The Leave No Child Behind Act of 2001 (H.R. 1),
soon to be considered by the House Committee on Education and the
Workforce, includes many of President George W. Bush's education
reform proposals. Unlike other education legislation now before
Congress, H.R. 1 includes more measures to promote academic
excellence, accountability, flexibility, and new opportunities for
children left behind by the current system. As is often the case,
however, extensive reforms such as these that promise to boost
achievement face major opposition from special-interest groups. The
temptation to weaken H.R.1 instead of strengthening it to improve
its potential could grow during the negotiation, amendment, and
reconciliation process.
As
the bleak results of the just-released 2000 National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP) in reading show, a new approach to
educating America's children is needed. Despite the $80 billion in
federal money spent over the past decade to close the achievement
gap, achievement in 4th grade reading has not improved in the
general population, and reading scores among children who are the
most at risk of illiteracy have declined.
Bearing this in mind, Members should not
only resist pressure to weaken H.R. 1's reforms, but work intently
to improve its provisions. Specifically, its reforms should be
strengthened to yield greater programming flexibility and
accountability; its testing provisions should be strengthened to
provide educators, reformers, and parents with the most accurate
information on the results their efforts are achieving; and its
choice provisions should be strengthened to offer children greater
opportunities to achieve.
THE PRESIDENT'S PLAN
President Bush's No Child Left
Behind plan, unveiled in January, includes an ambitious series
of education reforms to improve results. The President
recommends consolidating over 60 federal Elementary and Secondary
Education Act (ESEA) programs into a smaller number of
performance-based categories such as improving the academic
performance of disadvantaged children, promoting literacy,
increasing teacher quality, enhancing technology, boosting English
fluency, improving math and science education, and strengthening
school safety.
The
President's plan would require, for the first time in the federal
education system, that recipients of federal dollars demonstrate
that their students are in fact learning and benefiting from the
programs that serve them. Administrators would have greater
flexibility in deciding how to meet that requirement, and children
trapped in persistently failing and unsafe institutions would be
able to transfer to successful schools.
Committees in both houses
of Congress have drafted bills to reauthorize the ESEA programs
that include some reforms. Members of Congress, however, are under
considerable pressure by interest groups to eliminate education
reforms in these bills and merely reauthorize existing programs at
higher authorization levels. Many of the President's No Child
Left Behind reforms reflected in these bills, including
measures to promote academic excellence and administrative
flexibility, are under attack by those who believe the status quo
is good enough.
HOW H.R. 1 SEEKS TO IMPROVE EDUCATION
Unlike the Better Education for Students
and Teachers Act (S. 1), recently approved by the Senate Health,
Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, H.R. 1 includes more of
the reforms to improve education that the President included in his
plan. The House committee
bill would focus education spending on results, both by requiring
annual testing to gauge academic achievement and by dedicating
resources to make changes where needed, and would break with the
status quo by enabling parents to choose better schools for their
children and empowering state reformers to devise ways to better
serve their students. The bill also includes measures to improve
the failing federal bilingual education programs, to emphasize
research-based instruction, and to consolidate duplicative and
unsuccessful federal education programs.
Accountability for Results
Like the President's No Child Left Behind plan, H.R. 1
demands accountability for student achievement. In exchange for the
federal education dollars they would receive, states would have to
set clear, measurable goals and implement annual state tests to
ensure that all students are achieving. Their bilingual programs,
for example, would have to show that students actually learn to
read and speak English, that their reading programs effectively
teach children to read, and so on. While there is room for
discussion as to how this testing should occur, the need for it is
obvious. Currently, these programs do not have to demonstrate that
they are achieving their objectives in order to receive federal
funding.
The
No Child Left Behind Act would address this by establishing a
system of monetary rewards and sanctions for states based on
achievement. Although relatively small, these rewards and sanctions
would create an incentive for the education establishment to
achieve better results.
The
most significant accountability mechanism in H.R. 1, however, is
school choice. Like the President's proposal, H.R. 1 would enable
students attending Title I schools that failed to improve for three
years to take their Title I per-pupil dollars to another school,
either public or private. Victims of school violence would also be
eligible to attend other schools. As a recent survey conducted on
behalf of the National Education Association found, there is strong
support for such programs: 63 percent of those polled favored
legislation that would provide parents with tuition vouchers of
$1,500 a year to send their children to any public, private, or
charter school.
To
demonstrate the impact of choice on academic achievement, the bill
authorizes the U.S. Secretary of Education to make grants to
eligible entities to carry out and evaluate research on the effects
of school choice. Although current
research indicates positive returns for choice, the number of
studies on choice is still limited. Funds under Title IV Part C
could be used by states and districts to create their own public or
private school choice programs. These provisions in H.R. 1 make a
small but valuable first step in efforts to focus federal funding
on the needs of children rather than on institutions.
