Every Child Achieves Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, as we wait for colleagues to arrive to the floor, I thought I would take a few minutes to speak a little bit about accountability in this bill.
As we know, the No Child Left Behind legislation and now this new version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act require annual tests. They are not popular.
I believe we are overtesting kids in this country. It is not the Federal requirement that is causing that; it is the relationship of the Federal requirement to State and local tests that are administered, so that by the time we get to the classroom inhabited by one of my three daughters who go to Denver's public schools, for example, kids end up spending too much time being tested. Part of that is because we haven't done a good job, I don't think, of distinguishing between tests that are used for accountability purposes--how is the school doing growing kids--and tests that are used for teaching and learning purposes, which are assessments that have to happen all the time during the school year. When I was in school, we called those quizzes, and we dreaded them, just as people dread them today. That was the way teachers were able to keep an eye on how students were doing in their classroom throughout the year so they could course correct, so they could make changes based on the individual needs of the kids in their classroom.
Teaching and learning and accountability aren't the same things, and I think we put too much freight on some of these assessments. I hope what we are going to see as we come out of this new reauthorization is an understanding about the importance of the accountability--why we have it--and better implementation of tests at the State and local level.
There is no reason for the Federal Government to be involved in education, really--only 9 percent of what we spend is Federal money, and the rest of it is State and local money--except for one reason. The civil rights imperative in this bill and that is at the heart of this bill has said to us that we just can't look the other way when it comes to kids of color and kids living in poverty in this country, which we did for decades--for decades--without knowing where we were headed.
The one great benefit of No Child Left Behind is that it required that data about kids living in poverty, kids of color, kids with special needs, and English language learners as well be published so we could see the huge gaps that exist all across this country in educational attainment. We can't go backward on that. I agree that allowing States to have more flexibility in the design of these systems is important. It is an important step forward in this bill.
As I mentioned yesterday, when I was the superintendent of the Denver Public Schools--the best job I ever had; I had that honor--I used to wonder all the time why people in Washington were so mean to our teachers and to our kids. I got here and I realized they weren't mean, they just have absolutely no idea what is going on in our schools and our classrooms. Where the Presiding Officer is right now, right here, in this place--and I mean this literally--is as far away as one can get from a school or a classroom in this country and still be in this universe. We are very distant. We may think we know what is going on there, but we don't know. This institution doesn't know.
While I, as that superintendent, have developed a very strong view that I didn't want to be told how we should do things by Washington, and I didn't want Washington telling my teachers how to do things, our principals how to do things, kids and families how to do things, I think it is important and imperative that we have a national expectation for what kids ought to be able to do at certain grade levels and that we have a national imperative around the achievement gap in this country.
We also have a national imperative--people may not like to know this--to figure out how we are going to replace the 1.5 million teachers we are going to require in this country over the next several years.
Those are all issues of national concern, but our federalist system tells us there are certain responsibilities assumed by the States and certain responsibilities assumed by the Federal Government, and we have gotten that twisted up when it comes to education. So I think that is an important step forward, that we are not going to be telling people how to do it, but we need to remind people that they need to do it.
It is not OK that we live in a country where if you are unlucky enough to be born poor, your chances of getting a college degree or its equivalent are roughly 9 in 100. That is not OK. That is a matter of national concern. That is why the accountability provisions in this bill are so important. To be honest, that is why the annual testing is so important, if it is done wisely and well and if the data is used in a thoughtful way to measure student growth.
No Child Left Behind not only was a huge overreach by the Federal Government, it also asked and answered the profoundly wrong question. It asked: How did this year's group of fourth graders do compared to last year's fourth graders? That is how we evaluated schools, on that basis. That is crazy. They are not the same kids. The question we should be asking and the question we are asking now in many States and in many communities across the country is this: How did this group of sixth graders do compared to how they did as fifth graders compared to how they did as fourth graders and then compared to all the kids in the State--this is the way we do it in Colorado--who had a statistically similar test history. That reveals a lot of information.
For No Child Left Behind, we used to have a matrix in Denver, and it was four squares, and in the upper right-hand corner was--well, there are two measures; one is growth and one is status. How much did you grow this year? It would be like saying, how much weight did you gain or lose this year, versus status, which is, how much did you weigh? What is your achievement level? Those are two different ideas.
In those four boxes I mentioned earlier, in the upper right we had high growth, high status schools, and in this corner we had high status but low growth schools. Those are schools we called excellent schools under No Child Left Behind. Those were blue ribbon schools even though kids were losing ground in those schools. They arguably shouldn't have been because those schools didn't have the struggles schools have with kids living in poverty. Those were blue ribbon schools. Those are schools where we were telling moms and dads and kids that everything is fine, even though kids were losing ground when they showed up at the schoolhouse door.
