Every Child Achieves Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Thank you, Mr. President.

I am obviously a Senator from Colorado, but as I rise, I am speaking more as the father of three daughters in the Denver Public Schools and a former superintendent of schools.

It was a great privilege of mine, probably the privilege of a lifetime, to have been the superintendent of Denver Public Schools for almost 5 years. I can't begin to express, as I am standing on this floor, my gratitude for what I have learned from teachers, principals, and parents who were sending their kids to what was then a school district that had seen declining enrollment for many years. It is now the fastest growing urban school district in America. Of course, the students themselves day after day inspired all the adults around them to want to help deliver a high-quality education.

But I also was struck when I was superintendent with the barriers that we have accepted as a country and as a society that we would never accept for our own children. We would never accept them for our own children. The first barrier I talked about on the floor before is the fact that if you are born poor in this country, you show up to kindergarten having heard 30 million fewer words than your more affluent peers. This is an enormous barrier we haven't addressed as a country, and there are many other challenges up to and including the fact that we have made it harder and harder as years go by for people to afford a college education without bankrupting themselves or shackling themselves to a mountain of debt.

In the face of all that, we have been very slow to change. We have been very slow at every level to change the way we deliver K-12 education or early childhood education through higher education. Let me just give you one example that this bill addresses today, in part. We have done almost nothing in this country to change the way we attract teachers, recruit teachers, inspire teachers, train teachers, reward teachers, since we had a labor market that discriminated against women and said the only job you can have is being a teacher or being a nurse. Those are your two jobs. So why don't you come to the Denver Public Schools and teach Julius Caesar every year for 30 years of your life for a really low compensation. But if you stick with us for 30 years--which you would not do anymore--we will give you a pension worth three times that of Social Security. That sounded like a good deal because you were likely to outlive your spouse, you weren't paid a lot during your lifetime, and you get the pension at the end. We have done nothing to change that. That is our offer.

I can tell you again--not speaking as a politician but speaking as a school superintendent, speaking as somebody who has never done anything but substitute teach. I have never actually taught as a traditional teacher. I substitute taught from time to time. That is the hardest job a person can have, especially when you are teaching in a high poverty school. It is much harder, I can say without any doubt, than any job any Member of the U.S. Senate has. Yet we have an offer that belongs to an era that no longer exists.

In all honesty, we used to subsidize the public education system in this country through that discrimination in our labor, our approach to labor, because even though the deal wasn't a good deal, we might have been able to get the very best British literature student in her class to commit to be a teacher of British literature because she had no other options except for perhaps becoming a nurse. Fortunately, that hasn't been true in this country for 30 or 40 years, but we haven't updated the offer, and we haven't changed the way we train our teachers once they get there.

That is why this bill is important in some parts because it makes some important steps in the right direction. We are not going to teach children from Washington. Our kids who today are in systems all across this country in their schools and classrooms are never going to remember who here worked on the new version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. That is not going to be of concern to them, but hopefully what they will remember is a third grade teacher who made a huge difference for them, a fourth grade teacher who made a huge difference for them, a college adviser who took a special interest and made sure somebody who didn't know that college was for them was for them.

Our job, it seems to me, is to do what little we can to try to help put people at home in a position to do that job.

That is why it is critical in this bill that we raise the quality of professional development by encouraging ongoing training and education that actually tracks the specific strengths and areas of growth for each individual teacher, instead of group workshops that we know are ineffective. For instance, teachers who need help in classroom management will receive training in that specific area, if a school district or a school would want to do that.

We promote collaboration and the use of common planning time, so that teachers can work together in groups as teams, each of whom may have a different view of each kid but together can figure out how to get each child in the school to their potential. One of the things I heard all of the time from the teachers that I worked with in Denver was that they felt that they faced a binary choice when it came to their profession. Yet they loved to teach. They loved being with the kids. But the only other option besides teaching was becoming a principal or going to work in the central office. We worked very hard in that school district and across the State to think differently about career ladders for teachers, to give more opportunity and options for people to give back, and to be able to help perfect their own craft as teachers by learning from their peers and also serving as master teachers.

This bill, for the first time, allows funding to be used for hybrid roles that allow teachers to serve as mentors or academic coaches while remaining in the classroom. It creates options, as I said. It encourages teacher-led and colleague-to-colleague professional development among teachers. I may have learned it the hard way, but I know that nobody knows how best to improve instruction more than our teachers do.

But the struggle is how to figure out how to break out of the old roles to give people the opportunity to be able to have the chance to mentor their colleagues and also, significantly, have the time in the school day and in the school year, when the stress of other business makes it hard to do, to create the time for people to be able to work together for our kids.

In this bill we recognize the work that is happening in cities such as Chicago, Denver, and Boston, around teacher residency programs, an alternative approach to bringing teachers into the profession, not relying anymore solely on higher education, understanding that maybe what we need is content matter experts who can learn how to teach by being latched to master teachers in a school district such as the Denver public schools, who bring their content, their substance from their undergraduate degree but can acquire a masters as they are learning on the job in the classroom, as in a medical residency program. We allow funding to be used for that. These programs can provide critical clinical experience to teacher candidates.