To
ensure that more children can receive a good education, the
constraints on choice in H.R. 1 should be removed. As written,
state laws could still deny school choice to Title I students in
failing schools. Private school choice is limited to the size of
the Title I per-pupil expenditure, which amounts to only a few
hundred dollars in most cases. A child could take those Title I
funds to another school only after the first institution had failed
to improve for three years in a row. A loss of three
years of learning in the early grades has grave academic
consequences. Would any Members of Congress allow their children to
attend failing schools for three years?
Roughly 7,000 Title I schools are
designated officially as being in need of "improvement" because
they are failing to make adequate annual achievement gains. Many of these
schools have not changed despite waves of reform over decades.
Their lack of reform should not hinder a child's opportunity to
learn. Choice would help students escape from such failing
schools.
School choice can serve as an impetus for
district and statewide reforms. The available evidence suggests
that public schools with poor achievement levels improve when they
are at risk of losing students. Introducing the
competitive forces that work so well in other industries into
education makes the entire system more consumer-sensitive and
accountable to parents and children who have the freedom to go
elsewhere if they are dissatisfied.
Streamlining Administration and Ending
Duplication
Like the President's plan, H.R. 1 would consolidate duplicative
or unnecessary programs to reduce bureaucracy and ensure that more
dollars flow to the classroom. For example, the Safe and Drug Free
Schools program and the 21st Century Learning Centers program would
be consolidated. It also would provide more focus on core programs
than the current ESEA law does or the Senate committee bill would.
However, the number of programs it allows would remain high.
Current law contains 61 separate line-item
authorized programs. The Senate committee bill includes 45 such
programs, and the House bill includes 33. The President's plan
contains a much smaller number of core programs: education for the
disadvantaged, teacher quality, safe schools, math and science
instruction, technology, character education, Impact Aid, and
English fluency.
The
consolidation proposed in H.R. 1 would represent a good start
toward eliminating duplicative and ineffective programs, but the
House committee should seek further consolidation and resist
efforts to add new programs.
Flexibility for Local Officials
H.R. 1 contains several provisions to give states and school
districts flexibility in the administration of their federal
education programs. Districts would be authorized to transfer funds
between programs: up to 35 percent at the local level without state
permission and up to 100 percent with state approval.
One
of these provisions reflects the "Charter States" proposal in the
President's plan. Similar to the Academic Achievement for All Act
(H.R. 2300), or "Straight A's," passed by the House during the
106th Congress, the H.R. 1 provision would allow states and
districts significant flexibility in exchange for meeting high
accountability standards in improving academic achievement. One of
the bill's most significant provisions, Straight A's would cut
top-heavy bureaucracy and empower state and local education
reformers to focus federal dollars on important priorities. Many
reform-minded state and local superintendents support this
provision.
Under the current system, funding
priorities are set in Washington, D.C., and do not reflect what is
needed in every state or school district. These one-size-fits-all
federal categorical programs are not aligned with state and
district priorities. Under H.R. 1, if a state or district applied
for Straight A's and met the qualifying terms to participate, it
could send federal dollars where they are most needed.
For
example, if a district already had sufficient computer technology
but needed more teachers, its superintendent could shift more
federal dollars to teacher recruitment. If class size reductions
yielded no improvement in test scores, the state education
authority could shift federal funding to improve curricula. States
with more rural areas could design and implement a comprehensive
rural school initiative. Urban districts could fund innovative
music programs that have been shown to improve mathematics
comprehension. So long as the state or district showed clear and
quantifiable academic improvements from these efforts, it would
continue to have the freedom to create a better system to serve its
student population.
Promoting Academic Excellence
Like the Bush plan, H.R. 1 also focuses on building
research-based instruction. Its Reading First plan would provide
funds to the states to focus on implementing proven methods of
teaching reading, based on scientific research, to ensure that all
students learn to read by the 3rd grade. The bill also would reform
bilingual education to focus existing programs on teaching English
to limited English proficient children and expediting their
transition into regular education classes. The bill requires
parental consent before students can be placed in an instructional
program that is not taught primarily in English.
There are no requirements in current law
that schools must demonstrate that these children have learned
English. Students in bilingual education classes tend to learn
English at a slower rate, later in their schooling, and with
greater difficulty than do their peers. Students are often
enrolled in bilingual classes without their parents' knowledge or
permission, and some parents have had difficulty removing them from
those programs. For these reasons, several states have ended or
limited participation in bilingual education.
Whether in committee, on the House floor,
or during conference to reconcile the House and Senate bills,
Members should defend H.R. 1's provisions that would ensure that
limited English proficient students learn to read and speak
English.
Protecting Teachers
H.R. 1 includes a provision to shield teachers, principals, and
school board members from liability when they undertake reasonable
actions to maintain order and discipline in the classroom--a
measure that was passed by both chambers during the 106th
Congress. Limiting legal liability
would reduce the threat of frivolous and arbitrary lawsuits against
educators who are acting in their professional capacity. It would
empower teachers to create an environment that is both safe and
conducive to learning by eliminating a barrier to discipline in the
classroom.