edward kennedy has been getting an earful of late. And since the subject of the senator’s listening sessions is the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, which he played a key role in passing and is up for reauthorization this year, the commentary hasn’t always been kind.

It would be an understatement to say the law, which set tough accountability standards for state school systems in exchange for some $20 billion in federal funding, is unpopular. The level of disappointment varies, of course, depending on who’s talking, from education reformers who say the law fails to focus enough resources on the worst schools to teachers’ unions, who say its expectations have been unrealistic from the start and its funding wholly inadequate.

What’s notable, however, is that, at least in Massachusetts, few of those who have been most critical of the law find fault with Kennedy, who was President Bush’s principal Senate partner, and who gave the legislation the bipartisan credibility it needed to become the signature achievement of the president’s first term.

“Our organization was somewhat displeased when he originally signed on, but now I think that if he had not been part of this, that the law would have been even worse,” says Anne Wass, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association. “Kennedy is blamed for inadequacies that he did not foresee, and I think he’s realizing some of the shortcomings now.”

Comments like that are a sign of the reservoir of support Kennedy enjoys among traditional liberal constituency groups and a tribute to how well he has maneuvered politically. Lately, he has seemed like more of a critic of the law than an original sponsor. He claims, for example, that the law needs an additional infusion of $70 billion to work as he intended. Nevertheless, what many No Child critics may find surprising is how much of the law Kennedy still supports.

As the new chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee, he will be the key Senate negotiator on reauthorization. However, Kennedy isn’t giving away his hand as yet, winning allies by listening and by speaking only in sympathetic generalities.

“We’re open to all suggestions of how to improve the law’s accountability provisions,” he said in a statement. “But helping all students become proficient in their academic subjects must continue to remain our goal. The universal-proficiency goal was meant to inspire students and teachers to strive for the highest achievement. We can’t turn back the clock by returning to a system that permits schools to ignore groups of students or accept low performance without improvement.”

the conventional wisdom is that no reauthorization will occur this year, given how far the parties are apart. President Bush has denied that the law has been underfunded, and has already said he wants any reauthorization bill to allow more experiments with charter schools and voucher systems—essentially, permitting students in failing public schools to instead attend private schools at government expense. This prospect is anathema to Kennedy.

At the same time, conservative Republicans in Congress are starting to rebel against No Child’s mandates, which many of them only grudgingly accepted in 2001. Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, for example, has introduced a reauthorization bill that would allow states to opt out of No Child Left Behind’s requirements and still collect federal funding. Sens. Jim DeMint of South Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas have proposed legislation that would allow states to negotiate a charter with the federal Education Department that would give them more freedom to set performance requirements for students.

Next year—in the midst of a presidential election—would seem to offer even less hope for compromise. So the smart money is on Democrats in Washington waiting it out until 2009 in the hope that they will maintain control of the House and Senate, and also win the White House.

But Kennedy isn’t acting like he’s planning on a delay, which would leave the provisions of the 2001 version in place. As soon as the 110th Congress convened in January, he launched a series of hearings on the reauthorization bill, then delivered a major address on it to the National School Boards Association.

At the first hearing, in February, Paul Reville, president of the Cambridge–based Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy, was one of several state experts—and the only one from Massachusetts—called in to testify. “I think on some of the more complicated issues, he’s in a listening mode,” Reville says of Kennedy.

For his part, Reville testified that the success of No Child “hangs in the balance” unless the federal government provides increased resources, both in terms of money and technical assistance.

The challenge for Kennedy will come when he has to put some formal proposals on the table. Teachers’ unions are gunning for a substantial relaxation of the law’s key provision: a requirement that all schoolchildren perform at or above grade level by 2014 and that schools make “adequate yearly progress” towards that goal. Even in the “ideal bill” with vastly more resources, “2014 would not be realistic,” says Thomas Gosnell, president of the Massachusetts branch of the American Federation of Teachers. But education reformers worry that opening up that provision will undermine the law’s demand that states seek to improve the performance of all students.

What critics don’t regularly acknowledge, notes Reville, is that the law allows states to design the tests that students take each year in grades three through eight and at least once during high school, and to determine on their own which students meet expectations. MCAS—the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System—just happens to be one of the more rigorous testing regimens in the country.

Partially as a result of the tight MCAS standards, Bay State schools are having difficulty meeting the yearly progress requirements. The state Department of Education reported last September that 37 percent of the state’s public schools—or more than 600—failed to meet No Child Left Behind’s requirements for at least two years straight. And that total is growing. In 2005, only 420 Bay State schools had missed performance targets for two straight years.

As a result, there’s a push among some to set national standards. “There’s an unfairness to it, and it cheats kids in some places,” says Gosnell of the existing system of state standards. But any push to set a national bar will be resisted, Gosnell predicts, by advocates on both sides of the aisle who have always seen No Child Left Behind as an unwarranted intrusion into schooling issues that have always been a local prerogative.

Kennedy proposes a middle ground. He’s backing an approach that would establish national benchmarks and encourage states to review the rigor of their standards and assessments. He also has said he’s supportive of rethinking how progress is measured by No Child. Under current rules, most states measure student achievement by comparing one group of fourth-graders or eighth-graders with the next. An alternative model being tested in some states as part of a pilot program, including Massachusetts, measures the progress of each cohort of students as they get older.

The senator has indicated that such experiments—including new tutoring and drop-out prevention programs, as well as more aggressive intervention in failing schools —are key to making No Child Left Behind work. He’s also praised, for example, the longer school day implemented at Boston’s Roxbury Preparatory Charter School, which he credits with boosting test scores. The longer school day, he says, is one way of assuaging critics of No Child who say it has forced schools to spend most of their time teaching to the test, focusing exclusively on reading and math at the expense of the arts.

But whether Kennedy can overcome the Bush administration’s reluctance to expand such programs with federal funding, or instead hope for a more sympathetic administration two years hence, remains to be seen. For now, anyway, he continues to win plaudits from even some of the law’s most skeptical critics.

“I really believe that [Kennedy] feels that the Bush administration has pulled the rug out from under the law,” says Gosnell. “Clearly, the accountability and funding were all wrapped up together. For a lot of people, the sell on the bill was both.”