[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 178 (Wednesday, December 9, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8532-S8535]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      EVERY STUDENT SUCCEEDS BILL

  Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I am sorry the Senator from Colorado has 
the misfortune of presiding over the Senate when I am giving a speech, 
but it is nice to see him.
  I wanted to come to the floor today to mostly say thank you but also 
to make some observations on a day where I am actually proud of the 
Senate. I am proud of the work we have been able to do to reauthorize 
the Elementary and Secondary School Act with a vote in the Senate of 85 
yes votes. This came after a vote in the House of Representatives that 
was 359 yes votes. And this comes after a time when just months ago it 
seemed as though we were paralyzed on this bill and unable to get a 
vote in the House and in the Senate. In fact, the House passed a very 
partisan bill that didn't get one Democratic vote. And when the 
Democrats were in charge, we passed bills that didn't get Republican 
votes, and then we couldn't even get them to the floor. Now we find 
ourselves just a few months later with a huge bipartisan result.
  I want to start by commending Lamar Alexander, the Senator from 
Tennessee, the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions 
Committee, for his extraordinary leadership, as well as Patty Murray, 
the ranking member of the committee, for her leadership. They ran this 
committee and they ran this process in a way that ought to set the 
standard for the rest of the committees in the Senate. They followed 
regular order. They started with a bipartisan product. They asked every 
single member of the committee whether we had ideas to try to

[[Page S8533]]

