[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 6]
[Senate]
[Pages 8060-8063]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                               EDUCATION

  Mr. JEFFORDS. Mr. President, we have several important amendments 
pending, but I would like to spend a few minutes discussing the very 
heart of the bill: Accountability and assessments. I believe the bill 
before us is the most dramatic reform of the Elementary and Secondary 
Education Act since 1965. I would like everyone to understand what is 
in this bill so they can understand how dramatic an impact it will have 
upon every school in this Nation.
  For the first time, we will require all children in grades 3-8 to be 
annually assessed, and that schools, districts, and States will face 
consequences if they fail to improve the performance of their students.
  Each year--year in, year out--every level of education will be held 
accountable for showing measurable progress for each group of students 
they serve. This is the central feature of the legislation, and yet, to 
judge from press reports and editorials, it is very poorly understood.
  I want to do what I can this evening to make sure it is widely 
understood in this Nation how dramatic the changes are for which we are 
about to vote.
  I am not probably known for unwavering support for the President's 
agenda, nor, I hope, am I known for going out of my way to criticize 
the press. But I rise today both to defend the President and to suggest 
that the press has been sloppy in its reporting and editorial writing 
on what should be the central issue of the story, education reform.
  For the past week or two, there have been a few press accounts and 
editorials implying that somehow the President or the Senate has caved 
to pressure, has watered down the standards in this bill, or has walked 
away from real reform.
  In fairness to the press, I realize this is a difficult subject to 
cover. The topic can be a bit dense, and there is no real bright line 
as to the kind of progress we can expect from students and schools.
  On Thursday, the lead editorial in USA Today read: ``Congress Set to 
Dilute Education Reform,'' while the subhead read: ``Lawmakers gut 
school accountability, turn backs on minorities.''
  That editorial is but one example of what I think is the lack of 
understanding about this bill, especially, it seems, in the press. And 
while my opinion, of course, is just that, it is based on a wealth of 
data that can be verified independently. Not only do I think it can be 
verified, I think it is the obligation of the press to do so before it 
makes value-laden judgments.

[[Page 8061]]

