington telling 100,000 public schools so much about what to do.”