improve the legislation. They moved it out of committee unanimously--
unanimously. This is a committee that has on it the junior Senator from 
Kentucky and the junior Senator from Vermont, just to pick two 
examples, and they got a unanimous vote. Then we brought it to the 
floor, we had amendments, an open process, passed it off the floor, the 
House passed their version of the bill, and we had an actual conference 
committee. Can my colleagues imagine that? I think it is the second one 
or maybe the third; there was one fake one and then two real ones since 
I have been here in the last 7 years. I have actually had the good 
fortune to be on two of them, including this one. So we produced a 
product and got it to the floor, and now it is going to the President's 
desk.
  I say to the pages who are here today that we are 8 years away in the 
reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. The bill expired, in effect, 8 
years ago, and we have taken 8 years to get this work done, which, if 
you were grading us in terms of getting our homework done in time--if 
the teachers at the Page School had the opportunity to scold us for 
being 8 years late with our homework, they probably would. But I am 
going to celebrate because I am glad this day has finally come. For 
teachers and for principals and for students and for families all 
across the country, this change is going to come as a great relief.
  Some people ask: Why should the Federal Government have any role in 
education at all? I think it is a fair question because of what we 
spend on K-12 education, only 9 percent of it is Federal. The rest of 
it is all State and local. The reason why the Federal Government is 
involved is because of the civil rights impulse that says kids ought to 
have a great education no matter what ZIP Code they are born into. That 
is what we tell ourselves. If you are lucky enough to be born to 
wealthy parents or unlucky enough to be born to poor parents, when it 
comes to education, you ought to be able to get a good education.
  The Federal Government is meant to help ameliorate the differences 
that exist in too many places all across the country. That was the idea 
when we got involved in this in the 1960s. Then we fast-forward to No 
Child Left Behind, the idea that George Bush had and Ted Kennedy had 
and the others who worked on that bill, including Margaret Spellings 
and others, had. The idea was that our kids are not succeeding all 
across the country and they are not remotely having the same 
opportunities, and we ought to expose that to the country.
  Notwithstanding all of the things about No Child Left Behind that I 
can't stand, the one thing I will be forever grateful for was the 
requirement that districts across the country annually assess kids and 
disaggregate the data so people can see how kids are doing by ethnic 
group and by their level of poverty or affluence and that we expose 
that to the country and stop hiding from what are terrible results for 
many kids living in the United States.
  Over the period of time that No Child Left Behind has been in place, 
we have been unable to hide from the results we have seen. What are 
those results? It is very clear now that we have studied it that if you 
are a kid born into poverty, you arrive in kindergarten having heard 30 
million fewer words than a more affluent peer. Ask any kindergarten 
teacher in America whether that is going to affect the outcomes in 
kindergarten, and she will tell us.
  We now know that there are whole communities in America, across 
cities and across rural areas, where there is not a single school that 
anybody in this body would be willing to send their kid or their 
grandkid to--not one. And those of us who are proponents of school 
choice, as I am, need to recognize that there are huge parts of 
geography in the United States where there is no choice. The choice is 
illusory. You have one lousy school to choose from and another lousy 
school to choose from.
  Then what we have discovered is that we have made it harder and 
harder for people to be able to afford college. As other countries 
around the world are understanding more than ever, we need something 
north of a high school diploma to compete.
  When George Bush, the son--and I say to the Presiding Officer that 
this is a temporal observation, not a partisan observation--when George 
Bush the son became President, we led the world in the production of 
college graduates. Today we are something like 16th. My question is, Do 
we want to be 32nd or do we want to do something different to give 
people greater opportunity?
  As I have said on this floor before, where this all ends is in a 
situation where if you are a kid born into poverty in America, your 
chances of getting a college degree is equivalent to roughly 9 in 100. 
They are not roughly 9 in 100; they are 9 in 100. That means that if 
these Senate chairs and these desks--there are 100 in this Chamber--
were inhabited by poor kids instead of by Senators, there would be 
those 3 seats, then those 3 seats, and then 3 of those seats in that 
row that would be inhabited by college graduates, and the entire rest 
of this Chamber would not be. I think that if we faced those odds for 
our own kids in this body--if Senators faced those kinds of odds for 
their own kids--we would quit the Senate and we would go home and we 
would try to fix whatever we could fix to ensure that our children 
didn't have a 9-in-100 chance but maybe had a 90-in-100 chance of being 
able to make a decision about whether they wanted to go to college.
  I think one of the reasons why we find ourselves with those kinds of 
results for our kids--not just around education but around health care 
and around many other issues--is that too often we are treating 
America's children like they are someone else's children, not like they 
are our own children. And if we treated them like they were our own 
children, I think it would focus our mind.
  I think that not just on education but on all kinds of issues, we 
would stop figuring out how to get through the week, stop trying to 
figure out how to keep the lights on for 1 more week or 1 more month or 
do a temporary tax deal that we could call a yearlong deal and it is 
actually a 2-week tax deal at the end of the year, and we would 
actually start doing what the American people want us to do, which is 
invest in the next generation--investment in the next generation in 
terms of infrastructure, in terms of immigration policies, in terms of 
energy; approaching the next generation by saying we have a theory 
about how we are going to right the fiscal problems this country faces. 
And we would be doing a lot--State, local, and Federal Government--to 
ensure that we had an education system that was much more aligned to 
the outcomes we want for our kids than the system we have.
  Having said all of that, I am so glad we have made the decision that 
we have made to pass this bill today because if we had a rally tomorrow 
on the steps of the Capitol to keep No Child Left Behind the same, 
literally no one would show up, which maybe explains why we have been 
able to get this bipartisan result in the end.
  I think the other thing that explains it is the fact that the No 
Child Left Behind bill, when it was passed, represented perhaps the 
biggest and greatest Federal incursion on State and local governments 
that we have seen in modern American history. Part of what we are doing 
here by changing the way this bill works is retreating, which I think 
is appropriate and what we should do.
  When I was superintendent of the Denver public schools, I used to 
wonder all the time why people in Washington were so mean to our kids 
and to our teachers. What I realize being here is that they are not 
mean; it is just that they have absolutely no idea what is going on in 
our schools and our classrooms.
  I think it is perfectly reasonable for the Federal Government to say: 
We expect you to do better. We expect you to close these achievement 
gaps. We have a national interest in knowing that kids are moving 
forward no matter where they are born, just as I think we have a 
national interest in understanding where the next 1.5 million teachers 
are going to come from to replace the teachers we have lost. But when I 
was a superintendent, the last thing I wanted was anybody in Washington 
telling me how to do the work or telling my teachers and principals how 
to do the work. That is not the province of anybody in Washington, DC, 
and there was too much of that with No Child Left Behind.

[[Page S8534]]

