WASHINGTON – A bipartisan education bill signed into law by President Barack Obama on Thursday will grant states a larger role in overseeing K-12 education.

The new bill will reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the federal law overseeing public education across the country. The new bill, known as the Every Student Succeeds Act, will replace No Child Left Behind, the last iteration of ESEA that expired in 2007.

President Barack Obama, who called the bipartisan effort “an early Christmas present,” signed the bill into law at a White House ceremony on Thursday morning. Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., who helped write the current legislation and played a role in ushering the legislation through Congress, was among the lawmakers to attend the bill-signing ceremony.

“Congress has finally done its job to pass a bipartisan bill that fixes No Child Left Behind,” Bennet said. “And it is proof that we can overcome our differences and come together and actually solve problems. We wrote this bill with help from people all across Colorado, and it brings us one step closer to ensuring that every child has the opportunity to receive a great education.”

Efforts to come up with a bipartisan education bill reached a turning point over the last several weeks. A joint House and Senate conference committee, established in mid-November, was given the responsibility of reconciling the differences between education legislation passed by both the House and Senate earlier this year. Bennet was a member of the conference committee.

Last week, the House voted 359-64 in favor of the conference committee’s bipartisan framework for updating No Child Left Behind. On Wednesday, the Senate passed the legislation with an 85-12 vote. Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., also voted in favor of the legislation.

The new legislation continues NCLB’s focus on standardized assessments, but grants states a greater say over how to evaluate teachers and school performance. States are also required to use targeted programs to improve their lowest performing 5 percent of schools.

Durango School District 9-R Superintendent Dan Snowberger said he is pleased the new legislation will maintain required assessments for third-graders through eighth-graders, and once in high school. But he added that more aligned standards between states are needed to accurately gauge student performance.

“No Child Left Behind actually required that states adopt standards, but there was no benchmark by which those standards could be compared, state-to-state,” Snowberger said. “If we don’t at least have some benchmark by which we can measure ourselves against, we’re going to go right back to where we were in 2000, which is everyone comes up with their own standards, and we no longer know how the kids in the nation are doing because we no longer have a common measuring stick that we’re comparing kids to.”

Although the new legislation grants states more autonomy in fixing low-performing schools and overseeing accountability initiatives, Snowberger said he is pleased with the legislation’s focus on student academic growth as an important measure of school and district performance.

“To expect proficiency overnight is a challenge, yet to expect growth is reasonable and should be expected,” Snowberger said. “So I was really pleased to see that growth became a factor, with Sen. Bennet’s strong urging, in the bill. So no longer will we just look at proficiency, but we’ll also continue to look at growth, which is something that Colorado has really valued for a long time.”

egraham@durangoherald.com. Edward Graham is a student at American University in Washington, D.C., and an intern for The Durango Herald.

An earlier version of this story misstated the name of the bill known as Every Student Succeeds Act.