Education experts and lobbyists say there is little chance Congress will meet President Obama’s request to have a rewrite of the No Child Left Behind law on his desk before students go back to school in the fall.

A Senate committee has missed its self-imposed April deadline for writing a bipartisan overhaul of the federal education law, and its counterpart in the House is still getting its 11 freshmen up to speed on education issues.

With the debate over raising the debt ceiling and the 2012 budget expected to consume the next few months, experts question whether lawmakers will pass the long-stalled rewrite even by year’s end.

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“The outlook is pretty bleak,” said Michael Petrilli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education policy think tank. Having talked to those in the negotiations, “I’ve been trying to have a positive attitude about it getting done this year, but that’s getting more difficult,” he said.

The biggest problem is over a way to hold schools accountable for student achievement. While there is consensus that student performance should be measured in terms of individual growth, instead of against a proficiency standard as in existing law, there is little agreement on what a new system would look like.

“My sense is that nothing is moving,” said Sandy Kress, a counsel at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld and former education adviser to President George W. Bush. “It’s really late now, and they continue to be all caught up in the budget. I think it just gets more complex all the time.”

Richard Lee Colvin, executive director of Education Sector, a policy think tank whose experts have been working with committee staff in drafting legislation, said that while a lot of work has gotten done, “there are a lot of technical details to work out. I just don’t know whether there is the time and bandwidth to work itself out before the [summer] recess.

“A lot of it will depend on whether the Republicans are going to be willing to get beyond the message of jobs and the economy and the deficit. Do we have time for another major domestic policy issue?”

Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said in January that it was his goal to have a draft ready before the mid-April recess and a bill on the floor by late spring. A committee spokeswoman said negotiations continued over the spring break and that the group is hoping to introduce a bipartisan bill soon.

A number of recently introduced bipartisan education bills would serve as the building blocks of the larger overhaul measure, she said.

While some education lobbyists said they expect the committee to mark up a bill in June, Petrilli said differences still exist in contentious areas such as whether to use incentives or mandates in teacher evaluations, as well as how to ensure school accountability.

“From what I’m hearing, it doesn’t sounds like the parties are close together,” he said.

A group of 11 moderate members of the Senate Democratic Caucus laid out plans in March to introduce a series of bills to jump-start the rewrite. Led by Michael Bennet of Colorado and Kay Hagan of North Carolina, the group signed on to a set of principles that reflect the main elements in the Obama administration’s March 2010 education blueprint, endorsing new school accountability models that reward high achievers, require the poorest-performing schools to adopt one of four turnaround models, award competitive grants to encourage more effective teaching and require better reporting of how schools use federal funds.

Over the last two months, bills have been introduced that would promote those goals, as well as promote education in science, technology, engineering and math; correct the lack of focus on high-ability students; help principals lead troubled schools; and require that student achievement be a primary factor in charter school approval and renewal decisions.

Additional bills are in the pipeline, including one aimed at providing more-equitable funding between schools in a single district, and another creating 100,000 teaching positions in the next five years.

House Education and the Workforce Chairman John Kline, a Minnesota Republican, said last month his panel would be ready as early as May to begin overhauling specific parts of the law (PL 107-110), but he appears to be moving in a different direction than his counterparts in the Senate.

For starters, Kline has said he would prefer to move small, targeted bills that “fix” what he describes as problems in the current law, rather than writing a single overhaul measure. Education experts said when Kline begins moving bills, they probably will focus on eliminating duplicative and ineffective programs, and finding ways to provide states with more flexibility to use federal dollars as they see fit.

In addition, the November elections brought in a number of conservative Republicans, Petrilli said.

“I think that’s pushed some Republicans even further to the right and freed them up to act like Republicans again and revert to their Republican positions on education — mainly, that the federal government should have a small footprint, if any,” he said.

“They want to get it done, but they aren’t where the Senate is,” Petrilli continued. “They are still talking about a really big rethinking of the federal role in education.”

Meanwhile, Education Secretary Arne Duncan continues meeting with lawmakers, state officials and stakeholders to underscore the importance of overhauling the law this year, something he calls “an economic imperative and moral obligation.”

Department spokesman Justin Hamilton said the administration is “committed to fundamentally changing the way our K-12 education laws work this year and will use all our resources to make it happen.”

If left unchanged, current accountability standards would begin penalizing states in 2014 that do not have all their students score as 100 percent proficient in math and reading. The deadline has school officials across the country clamoring for waivers from the requirement, increasing pressure on Congress to pass something.

But Kress, the former Bush adviser, warned against passing a bill under pressure.

“I don’t think they’re prepared to pass a good bill,” he said, “and I’d rather pass no bill than a bad bill.”

Lauren Smith writes for CQ.