A Sad Day in the Senate for Education Reform and School Choice
The silly season has begun on Capitol Hill. Normally, this season opens at the end of the year or just before a major election when members of Congress attempt to add pieces of legislation to bills that, at any other time, would have no chance of passing. But with the mark-up last week by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee of S. 1725, to amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, this year’s season has kicked off early. The news isn’t good for education reform and school choice advocates. In the name of “fixing NCLB,” the Senate HELP Committee reported a bill that will take education policy back to the dark days of little accountability for academic results and few school choice alternatives for students and parents. This can be expected from Senate Democrats who align themselves with teachers unions and the education establishment. Both have opposed accountability and school choice provisions in NCLB from its inception over a decade ago. However, what is surprising is that several republican senators have bought into these policies in the name of local control and flexibility.
There is no doubt that reforms need to be made to NCLB in order for more flexibility and control to be returned to states, local school districts and parents. The Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) provisions have proved burdensome and unwieldy and, in many cases, made states adopt lower academic standards so as to not be penalized by the federal government. But if the Senate bill is enacted into law, teachers unions and the education establishment will return to power and they, not parents and local principals, will once again control how decisions are made in our public elementary and secondary schools. Under the Senate bill there will be no ability for students who are lagging behind to access after-school tutoring or transfer to another higher performing public school unless they happen to attend one of our worst performing schools. There will be no way for parents to know how their school is performing academically compared to other schools in the district and the state and there will be no consequences for states and schools who persistently fail to educate our students. In essence, the Senate HELP Committee has taken away the only tools parents and taxpayers have to hold educators accountable and replaced it with the nebulous and immeasurable concept of “continuous improvement.”
The Senate HELP Committee should be congratulated for attempting to find common ground in the complex and political minefield of education reform. There is something to be said for reporting a comprehensive bipartisan education reform bill through the committee process when too often today bipartisanship is viewed as betrayal to your political party. However, in their zeal to reach a bipartisan compromise and eliminate the complicated and unpopular AYP provisions, the Senate HELP Committee failed to offer an easier and less complex alternative to measure student academic performance and to hold states and school districts accountable for how federal education dollars are spent. By focusing only on five percent of the worst performing schools in each state, the Senate HELP Committee abandoned 95 percent of our schools where academic performance is still lacking.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), two-thirds of our children are not performing at or above grade level in reading and math. Regrettably, those children do not just attend the bottom five percent of our schools. The Senate HELP Committee also eliminated any opportunity for parents to remove their child from a persistently failing school in order to attend a higher performing one unless they are unfortunate enough to attend the bottom five percent of schools in the state.
What is the Senate HELP Committee saying to parents and students, particularly those who are disadvantaged? It says we are going back to the failed policies of the past where you have no ability to leave a failing school unless you attend one of the worst schools in the country, can afford to pay for a private education or are one of the few accepted by lottery to attend a public charter school. For the majority of poor minority students, this bill dooms them to an educational system that continues to pass them by with no ability to escape. Is this what our policy makers really want? I would hope not.
In an effort to move the reauthorization along, many amendments were withdrawn or not even offered during the committee markup so there is still time to work through the many flaws in this legislation. However, conservative republican members must insist that school choice options remain for parents to exercise control over their child’s education in all of our schools. In order for that to happen, there must be ways for states to measure how well all schools are performing academically, not just those in the bottom five percent. While the Senate bill retains provisions to disaggregate achievement data based on certain subgroups of students including race, economic status, disability and English language learners, there are no consequences for states or schools that fail to meet their own state developed academic standards or narrow the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their non-disadvantaged peers. Parents will not be able to request additional tutoring services or move their child to another school if they cannot determine how their school is performing.
If policy makers, particularly conservatives, are truly committed to returning control to the local level then they should put the power of the federal dollar into the hands of the parent so that federal funds can follow the child to the school of the parent’s choice. States should be given the flexibility to rank or grade each school in the state so that parents will know where their school falls with regard to student academic performance and can make the choice of whether to stay or leave. Only through such parental empowerment will the education establishment finally wake-up and begin to focus on increasing academic achievement for all of our students regardless of their economic or minority status or what school they attend.
Prior to the markup, a diverse group of civil rights advocates, business representatives, state education officials and other education advocacy groups refused to support the legislation due to its weak accountability provisions. It is rare that such a diverse group of organizations have come together to insist that some type of accountability system be retained in any re-write of NCLB. Many of these groups are not insisting that the federal law dictate what those accountability measures should be but that states should have them in place so that parents, educators, policy makers and taxpayers know how federal education dollars are spent and if American students are meeting high academic expectations. Such accountability systems must also provide options for parents to obtain additional tutoring services for their child or move to another higher performing school.
The Senate HELP Committee has not “fixed” NCLB. But there is still time to make the necessary changes to this legislation that will ensure all of our students receive a high quality public education.
Sally Lovejoy
