1201 16th St., N.W.

| Washington, DC 20036 | Phone: (202) 833-4000

Lily Eskelsen Garca

President
Rebecca S. Pringle
Vice President
Princess R. Moss
Secretary-Treasurer

February 10, 2015

John C. Stocks
Executive Director

Education and the Workforce Committee

United States House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative:
On behalf of the three million members of the National Education Association and the students they
serve, we urge you to VOTE NO on the Student Success Act (H.R. 5), scheduled for markup tomorrow.
While the bill contains some positive provisions, as a whole it erodes the historical federal role in

public education: targeting resources to marginalized student populations as a means of helping

to ensure equity of opportunity for all students. Votes on the issues discussed below may be included
in the NEA Legislative Report Card for the 114th Congress.

Our vision
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB)
for the last 12 years, is the cornerstone of the federal presence in public education. Students,
parents, educators, and policymakers on both sides of the political aisle agree that NCLB has not
workedthe current system delivers unequal opportunities and uneven quality to Americas
children based, too often, on the zip code where they live. Educators welcome the renewed effort
to reauthorize ESEA and stand ready to work with members of both parties to complete a
reauthorization that fixes this badly broken law.
As the United States Supreme Court said in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, education is
a right which must be made available to all on equal terms. ESEA reauthorization is an
opportunity to move closer to that vision. Toward that end, we have identified three core goals:

Creating a new generation accountability system that includes an opportunity

dashboardindicators of school quality that support learning. States and districts
should be required to collect data, disaggregated by NCLBs current population groups,
on students access to resources and supports such as advanced coursework; fully
qualified teachers; specialized instructional personnel; high-quality early education
programs; arts and athletic programs; and community services like health care and
wellness programs. The dashboard should also include student graduation rates. States
and districts, in their applications for ESEA funds, should be required to report their
dashboard data and attest that they have developedthrough a public process involving
all stakeholdersan opportunity and equity plan to address the gaps revealed.
In addition, as the Excellence and Equity Commission recommended, federal financial
incentives should be provided to encourage states to develop, adopt, and implement

equitable financing mechanisms that provide funding sufficient for every student to meet
state content and performance standards.

Ensuring more time for students to learn and teachers to teach by reducing the
number of federally-mandated tests. Fewer tests would allow teachers to spend more
one-on-one time with students, especially those most in need of extra help, and free up
resources to undo the narrowing of the curriculum that has been an unfortunate, albeit
unintended, consequence of NCLB. We support grade-span testing: once in
elementary, once in middle, and once in high school. All students should have access to a
well-rounded curriculum, including courses in fine arts and physical education.
Federal law should call for states and districts to assess the number and quality of
assessments being useddeterminations made on the basis of input from classroom
educators. States and school districts should also have flexibility to determine what kinds
of tests will provide the most useful information to improve instruction and help students
learn; tests that are redundant or not useful should be eliminated. And educators should
not be penalized for telling parents about opt-out options.

Ensuring qualified educators for students and empowering them to lead. Every
student deserves committed, caring, and qualified educators. To ensure they get them,
educators must be empowered to focus on what is most important: student learning and
achievement. In addition, the expertise of accomplished educators should shape policy
and practice at all levels. To help ensure it does, incentives should be provided for
educator-led professional development and trainingfor example, in using data to
inform instruction, supporting diverse learners, and creating an environment in which all
students can succeed using tools such as cultural competence, bullying prevention, and
positive behavioral supports.
We need to build a pipeline of diverse, fully qualified educatorsavailable to every
student in every zip codewho are prepared to teach in todays classrooms on day one.
States should focus on the entire spectrum: induction, professional growth and continual
learning, and finally teacher leadership. States should be required to publish teacher
turnover rates, categorized by years of experience and ethnicity; report on mentoring and
induction programs now in place; and identify gaps among high-poverty and low-poverty
schools.

We appreciate that the bill:

Eliminates AYP and the arbitrary deadline for 100 percent proficiency. NCLB
created the unworkable system of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), which led to a
national obsession over testing and inaccurate and unreliable labeling that punished an
indiscriminate number of schools and their students. Significantly, the bill retains
disaggregation of student subgroup datacritical to monitoring achievement gaps among
disadvantaged student populations.

Scraps labeling of schools. The bill eliminates NCLBs one-size-fits-all system of

labeling and punishing schools based on standardized test scores.

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Flexibility to improve. The bill gives states and school districts more flexibility to create
standards, assessments, accountability systems. It may, however, tip the balance too far
by severely limiting the Secretary of Educations authority with regard to state plans.

Multiple measures. The bill allows for multiple measures of school and student
performance. To ensure success for all students regardless of their zip code, school
districts and states must look at more than two standardized test scores for each student.

Student assessments. The bill provides for alternative assessments for students with
significant cognitive delays, when appropriate as determined by the IEP team; those
assessments are not subject to arbitrary percentage caps.

School improvement. The bill increases the school improvement set aside to 7 percent
and does not include the four prescriptive turnaround models, allowing decisions about
improving schools to be based on local needs and available supports.