  I want to talk a little bit about a few aspects of the bill today 
that I think are important. I am not going to talk about everything 
because there is an awful lot that changed. The first thing that is 
important to me was thinking about how we spend money when it comes to 
schools and understanding better how those resources are used.
  I mentioned earlier that the whole reason the Federal Government is 
involved in education is because of a civil rights impulse. It might 
surprise the Presiding Officer to know that we are only one of three 
countries in the OECD that spend more money on affluent kids than we do 
on kids in poverty as a country. Part of that has to do with the way we 
fund education through property taxes, but part of it is compounded by 
the way the Federal Government has required reporting from school 
districts and States, going back to the 1960s, where we said to States 
and school districts: You need to report not an actual teacher's salary 
but an average teacher's salary, and that is what we are going to 
require you to do. For reasons that I am not going to belabor here 
today, that became something called the comparable loophole and meant 
that it was unclear where the resources were going, including the title 
I resources which are meant for kids living in poverty.
  I wanted to close the comparability loophole as part of this 
legislation. We got a vote in the committee, but it didn't make it into 
the bill. But we have made a change in reporting, which is that we are 
now requiring districts and States to report on actual teachers' 
salaries, not average teachers' salaries, and what that is going to 
mean is much more transparency about where money is going in our school 
districts.
  It is pretty easy to think about it this way. If you imagine an 
average salary for a school district, if you are in a high-poverty 
school, it tends to be that younger teachers, newer teachers are in 
that school. Those newer teachers are paid not at the average salaries 
but an actual salary down here. If you go to a more affluent school, 
teachers tend to be more experienced and paid more, and they are paid 
up here. So in the wealthier schools, the school is billed as though it 
is paying lower average salaries even though it is paying higher 
salaries. The poor schools are being billed as if they are paying 
higher salaries, but they are paying lower salaries. That is a 
travesty. That is a massive subsidy going from poor kids to wealthier 
kids in this country because of the requirements of the Federal 
Government going back to the 1960s. We have to change that reporting, 
and I believe in the next incarnation of this legislation we will 
finally change the budgeting itself.
  We also focused on teacher leadership as part of this bill and 
teachers in general. They are the most important thing when it comes to 
a quality education. We know that the most important thing a kid who is 
living in poverty can get is 3 years of tremendous instruction. If they 
do, we can close the achievement gap. We know we can.
  There is a lot of attention paid to this question of how we get rid 
of low-performing teachers, and having been a superintendent, I am all 
for it. But the most important question or fact we need to observe is 
that we are losing 50 percent of our teachers from the profession in 
the first 5 years. What is it we can do to keep teachers longer than 
that? We can't keep them for 30 years anymore. It is not going to 
happen. We imagine that is going to happen. We have exactly the same 
system that was designed when we had a labor market that discriminated 
against women and said: You have two choices--one is being a teacher 
and one is being a nurse. So come teach Julius Caesar every year for 30 
years of your life in the Denver public schools.
  Those days are over. They are over. Our compensation system and the 
way we train people and the way we inspire people to teach needs to 
change to match the labor market we have today. We could not solve that 
problem in this bill. That problem is not going to be solved here, but 
we did create more flexibility when we rewrote title II, which has been 
essentially a slush fund of lousy professional development, and we 
focused our funding on opportunities for teachers to serve as mentors 
and academic coaches. Eagle, Durango, and Adams 12 in our State are 
leading the way in these innovative practices.
  We create support for teacher residency programs inspired by the 
Denver and Adams State teacher residency programs so that we are not 
saying we are going to have to rely on higher education programs that 
are not going to prepare our teachers to do the work we need them to 
do. Instead, we are going to train them in classes with master teachers 
so they can perfect the craft of teaching. They can bring their 
content-matter expertise, and they can learn how to teach in the place 
that matters, which is in school.
  We have resources to train great principals because there is nothing 
more frustrating for teachers than somebody in their building who 
doesn't know how to lead.
  We have funding to help modernize the teacher profession for 
preparation, recruitment and hiring, replacement and retention, 
compensation, and professional development.
  I am often asked what is the one thing that will change outcomes in 
our schools. What I tell people is that there is not one thing, it is 
everything. There is almost nothing about the incentives and 
disincentives in our K-12 system that are aligned to the outcomes we 
want for kids--almost nothing. What we say is: On all of these 
different dimensions, school districts, feel free to innovate and feel 
free to use some Federal resources on the most important thing you can 
do, which is making sure you have a great workforce in your building.
  We have funding to create differentiated compensation systems and 
increased school leader autonomy to support the reshaping of 
instructional time, planning time, and professional development. We are 
not going to hire teachers in Washington. We shouldn't hire teachers in 
Washington, but as I said earlier, we do have a vital national interest 
in knowing we have a pipeline of the very best people who are coming to 
teach our kids.