The reverse was also true. The reverse was also true because we were saying to schools that were below the threshold of high status--low status schools--that they were failing schools even though they might have been schools where what we were seeing was 2 years of growth for kids who had started out way behind because they had come to kindergarten with that stubborn word gap, that 30 million word gap that kids have who are living in poverty and are showing up in kindergarten. By the way, we are not doing anything, almost, as a country to deal with that problem.
As I mentioned yesterday, we are having a debate in Washington about income redistribution sometimes. We have a discussion about what the Tax Code should be, and there are people here who believe that it shouldn't do anything. That is a principled position, but if that is a person's position, they better be working day and night to make sure every single kid in America has access to high-quality early childhood education. We better make sure every kid in America has access and a choice to go to a high-performing K-12 school. And we better make sure we are doing everything we can to make it easier, not harder, to go to college to get a higher education degree because this unforgiving international economy is not going to change its mind about whether a high school degree is enough or dropping out of high school is enough.
We need to be focused on education in this country. It is the single most important public good we provide domestically. If a person asks me as a parent what I would take a risk on for my kids, the No. 1 thing I wouldn't take a risk on is their education. That is how we ought to be feeling about all of the kids in the United States of America. We should stop treating America's children as though they are someone else's kids. They are not someone else's kids; they are our kids. And if we extrapolate the academic outcomes that we are seeing in this country, the college graduation rates we are seeing, the high school graduation rates--if we extrapolate those against the changing demographics in the United States, we are not going to recognize ourselves in the 21st century.
When we constrain a child, a human being, an American citizen to the margin of this economy or the margin of the democracy simply because they are born into poverty and we can't do the work to provide a high-quality education, that is all the evidence we need that we are treating people as though they are someone else's kids. That is why, by the way, there is more we need to do on accountability.
I feel as though we have made good progress with a lot of this bill, and I am extremely grateful for the leadership of Chairman Alexander from Tennessee and the ranking member of the committee, Senator Patty Murray, and I am pleased to see that the bill passed out of committee unanimously. Remember, ESEA is fundamentally a civil rights law. We should measure growth. We should identify the bottom 5 percent of schools in this country. We need to ensure that subgroups and high-performing schools are not left behind. And that is the power of the data that is collected, and that is the power of what is called the disaggregation of that data so that we can see outcomes.
I see my colleague from New Jersey is here. Through the Chair, I would ask if he wishes to speak, and if so, I will stop. I was filling time. I do want to talk about the comparability loophole, but I will come back to that and yield to my colleague from New Jersey.
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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I thank Senator Booker.
I see the Senator from Pennsylvania is here. The Senator from Connecticut is here, and I want to thank him for his leadership and how he has stuck with it week after week after week.
I want to say to my friend from New Jersey, through the Chair, how much I appreciate his words and his aspirations for our country, because we are falling down on the job.
We have issue after issue after issue that comes here to the Senate floor--sometimes resolved, sometimes not. Education almost never is in front of us.
I sometimes hear people say this, and it rattles me when I hear them say it. Sometimes people say: Michael, don't you know that not everybody is going to go to college? Don't you know that not everybody is going to go to college?
That is OK with me as long as it is their decision that they are making and that they are an educated 12th grader but they are deciding not going to go to college. That is the decision they are making.
But the reality is that it is not that we are sort of, kind of getting it right when it comes to kids in this country. Let's do the math. If you are born poor in the United States, because of the way our K-12 system works in access to higher education, you stand a 9-in-100 chance of getting a college degree--not an 80 percent chance, not a 75 percent chance, but 9 in 100.
If we were poor kids in this place instead of Senators, it would be those desks in the front row, the desks in the row behind them, and three desks in the next row. The entire rest of this Senate would be a sea of people without a college degree. That is the condition for poor kids living in the United States of America.
That is the circumstance they face. We have to start believing there are kids--they are not someone else's kids. We learned for the first time a month ago--this is not a measure of poverty in the same sense that I was just using the word, but for the first time in this country's history, over half our public school children are poor enough that they qualify for free and reduced lunch.
We did not change the standard for free and reduced lunch. That is the effect of 20 years of an economy that is not driving middle-class wages up and the worst recession since the Great Depression. So at every level from the schoolhouse door to the floor of the Senate, this ought to be our No. 1 priority. Because as the Senator from New Jersey said, all the other stuff that we want to fix--he mentioned what we need to do with sentencing reform.
Eighty-five percent of the people in our prisons are high school dropouts. That tells you something about what you might do to cure that problem. This ought to be our No. 1 issue. It ought to be our No. 1 here, and it ought to be our No. 1 issue at home.
I yield the floor.
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