Magnet schools. The bill expresses support for magnet schools that can improve
achievement and diversity.

Restores local parent information resources. The bill changes the name of Parent
Information and Resource Centers (PIRC) to Statewide Family Engagement Centers and
provides funding for effective parental involvement strategies, developing and
strengthening partnerships to meet childrens educational needs, and fostering
relationships between parents and their childrens schools.

Parental notification. Schools must continue to inform parents about their achievements.
We need to take the next step: ensuring that the information they provide is meaningful.

Our major concerns include:

Equity. The bill does not push states enough to narrow achievement gaps and provide
equal access to quality education. The bill also lacks a comprehensive plan to make
transparent and address existing resource inequities that are harming students and
communities, particularly students and communities of color. As a result, it is impossible
to get a good picture of whether all students are getting the education they deserve.

Federal role. The bill dramatically weakens the ability of the Secretary of Education to
ensure equity and promote excellence through excessive restrictions on his/her powers.

Portability. The state option allowing Title I funds to follow the child upends
progressivity by providing a flat dollar amount per child instead of greater funding for
greater concentrations of poverty. In a nutshell, schools with the most children in poverty
lose funding.

Comparability. The bill does not strengthen the comparability provision, designed to
ensure that Title I funding supplements existing state and local resources so poor students
receive the additional services they need. For example, it does not require the reporting of
actual expenditures, both personnel and non-personnel, at the district and school level,
nor does it require reporting of other services, conditions, and resources such as access to
full-day kindergarten and advanced coursework.

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Equitable participation. The bill inappropriately and dramatically expands private

school authority over the allocation and use of public funds by requiring funding to be
allocated on an individual rather than a proportional basisa fundamental departure from
current law. As a result, it significantly reduces the already insufficient funding
for eligible children.

Comprehensive quality education. The bill does nothing to ensure that all children have
access to a well-rounded education, including music and the arts. Instead, it continues to
overemphasize English, mathematics, and yearly testing.

Annual tests. The bill continues NCLBs measurement of schools and students with
annual standardized testing in grades 3-8 rather than focusing on the broad supports
schools and students need to improve. NEA supports grade-span testing to provide more
time for learning, more flexibility, and more useful, meaningful data to help students
achieve.

Standards and assessments. Although the bill allows states to enter voluntarily into
partnerships with other states to develop and implement standards and assessments, it
limits the Department of Educations ability to support joint efforts to create standards
and assessments that are valid and reliable, inform the learning process, and promote
college and career readiness.

Educators voice. The bill does not provide a strong voice for educators and their
representatives. It eliminates the provision of the current law that respects collective
bargaining rights while requiring interventions with implications for collective
bargaining.

Student assessment decisions. The bill does not provide guidance regarding students
with disabilities that have IEP eligibility in areas beyond cognitive delays; we need to
ensure that the IEP team drives all assessment decisions.

English-language learners. Merging Title III into Title I could lead to a loss of national
focus on English-language learners.

Charter school accountability and transparency. The bill fails to address longstanding, significant issues of accountability to students, parents, communities, and
taxpayers. In exchange for federal dollars, charter schools must be required to be more
transparent about their finances, disciplinary policies, boards, meetings, conflicts of
interest, and other policies that impact student well-being. Moreover, the bill penalizes
states that cap the number of charter schools due to concerns about quality, monitoring
capacity, or because they prefer to encourage innovation by other means. Governors
offices are among the state entities eligible to receive federal grants even though they
are not equipped to oversee or monitor sub-grantees. The bill also permits funding the
creation of charter school in states that have not adopted a charter lawby definition,
those states have not addressed the many policy issues associated charter schools.

Collective bargaining. The bill lacks clear protection of collective bargaining

agreements and memorandums of understanding that are already part of state laws. ESEA
should also recognize the role of collective bargaining agreements in constructing teacher
evaluation systems.

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Privatization. Under the new Local Academic Flexible Grant, states reserve not less than
10 percent of their funds for grants to nongovernmental entitiessuch as private
organizations and businessesfor programs outside traditional public school systems.

Funding. Overall, authorizations of appropriations are at current (FY2015) funding

levels; beginning in FY2016, they remain flat for five years despite projections that
enrollment will increase by 4.4 percent and costs rise by more than 12 percent over that
period. Even the budget caps under sequestration allow nondefense discretionary
spending to grow by almost 13 percent through FY2021. These funding levels are
unconscionable at a time when 51 percent of public school students qualify for free- and
reduced-price meals and the number of English-language learners and immigrants
continues to rise, especially in areas where they have not traditionally settled. Where the
bill increases authorization levels, it is at the expense of more than 20 programs whose
funding is either consolidated or eliminated. As the summary document accompanying
the bill says, [T]he amount authorized for all ESEA programs under the bill is lower
than the Title I authorization for the last year it was authorized under current law.

