[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 11 (Thursday, January 22, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S417-S418]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
IT'S TIME TO FIX NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a copy of
my remarks at yesterday's Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
Committee hearing be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
It's Time To Fix No Child Left Behind
Since this is the first hearing of the committee in this
114th Congress, I have some preliminary remarks.
This committee touches almost every American.
No committee is more ideologically diverse and none is more
productive. In the last Congress, 25 bills passed out of this
committee became laws.
That's because we worked with Chairman Harkin on areas of
agreement.
I look forward to working in the same way with Ranking
Member Murray in this Congress. She is direct, well-
respected, she cares about people and is results-oriented.
We are going to have an open process, which means we're
going to have a full opportunity for discussion and for
amendments. Not just in the committee, but on the floor. In
the last two congresses, we reported a bill, but it didn't
make it to the floor.
This congress, we hope to have a bipartisan bill coming out
of committee--but even if we don't, the bill will go to the
floor and it will have to get 60 votes on the floor, 60 votes
to go to conference, 60 votes to get out of conference, and
then the president will have his say. We hope to get his
signature and get a result.
Next, the schedule:
Let me start with some unfinished business:
Fixing NCLB: This is way overdue, it expired more than 7
years ago. We posted a working draft on the website last
week, already feedback is coming in--not just from Congress
but from around the country. We have several more weeks of
hearings and meetings. We hope to have a bill ready for floor
by end of February. The House expects to have its bill on the
floor by the end of February.
Reauthorizing the Higher Education Act: This is, for me,
about deregulating higher education making rules simpler and
more effective. Also, finishing the work we did on student
loans in the last congress. Our first hearing on the
deregulation task force formed by Senators Mikulski, Burr,
and Bennet and me is on Tuesday, February 24.
As rapidly and responsibly as we can, we want to repair the
damage of Obamacare and provide more Americans with health
insurance that fits their budgets. Our first hearing is
tomorrow on the 30 to 40 hour workweek--the bill introduced
by Senators Collins, Donnelly, Murkowski and Manchin. We will
report our opinions to the Finance committee.
Then, some new business:
Let's call it 21st Century Cures--that's what the House
calls it, as it finishes its work this spring. The president
is also interested. What we're talking about is getting to
market more rapidly, while still safe, medicines, treatments
and medical devices. There is a lot of interest in this and
we'll start staff working groups soon.
There will be more in labor, pensions, education, health
but those are major priorities and that is how we start.
The president has also made major proposals on early
childhood education and community college. These are
certainly relevant to K-12, but we've always dealt with them
separately. It's difficult for me to see how we make these
issues part of this reauthorization.
Now to today's hearing: Last week Secretary Duncan called
for law to be fixed. Almost everyone seems to agree with
that--it's more than 7 years overdue.
We've been working on it for more than 6 years. When we
started, former Rep. George Miller said, Pass a lean bill to
fix No Child Left Behind, and we identified a small number of
problems.
Since then, we've had 24 hearings, and in each of the last
two Congresses we've reported bills out of committee.
Senators should know issues by now, 20 of 22 were here in
the last congress, 16 of 22 were here in the previous
congress.
One reason it needs to be fixed is that NCLB has become
unworkable.
Under its original provisions, almost all of America's
100,000 public schools would be labeled a ``failing school.''
To avoid this unintended result, the U. S. Secretary of
Education has granted waivers from the law's provisions to 43
states--including Washington, which has since had its waiver
revoked--as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.
This has created a second unintended result, at least
unintended by Congress, which stated in law that no federal
official should ``exercise any direction, supervision or
control over curriculum, program or instruction or
administration of any educational institution.''
Nevertheless, in exchange for the waivers, the Secretary
has told states what their academic standards should be, how
states should measure the progress of students toward those
standards, what constitutes failure for schools and what the
consequences of failure are, how to fix low-performing
schools, and how to evaluate teachers. The Department has
become, in effect, a national school board. Or, as one
teacher told me, it has become a national Human Resources
Department for 100,000 public schools.
At the center of the debate about how to fix No Child Left
Behind is what to do about the federal requirement that
states annually administer 17 standardized tests with high-
stakes consequences. Educators call this an accountability
system.
Are there too many tests? Are they the right tests? Are the
stakes for failing them too high? What should Washington,
D.C. have to do with all this?
Many states and school districts require schools to
administer additional tests.
This is called a hearing for a reason. I have come to
listen.
The Chairman's staff discussion draft I have circulated
includes two options on testing:
Option 1 gives flexibility to the states to decide what to
do on testing.
Option 2 maintains current law testing requirements.
Both options would continue to require annual reporting of
student achievement, disaggregated by subgroups of children.
Washington sometimes forgets--but governors never do--that
the federal government has limited involvement in elementary
and secondary education, contributing only 10 percent of the
money that public schools receive.
For 30 years the real action has been in the states.
I have seen this first hand.
[[Page S418]]
I was Governor in 1983 when President Reagan's Education
Secretary, Terrell Bell, issued a report called: ``A Nation
at Risk,'' which said that: ``If an unfriendly foreign power
had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational
performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it
as an act of war.''
The next year Tennessee became the first state to pay
teachers more for teaching well.
In 1985 and 1986, every Governor spent an entire year
focused on improving schools the first time in the history of
the National Governors Association that it happened. I was
chairman of the association that year and the Governor of
Arkansas, Bill Clinton, was the vice chairman.
In 1989, the first President Bush held a national meeting
of Governors in Charlottesville, Virginia, and established
national education goals.
Then in 1991-1992, President Bush announced America 2000 to
help move the nation voluntarily toward those goals, state by
state, community by community. I was the Education Secretary
at that time.
Since then states have worked together voluntarily to
develop academic standards, develop tests, to create their
own accountability systems, find fair ways to evaluate
teacher performance--and then adopted those that fit their
states.
I know members of this committee must be tired of hearing
me talk until I am blue in the face about a ``national school
board.'' I know it is tempting to try to fix classrooms from
Washington. I also hear from governors and school
superintendents who say that if ``Washington doesn't make us
do it, the teachers unions and opponents from the right will
make it impossible to have higher standards and better
teachers.''
And I understand that there can be short term gains from
Washington's orders--but my experience is that long term
success can't come that way. In fact, today Washington's
involvement, in effect mandating Common Core and teacher
evaluation, is creating a backlash, making it harder for
states to set higher standards and evaluate teaching.
As one former Democratic governor told me recently, ``We
were doing pretty well until Washington got involved. If they
will get out of the way we can get back on track.''
So rather than turn blue in the face one more time about
the national school board let me conclude with the remarks of
Carol Burris, New York's High School principal of the Year.
She responded last week to our committee working draft this
way:
. . . I ask that your committee remember that the American
public school system was built on the belief that local
communities cherish their children and have the right and
responsibility, within sensible limits, to determine how they
are schooled.
While the federal government has a very special role in
ensuring that our students do not experience discrimination
based on who they are or what their disability might be,
Congress is not a National School Board.
Although our locally elected school boards may not be
perfect, they represent one of the purest forms of democracy
that we have. Bad ideas in the small do damage in the small
and are easily corrected. Bad ideas at the federal level
result in massive failure and are harder to fix.
Please understand that I do not dismiss the need to hold
schools accountable. The use and disaggregation of data has
been an important tool that I use regularly as a principal to
improve my own school. However, the unintended, negative
consequences that have arisen from mandated, annual testing
and its high stakes uses have proven testing not only to be
an ineffective tool, but a destructive one as well.
____________________