  In order to understand where we are, a bit of background is 
necessary. The major education proposals before the Congress have at 
their core the requirement that States and schools set high standards 
in core subject matters and that they measure whether students are 
achieving those standards; further, that we pay particular attention to 
the progress of our lowest-achieving students. In other words, we are 
going to look at the groups of students, as well as the students on a 
general basis, to make sure that no child is left behind.
  As reported from the Committee, both H.R. 1 and S. 1 contain the 
notion that all students would be proficient in math and reading in 10 
years and that a school or school district or State that failed to meet 
this standard would be deemed to have failed--let me repeat that--and 
that a school or school district or State that failed to meet this 
standard would be deemed to have failed.
  Further, progress in meeting this goal would be monitored on an 
annual basis. If a school or district or State failed to make the so-
called adequate yearly progress--a term I will use over and over again, 
``adequate yearly progress,'' or, for short, AYP--it would be 
identified as needing school improvement--another phrase to remember--
or subject to sanctions if improvement efforts failed.
  The concept of AYP is an important one because adequate yearly 
progress is the bar for judging whether a school or district or State 
has succeeded or failed.
  Legislating that all students should be proficient in 10 years is a 
wonderful goal, and perhaps for this reason none of us really gave it 
much thought. Having been involved in the passage of the Goals 2000 Act 
some years ago, having served on the national goals panel, I must 
confess that I have become a little wiser about our ability to achieve 
wonderful goals.
  For my colleagues who may not be familiar with the Goals 2000 Act, in 
it we codified very ambitious goals that we hoped to achieve by the 
year 2000. For example, back in 1994, we called for our students to be 
first in the world in math and science--that was a big goal, a goal 
that we are so far from having fulfilled--and that all students leaving 
4th, 8th, and 12th grades would do so with demonstrated competency in 
challenging subject matter, including English, math, science, foreign 
language, and so on, all by the year 2000.
  Well, 2000 has come and gone. In my view, we have made only limited 
progress in reaching those goals. We have a long way to go, especially 
in these goals directly relating to academics. I don't think the lesson 
to take from this experience is that goals are a bad idea. Rather, I 
think the lesson is that an unrealistic goal, linked to very real 
consequences, is a bad idea.
  The goal contained in S. 1, as it was reported from the HELP 
Committee, that all students would be proficient in 10 years, was both 
admirable and entirely unrealistic. That will explain why we have done 
what we have. It gives me no great pleasure to say this. I have spent a 
good part of my career in a continuing effort to improve education for 
all students, beginning in my very first year in Congress in 1975. Like 
anyone, I take some pride in my work. I would much rather correct a 
glaring problem in a piece of legislation before it is reported from my 
committee, but as has been noted before, wisdom is a rare commodity 
which should not be rejected merely because it arrives late.
  Unlike some of the issues we confront in this Chamber, we have a 
solid amount of experience in the results of education reform and 
educational assessment. The same year we put in place the national 
education goals, we also passed the last reauthorization of ESEA. Among 
other things, that reauthorization required annual assessments of 
students served by title I; that is, for economically disadvantaged 
students. Combined with the efforts of States and especially leaders 
from Connecticut and North Carolina and Texas, we have a good idea of 
what States can accomplish.
  Thanks to the Internet, which effectively didn't exist during the 
last reauthorization, it is a simple matter to examine what States and 
schools have been able to achieve and how they compare with the 
standards we are contemplating in this legislation.
  What you will find when you do so is that the standard we have set in 
our bill, expecting every child to be proficient in reading and math in 
10 years, was simply not going to happen unless States dramatically 
dumbed down their tests. Moreover, because States used different 
criteria for determining proficiency, some States would encounter 
tremendous hurdles relative to other States, as we tried to overlay one 
Federal goal on top of 50 very different State systems of measurement.
  A good example of this is in the comparison of the States of Texas 
and Missouri. According to the National Assessment of Education 
Progress, or NAEP, students in Texas and Missouri are almost identical 
in their reading ability. Yet the two States' assessments could hardly 
have been more different.
  In 1998, when the NAEP reading test was given, Texas, by its own 
test, judged 79 percent of its students proficient, while Missouri, by 
its tests, rated only 29 percent of its students proficient in reading. 
Neither State is right or wrong. The point is, they have very different 
standards.
  Yet the way our bill emerged from committee, Missouri students would 
have been expected to make 2\1/2\ times the gains of the students from 
Texas each year merely because their State had set a higher bar for 
proficiency.
  Whether a State was expected to make proficiency gains of 7 
percentage points a year, such as Missouri, or 2 percentage points, 
such as Texas, matters little. As it turned out, of the 20 or so States 
we looked at, no State achieved a level of AYP, annual yearly progress, 
required by the committee-reported bill.
  Not surprising, what was true at the State level for all students was 
even more true as the sample size declined. Either by looking at 
various student subgroups or districts or schools themselves, random 
samples of schools in Connecticut and North Carolina and Texas revealed 
that almost no school would make adequate yearly progress under our 
original definition; our original definition meaning later on we 
changed it. We had to.
  I should note here, my remarks focusing on certain States should be 
taken as a compliment. The three States I just mentioned are widely 
recognized as being leaders in education reform. Their data goes back 
for several years. And in the case of North Carolina and Texas, that 
data is broken out by many of the categories that would be required 
under our legislation.
  My own State of Vermont, which has been working very hard at 
education reform and assessments over the past several years, would 
also fail to make annual yearly progress. So would every other State 
based on the progress even leading States have been able to make.
  Some self-styled education reformers have argued that we should not 
have abandoned the committee report approach, even in the face of this 
evidence that every school, practically, in the United States would 
fail. But it is a mystery to me how you can have education reform if 
every school and every school district and every State is labeled a 
failure. Resources would be diluted; chaos would result, as every title 
I school would be steered into corrective action and reconstituted 
under the bill. Reconstitution means that you tear it all apart. You 
create a charter school. You fire all the teachers, whatever else. You 
have to do something that dramatic, with the entire staff being fired, 
maybe.
  Those teachers with seniority rights would no doubt exercise their 
bumping rights to land a position in another school. This mass firing 
and dislocation of teachers would come amidst what most people see as a 
looming teacher shortage. All over the country, we know that our 
teachers are getting older and fewer and fewer are coming into the 
field of teaching. Thus, we are going to have problems in that, which 
is another issue we will have to face later.