Maintenance of effort. The bill eliminates maintenance of effort (MOE) requirements,

triggering a race to the bottom in state and local spending and violating a driving
principle of Title I: using federal dollars to augment state and local support for children
who are economically disadvantaged or academically behind. Removing MOE
requirements also undercuts the effectiveness of the bills remaining supplement, not
supplant requirementsonly in tandem can they ensure that federal dollars provide
extra support for struggling students on top of a sufficient base of state and local funds.

Funding flexibility. The bill enables states and school districts to use funds dedicated to
special populations for other purposes, including other special populations. Although
repurposing is limited largely to state- and local-level activities, the provision erodes the
historical federal role of ensuring equal opportunity for all children.

Program flexibility. The bill offers states and school districts a trade-off: fewer
programs and greater flexibility in exchange for flat funding. It repeals, eliminates, or
consolidates 65 elementary and secondary education programs, including more than 20
that are now funded such as School Improvement State Grants, 21st Century Community
Learning Centers, Elementary and Secondary School Counseling, Physical Education
Program, Promise Neighborhoods, and Arts in Education, among others. The Local
Academic Flexible Grant replaces such programs.

Students in struggling schools need resources and wraparound services. The bill
outlines funding guidelines and much-needed services for incarcerated and transitioning
youth. Students who are not incarcerated also benefit greatly from similarly targeted
resourcesfor example, individualized learning plans, coordinating health and human
services, college and career counseling, and mentoring programs.

Educator quality. We need to fix the existing highly qualified provisions, not
eliminate all focus on the quality of entry-level teachers and paraprofessionals as this bill
does. A critical part of the federal role is paying attention toand supportingfuture
educators.

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Teacher evaluation. The bill inappropriately prescribes certain features of evaluation

systems that are better determined collaboratively at the state and local level. While it
acknowledges the importance of using multiple measures in evaluation, the bill continues
to prioritize the use of one potential component (student achievement) as a significant
factor. The bill also appears to give priority to using evaluation feedback and data to
make personnel decisions, not helping teachers improve their practice.

Background checks. NEA supports appropriate background checks of educators in a

manner that is fair. However, the bill contains no provisions for appeals, confidentiality,
use of funds for background checks, or ensuring accuracy.

Support for the entire school staff. The bill lacks sufficient recognition ofand support
forthe key roles qualified education support professionals (ESPs) and specialized
instructional support personnel (SISPs) play in helping students reach their goals.

Professional development. The bill diminishes the focus on professional development

and does not provide enough support for professional development for all staff in the
school building. While the bill says funds to implement evaluation systems may be
used for job-embedded professional development to help teachers improve, quality
professional development is not required for either teachers or evaluators. People do not
just know how to evaluate; they must be trained, which takes time and money. The bill
should specify that funds MUST be used to train school leaders (administrators, mentor
teachers, etc.) in evaluation.

Class size. The bill caps the use of Title II, Part A, funds for class size reduction at 10
percent, which will result in the loss of educator jobs. During the 2013-14 school year,
districts used 35 percent of their Title II, Part A, funds to pay highly qualified teachers
and reduce class size; 12 percent of districts used all their available funds to reduce class
size. Fifty-seven percent of the 11,000 teachers supported by those funds were in grades
K-3 and 44 percent were in the districts with the highest poverty rates.

Direct student services. The bill requires states to set aside 3 percent of their Title I
allotment for a reconstituted version of supplemental education services and
transportation choice, diverting precious Title I dollars to ineffective interventions at the
expense of proven interventions.

School improvement. The bill increases the set aside for school improvement activities
under Title I, Part A, from 4 to 7 percent, but eliminates the School Improvement State
Grants program. While overall funding is about 96 percent of current funding, the bill
does not ensure that resources go to the schools and students most in need; collective
bargaining protections have been removed as well.

Pay for performance / merit pay. The bill promotes pay for performance and appears to
encourage using test scores as the primary metric even though todays standardized tests
are unreliable indicators of student learning and therefore not a valid way to measure
performance. Compensation systems should be negotiated or developed collaboratively
with educators and their representatives.

Literacy. The bill calls for the elimination of existing literacy programs with no
provisions to replace them with equivalent services. While the bill includes allowances

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for family literacy services and outlines specific populations eligible for them, it
overlooks the highest-need, economically disadvantaged at-risk population.

Homeless education. While the bill maintains a strong commitment to identifying and
addressing the needs of homeless students, it fails to mitigate related equity issues.
Although the percentage of homeless students varies widely across districts and schools,
a majority of states distribute sub-grants equally across school districts. Instead, need
should drive the distribution of sub-grants.

Career and technical education. States need to consider the career and technical needs
of both their high school graduates and industries. On the one hand, the bill is
exceedingly prescriptive; on the other, it may not include all necessary stakeholders. In
addition, we recommend changing individual private sector employers and
entrepreneurs to representatives of the state department of labor.

Thank you for your consideration of our views on these vital issues. Again, we urge you to VOTE
NO on the Student Success Act in its current form. We hope that the Committee is willing to make
improvements in this legislation to ensure that it provides the greatest opportunities for the
students most in need.
Sincerely,

Mary Kusler
Director of Government Relations

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