Big changes in the proposed ESEA draft in the Senate

Yesterday my Google Reader box was full of the education blogsphere yelling about the changes in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act proposal from Senators Harkin and Enzi. From a strictly political viewpoint, this appears to be about getting the votes together to get something moving (thus the bipartisan nature of the proposal).What were the changes?

The original bill, released last week, would have required all states to develop mandatory evaluation systems based, in part, on student outcomes. In the latest version, only districts that participate in the Teacher Incentive Fund—a voluntary federal program—will need to do evaluations.*

If you're following this, you can guess how the blogsphere's reactions went: local control, caving to the unions, authentic assessments of student learning, and so forth. Here's the politics making strange bedfellows bit, though: the proposal came from the Republicans. The biggest fans of it are in the teachers' union.
Marking up the bill starts tomorrow. 

*Note that this will not supercede state laws which have changed in response to Race to the Top, as in Massachusetts.