  I did not mean this to sound political or sound like a politician or 
sound a little bit like that, but, believe me, there is nobody in this 
room who has a job that is harder than being a teacher. There is nobody 
in this building who has a job that is harder than being a teacher in a 
high-poverty school--nobody. Nobody. That is the hardest job you can 
have. We train people in ways that don't prepare them for the work, we 
give them leadership that doesn't support them in the work they are 
trying to do, and we pay them a crummy wage that no one in their 
college class would subject themselves to. No wonder that fewer than 
one-third of eligible voters under the age of 30 would recommend 
teaching as a job to a friend.
  Until we change that, until we have a system that says that teaching 
is a great and noble profession, that it is something we can do as a 
way to give back to the community, a way to build the future of this 
country, and 70 percent of American voters are saying ``I would 
recommend that to a friend,'' we know we are not on the right track. 
This bill doesn't solve the problem, but it points the way to 
flexibility that I think is vitally important--flexibility around 
teachers and also innovation to try new things, funding for schools and 
districts to innovate. St. Vrain instituted a STEM academy that ought 
to be replicated all over. Northwest BOCES is modernizing professional 
development and support for rural educators. We have some very 
important parts of this bill related to rural schools, and Denver 
Public Schools has developed a unique English learners program. These 
are the kinds of things that can be replicated with the innovation 
dollars that are in this bill.
  Very important to me, the bill supports the replication and expansion 
of high-quality charter schools, which we have seen have great success 
in Denver.
  I mentioned support for rural schools and districts. We have support 
for rural districts that I heard from that said: Michael, it is all 
well and good that Denver is able to get that grant money, but we don't 
have a grant writer to be able to do it.
  This will give them assistance to be able to write those grants, and 
it will allow rural communities for the first time--like the community 
the Presiding Officer is from--to be able to come together, as they 
want to do, and apply jointly for funds from the Federal Government.
  On accountability, very importantly, we kept the requirement for 
annual

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testing in this bill. I hate testing as much as anybody else. Believe 
me, the Bennet girls who are students in the Denver public schools hate 
testing more than anybody else. But it is critically important that 
until we can figure out another measure, the only way we can measure 
growth of kids is through that annual test. I commend Chairman 
Alexander for keeping that option alive in his opening bill, and we 
kept it in the end.
  It still requires that we break down data so we can see how kids of 
color are doing compared to their peers and how low-income kids are 
doing compared to wealthier kids. It requires that States address the 
bottom 5 percent of schools and requires States to deal with the 
stubborn cases of high-performing schools where there are kids in 
subgroups--kids of color and in particular special needs kids--who 
aren't succeeding and aren't performing.
  It also relents in important respects and says that decisions about 
how to change schools don't belong in the Federal Government, don't 
belong with the Department of Education, but they belong at home. I 
agree with that completely.
  I want to close, and I say to the Presiding Officer, forgive me for 
asking for a few more additional moments. I want to thank all the 
Coloradoans who helped us write this bill. I thank the Colorado 
Association of School Executives, the Colorado Association of School 
Boards, the Colorado Department of Education, the Colorado Board of 
Cooperative Educational Services, the Colorado Education Association, 
the American Federation of Teachers in Colorado, the dozens of teachers 
who took time to speak with us, numerous school districts and 
superintendents who provided us feedback and ideas, civil rights groups 
across the State, including the NAACP, the Urban League, and Padres & 
Jovenes Unidos, the Colorado Impact Aid advocates, Colorado's Children 
Campaign, Colorado Succeeds, the Charter School League, Rural Schools 
Alliance, Colorado PTA, Clayton Early Learning, the Merage Foundation, 
the Colorado Education Initiative, and many more.
  This is a great day in the Senate. It is proof that we can overcome 
our differences and come together and actually solve problems. But it 
is only the start of what we have to do. It is the next generation of 
Americans that is going to have the opportunity we have. In this global 
economy, this shrinking economy, in some ways this savage economy, it 
is going to be harder and harder to get by without an education. It is 
going to be harder to get by with something north of a high school 
diploma, harder to get by with something less than a college education. 
It is hard to get by if you don't have access to midcareer education so 
you can change your profession. But we have taken a step forward in 
this bill.
  I look forward to the day when I can come to the floor based on the 
results that we see to demonstrate that the ZIP Code you are born into 
doesn't determine the education you get; when we are actually funding 
what we say we are funding in order to close the achievement gap; when 
we see that kids 0 to 5 actually have access to those 30 million words 
that their more affluent peers have; when we can say that every kid in 
America is going to a school that any Senator in this place would be 
proud to send their kids; when we can say to anybody in America who has 
worked hard through their K-12 education and been admitted to the best 
college they could get into that ``You can go there and not bankrupt 
yourself or your family.'' Then we can come to the floor and say we are 
not treating children like they are someone else's children; we are 
treating America's children like they are America's children. And I 
think we can get there working together.
  I will close by again saying thank you to my colleagues on the HELP 
Committee. Thank you to Senator Alexander and Senator Murray and their 
counterparts in the House of Representatives. Thank you for all of your 
good work.
  With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Lee). The Senator from Nevada.
  Mr. HELLER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to enter into a 
colloquy with my colleague, the Senator from New Mexico.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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