There is funding to train and place effective principals to lead high-need and low-performing schools. You cannot have a good school without a good principal. Ask anyone. You cannot have a good working environment for a teacher without a good principal. It is impossible. We skipped over that in our efforts of implementation across the country. When I had the good fortune to be the superintendent of Denver Public Schools, my chief academic officer was a guy named Jaime Aquino, a gifted school leader.

He and I would start every single day for 2 hours with a group of 15 principals in one of their schools. It was not about broken boilers, and it was not about who got left on the bus. It was about teaching and learning in Denver Public Schools.

We would do the same thing for 3 weeks, and then we would start over again, which meant that I got to see every principal in my school district once every 3 weeks, and they got to see each other. They came to understand that they had a reciprocal obligation to each other as we thought about the obligation we had to the kids in Denver. I will give you an example of one of the sessions. Jaime would bring a 1 1/2 -page piece of student writings to these meetings, because it is really important for teachers to look and analyze student work to be able to differentiate their instruction to meet the individual needs of kids in the classroom.

It is easy to say that. It is easy to have the fly-by professional development where a bunch of people are sleeping in auditorium listening to really boring stuff. It is another thing to actually get people to want to do the work. At the beginning it was hard. We would pass out that piece of student writing and you would hear sort of a crescendo as people were talking about it, and they would say: I cannot read this. I don't know what this says. This looks like a foreign language to me.

Then Jaime would say: Based on what you have read, what are Nancy's strengths as a writer?

She turned out to be a very typical fourth grader in our school district.

They would say: Well, she writes from left to right. She has a sense of story structure. She spells high-frequency words correctly.

Jaime would say: Well, why is that? He would say: Well, maybe she had a vocabulary test. He would say: Maybe she had a word wall, and she is using it to scaffold her instruction.

Over time, the principals saw what their role was as leaders and how reliant we were on them.

I can tell you firsthand that school leaders have a powerful affect dramatically improving the quality of teaching and raising student achievement, and we have skipped over them. This bill no longer skips over them.

We also update and improve the teacher incentive fund in this bill. We encourage districts to redesign their systems for recruiting, hiring, and placing teachers.

We incentivize districts to think about paying different teachers differently. In Denver, we don't have a monopoly on wisdom, but if you are working in a high-poverty school, you get paid more for that. It is harder to find you. It is a harder job. We recognize that. If you are teaching a subject for which it is hard to find people to teach, we pay a little more for that.

If you are driving student achievement or your colleagues are, we pay you a little more for that. Through this incentive fund, we promote school autonomy over budgeting, staffing, and other school-level decisions. We incentivize folks to change hiring schedules so high-need schools can hire earlier in the year and select from the best and brightest teachers, instead of the reverse.

So we have done some good things here on teachers. It is one of the reasons why I am supporting this legislation. I want to thank Chairman Alexander and Ranking Member Murray, who are both on the floor today, for their exceptional leadership in bringing this bill out of committee. The people who are watching this on television know that this body cannot seem to agree on anything these days. Because of their work, we were able to produce a bill that got unanimous support in the HELP Committee. Every single member of the committee supported it. Imagine that. Imagine that in this body.

You know what. There are no ringers on that committee either. That committee has the junior Senator from Kentucky on it, Mr. Paul; it has the junior Senator from Vermont on it, Mr. Sanders, and everybody in between. That is a rare case of unanimity among a very diverse set of Senators, which I think argues well for getting this bill through in the Senate and hopefully in the House.

I see my colleague is here. If I can just take 2 more minutes I want to mention a word or two about the title I formula. I have joined my friend from North Carolina in supporting an amendment to change the title I funding formula. The formula I think that we are trying to propose today is sensible and eliminates the overly complex and opaque formulas that we currently have. It creates one formula that is targeted and provides more funding for districts with higher concentrations of poverty.

I am extremely sensitive to the arguments that others have made, such as my friend from New York. I also agree that we need to invest significantly more in our kids. This formula change is good for my home State of Colorado. I think if you are a poor kid in Alamosa or Woodrow, CO, you deserve every chance to get a great education, including receiving an equitable share of Federal resources.

With that, I see my colleague from Utah is here. So I will relent and yield the floor and come back at a later time.

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Mr. BENNET. I thank the Presiding Officer.

Mr. President, as the father of three girls in Denver Public Schools and as a former school superintendent, I know there is a lot we can do to streamline tests, but the problem is not the Federal requirement. That is not the real problem. The real problem is the way the Federal requirement works with States and the way the State tests have piled up on the Federal requirements.

That is why States should establish a cap on the total amount of time spent taking these assessments. This target would be State-determined, subject to discussion among parents, teachers, and policymakers. If the district exceeds the policy cap, it would be required to simply notify parents. This is an essential way to respond to concerns voiced by students, parents, teachers, principals, and communities across the country about overtesting.

I urge my colleagues to support this amendment.

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