[[Page 8062]]

  This is not good education policy. This is madness. But we were all 
so intent on proving how tough we could be improving education that for 
a long time nobody seemed to be willing to admit we were wrong.
  The President, to his everlasting credit, saw the problem and was 
willing to try to address it. He has stuck by that decision in spite of 
the often ill-informed treatment he has received from the press. He has 
chosen the substance of education reform over its political symbolism.
  The President and anyone engaged in education reform for very long 
knows that a goal of education reform must be significant, continuous 
improvement. And to get it, you need to focus your efforts on the 
schools that need the most help. Monstrous gains from one year to the 
next, year in and year out, simply do not happen in the real world. In 
the real world, our schools are battling poverty, violence, drugs, 
unstable families, apathetic parents, engaged parents, with more than 
one job, television, turnover, and all manner of impediments. We cannot 
throw in the towel, but neither can we legislate miracles.
  The substitute amendment pending before the Senate tries to set 
ambitious but realistic goals for school improvement. If they are 
adopted, we will all see the results in a few years. I would wager 
today that we will not look back with regret for setting the bar too 
low. My own view is that the greatest likelihood is that we will swamp 
the system by identifying too many schools and States as failing.
  But we have reached a compromise on this issue and I will support it, 
in the firm hope that time will prove me wrong and this bill will not 
over-identify schools as failing.
  The substitute amendment sets our two tests for meeting AYP. First, 
states must establish a formula that measures progress against the goal 
of 100 percent proficiency for all students in a decade. Many States 
already have such formulae in place, so they may have to make some 
adjustments to their existing approaches. The state-determined formula 
must give greater weight to improving the performance of the poorest 
performing students. Quite sensibly, greater weight should be given to 
greater gains. And the driving factor behind a formula must be the 
performance on assessments.
  The second prong of the AYP definition is designed to ensure that no 
matter how a State formula is constructed, in order to show adequate 
yearly progress, the State and its schools and districts will be 
required to achieve at least a one percentage point gain in proficiency 
for each group of students, every year.
  Let me briefly address the notion that our proposal permits schools 
to hide the performance of low-performing minorities.
  Simply put, this notion is rubbish. The disaggregated scores of 
groups of students must be reported for schools, districts and states. 
As a result, parents and the public at large will know exactly how 
groups of students are performing.
  What are these groups? They are based on race, ethnicity, gender, 
migrant status, limited English proficiency, low-income status and 
disability. The performance of each of these groups will be measured 
and disclosed through various means, including the Internet.
  We're not hiding the results, we're putting them on a worldwide 
billboard.
  A school will be deemed to have failed to make adequate yearly 
progress if it fails to make progress for disabled students, for 
limited English proficient students, for low-income students, and for 
racial and ethnic groups of students in each subject assessed.
  There are easily a dozen different ways a typical school can fail to 
make adequate yearly progress under the approach taken in the pending 
substitute.
  Making a one percentage point gain in the achievement year after year 
for every subgroup is a daunting task. Very few states have easily 
accessible data at the school level by the various subgroups for which 
this bill will require measurement and consequences. But the few that 
do indicate it will be a high standard indeed.
  Even at the State level, this kind of continuous improvement has 
proven elusive for almost every State, even those that are held up as 
examples of states committed to reform.
  The Education Trust recently published a study of how well States 
have done in closing the achievement gap between white and minority 
students. As part of that study, it looks at the states making the 
largest gains in minority math achievement as measured by NAEP.
  According to the Education Trust, eight States made above average 
gains in 4th grade math for African American students. They were: 
Massachusetts, Michigan, Texas, Iowa, North Carolina, Connecticut, 
Indiana, and Louisiana.
  Most of these States are generally recognized as being in the 
forefront of education reform efforts in our country.
  They also share this distinction. Each of them would be deemed a 
failure under the committee reported bill.
  Let me repeat that. The eight states that did the best job in 
improving math instruction for black students would all fail if you 
held them to a standard of reaching 100 percent proficiency for all 
students.
  I have with me a few charts that illustrate my point. In each, the 
most recent data available is used, and it is compared to what it would 
take to reach 100 percent proficiency over 10 years. The charts go back 
in time as far as readily available comparable data permits. Again, 
these are some of the very best, most committed States.
  If you go across the chart, you will find that in 1999, which is the 
year from 1998-1999, it shows failure because the progress was not 
there from 1998, and the actual progress was 11.5 and total required 
progress was 8.8. I get a little confused with the charts, and I 
suspect everybody will.
  Let's go to Iowa. It shows that their annual required progress was a 
2.76 improvement. You will notice that as you go along, starting out 
with 72.45, if you add all the red, it is because they didn't make the 
2.76 improvement all the way across, and actually they are missing 
about 16.56 percent. Then you can break it down by groups. You can see 
all the way down male, female, and you go to mathematics and so forth. 
But they are failing.
  Connecticut is the same. Connecticut has one of the most impressive 
educational systems, but you will see there from looking back to the 
annual progress, they fail right across the board for all those years. 
We thought they were one of the best. That gives you an idea of what we 
are looking at, which will show that we have really an incredibly 
strict piece of legislation.
  Massachusetts failed to make progress in reading, and actually lost a 
little ground in math.
  Michigan, in 1999, failed in math and reading.
  Texas failed in both subjects in every year but 1997.
  Iowa has failed for 5 years running in both subjects.
  North Carolina failed to make AYP in both 1999 and 2000.
  Connecticut would have failed to make AYP for 5 years running.
  Indiana has lost ground in reading and math, and would have failed 
for 3 years running.
  In Louisiana, given the high bar it sets for proficiency, its gains 
from 1999 to 2000 don't come close to meeting AYP.
  To sum up, every States fails.
  So for the press to come out and say that we have weakened the 
standards and somehow we are not going to be stiff enough, they have to 
understand that under this bill it is going to be very difficult for 
the States to comply.
  These are the results that drove us to amend the committee-reported 
bill. We didn't do so because of pressure from Governors or any 
alllegiance to the status quo. We did so because facts are stubborn 
things. And the facts show that no State has made, or will make, the 
kind of gains called for in the original bill. Has the substitute set 
the bar too low? That's a fair question. Again, I think it has to be 
answered by what the best schools and States can achieve. And again, I 
think we have set a very high bar.

