Statement in Support of S. 1177, the Every Student Succeeds Act

December 2, 2015

I support the Every Student Succeeds Act.  It preserves critical civil rights protections for students, maintains the historic commitment to low-income children and communities, and strikes a delicate balance between federal accountability and state flexibility to meet local needs.  I thank Ranking Member Bobby Scott and Chairman Kline – as well as the former Committee leaders George Miller and Buck McKeon - for their leadership. This is not a perfect bill, but it is a good bill.  It represents an improvement over the current waiver process and over the outdated, one-size-fits-all, punitive No Child Left Behind law.  I especially am proud that the bill includes multiple provisions that I have championed for years. 

Foremost, the bill maintains federal accountability in public education.  The Elementary and Secondary Education Act at its heart is a civil rights law, and, as such, it is essential that the federal government provide oversight to ensure equal educational opportunity under the law.  Although the bill transfers considerable power to the states to oversee their improvement and limits some Secretarial authority, it requires states to take action in every school in which any group of students is consistently underperforming under the state’s accountability system, in all high school dropout factories where one-third or more of students fail to graduate, and in the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools.  

The bill enhances transparency into the educational success of vulnerable students.  Many years ago, I wanted to know how African American boys were doing in school only to learn that we did not know because we did not collect student data in a way to answer that question.  I have fought to change this because we cannot develop educational interventions to help students – especially vulnerable students - if we lack a clear understanding of how various groups of students are learning.  This bill requires reporting of outcomes and indicators by important student characteristics to inform our understanding of student learning and direct interventions. 

Further, the bill adds to the our understanding of student experiences by including critical information about discipline practices, including rate of suspensions, expulsions, referrals to law enforcement, and school-related arrests.  Given that African Americans – especially African-American boys – disproportionately experience harsh discipline that contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline, clear information about actual practice is key.  Importantly, the bill also discourages the overuse of exclusionary and dangerous discipline practices by requiring state plans to describe how they will improve learning by decreasing such practices.  Similarly, the Every Student Succeeds Act promises to improve the school environment for students by decreasing bullying.  For over a decade I have led a bill to direct greater federal resources to promote bullying-free learning environments.  In addition to requiring states and districts to report incidents of discipline, bullying, and harassment, the bill provides funding for states and localities to implement evidenced-based positive behavioral interventions and supports and other successful approaches that improve behavior, reduce harsh discipline, and decrease bullying and harassment so that teachers can teach and students can learn.   

The bill addresses key educational challenges for foster youth for which I have advocated, including:  ensuring that foster youth can remain in their current school when they enter care or change placements when doing so is in their best interest; allowing immediate enrollment in a new school, prompt access to educational records, and assistance in transferring and recovering credits to remain on track for graduation; assuring a point of contact for foster youth within the education system when such a contact exists in the corresponding child welfare agency;  requiring school districts and child welfare agencies to work together to ensure funding for transportation exists to allow students to remain in their schools of origin and to remove negative effects of unreliable transportation; and mandating that the Department of Education and Health and Human Services report on the progress made in and remaining barriers to addressing educational stability.  Further, the bill requires states and localities to report on the student outcomes of foster youth and homeless youth to better understand their educational attainment.

The bill provides critical protections for students with disabilities that I have promoted, such as advancing high learning standards for students with the most significant disabilities.  It caps the use of alternative, less-rigorous tests for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities at one percent of all students and prohibits states from counting lesser credentials as a regular high school diploma. 

The bill does many additional important things. It invests in teachers by improving professional supports, recognizing that states and localities are better-suited to implement teacher evaluations than federal officials, and requiring collaboration with teachers and the prohibition on overturning existing collective bargaining agreements if states voluntarily develop teacher evaluation programs.  It helps improve equitable distribution of resources among school districts, promotes responsible testing policies that reduce over-testing and discourage the use of tests for high-stakes decisions, expands early childhood education, increases federal investment in education, and maintains the historic and necessary state financial commitment to education.

This bill does raise concerns and the need for vigilance.  With the greater responsibility given to states, there is a heightened need for monitoring by the federal government, advocates, and the civil rights community to ensure that critical supports go to the schools and students in need to close achievement gaps and improve learning.

This is not a perfect bill, but it is a good bill that advances educational opportunity. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting its passage.