[[Page 8063]]

  A look at a random sample of school districts deemed ``exemplary'' in 
Texas shows that they nearly all fail to make one percentage point 
gains each year, for each group. That might be explained by the fact 
that when a school's students are at 90 or 95 percent proficiency, 
either all students or a group or two will fluctuate up and down. But a 
look at lower-performing Texas schools, those deemed only 
``acceptable,'' yields the same result. If you look at a dozen, 
probably only one will make AYP.
  The same holds true for Connecticut schools and districts.
  I have a chart that looks at the committee-reported standard, in 
which all schools and districts failed. But the results are only 
marginally different with a 1 percent standard. In the case of 
Connecticut, the data we have does not show student subgroup 
performance, which will show gains above and below the average 
performance, but overall not that good. North Carolina shows the same 
results. The areas that are darker are the problem areas with no 
success shown. We looked at the first dozen or so school districts in 
that State. As our chart shows, all but one failed to make AYP based on 
the performance of all students in either math or reading.
  We found one district did make AYP on the basis of all students, but 
when you look at the performance of the subgroups of students as we do 
in the chart for the district, it failed to make a uniform 1 percentage 
point gain, both for some of the lower performing groups, but also for 
the highest one. The purpose behind my remarks is not to leave all of 
us discouraged, but to try to illustrate that even where you have the 
best efforts at educational reform, improving educational performance 
is a very hard task, and we cannot expect miracles.
  Our efforts should be ambitious but anchored to what we know schools 
can achieve.
  If we enact a system that labels all schools failures, then it is we 
who have failed.
  On the other hand, if they have not already done so, I hope my 
colleagues in the Senate will take some time to talk with educators in 
their State about this issue. And I hope the very capable people in the 
press who write on this issue will spend a little more time in trying 
to connect the varying claims in this debate to the rich amount of 
experience that is easily available.
  I thank my colleagues for their attention.
  I took the time this evening to allow people to have the full story 
so as to better understand, especially when the press says we have 
watered down the standards. They can make that argument, but if you 
realized how strict they were to start with and if you realized the 
present status of our schools, you would understand that had we not 
done this, it would have been devastating and probably so deflating 
that we would have chaos.
  We have tried to come up with what we believe are the improvements 
that are capable of being performed by the schools. I point out, as I 
have pointed out to my colleagues continuously, that is why it is 
incredibly important we make sure the resources are there for these 
schools to make the changes to live up to the President's program.
  I urge everyone to follow the costs that are going to be incurred and 
to talk with the officials in their States to see what resources they 
believe will be necessary to make sure that every child in that State 
has an opportunity to be a successful student.
  Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. JEFFORDS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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