Every Child Achieves Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, again, I really want to thank my colleague, the senior Senator from Tennessee, for working with me on this bipartisan bill. Senator Alexander and I are both committed to fixing the current law known as No Child Left Behind.

I am glad we are having this very important debate on the Senate Floor. Nearly everyone agrees that No Child Left Behind is badly broken. As I have traveled around my home State of Washington over the past decade, I have heard from so many of my constituents--from teachers in the classroom to moms in the grocery store to tech company CEOs--that we have to fix this law.

Our bipartisan bill, the Every Child Achieves Act, is a good step in the right direction. It gives our States more flexibility while also including Federal guardrails to make sure all students do have access to a quality public education. I am looking forward to improving and strengthening this bill throughout the process on the Senate floor and beyond. I am going to continue working on helping our struggling schools get the resources they need, and I will be focused on making sure all our kids, especially our most vulnerable students, are able to learn and grow and thrive in the classroom.

This bill could not be more important for students across the country, and it is critical for the future of our Nation. When all students have the chance to learn, we strengthen our future workforce, our country grows stronger, and we empower the next generation of Americans to lead the world. So I am looking forward to getting to work and hopefully moving forward on fixing No Child Left Behind and making sure all of our students can learn regardless of where they live or how they learn or how much money their parents earn.

I join with Senator Alexander in encouraging our colleagues to file their amendments so that we can continue making progress on this very important piece of legislation.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, since our Nation's founding, the idea of a strong public education for every child has been part of the fabric of America. In the late 1770s, Thomas Jefferson introduced a bill in Virginia that outlined his plan for public schooling. At the time he wrote: ``By far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people.''

Jefferson knew that educating children would strengthen our country. That is still true today. Today a good education can provide a ticket to the middle class. When all students have the chance to learn, we strengthen our future workforce and our economy. But nearly everyone today agrees that the current education law--No Child Left Behind--is badly broken.

The bipartisan bill we are debating on the floor today--the Every Child Achieves Act--is a strong step in the right direction to finally fix that law, and it will help continue our Nation's tradition of making sure all students have access to a quality public education.

Some of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle are interested in voucherizing the public school system. Instead of investing in our public school system, they want to send Federal resources to private schools. That would be a major step backward. Vouchers undermine the basic goals of public education by allowing funding that is designated for our most at-risk students to be rerouted to private schools. I urge my colleagues to oppose any attempt to use Federal education funds for private school vouchers.

I strongly oppose vouchers for several reasons. For one, vouchers divert much-needed resources away from our public schools and reroute them to private and religious schools. Today public schools across our country, and particularly those schools with high concentrations of students in poverty, need more funding, not less. We can't afford to send scarce Federal resources away from our public schools to benefit private schools.

Secondly, vouchers would send Federal taxpayer dollars to private schools that are in no way accountable to the public. Proposals to create vouchers do not require private schools to adopt strong academic standards or provide students with disabilities the same services they have in public schools. Unlike public schools, private schools do not need to serve all of our students. There is no guarantee that private schools would make sure students have access to State-licensed teachers, and they would not administer the same assessments as public schools, which would diminish our accountability of Federal tax dollars.

I can tell you, as a former school board member, when people in my community were unhappy with how their taxpayer dollars were spent, they would find me in the grocery store, at the school board meeting or call me at home at night. But if Federal tax dollars go to private schools, there is no elected official that a public citizen can call and say: I don't like how you are spending our tax dollars, and I want you to look at this.

Many of our colleagues today demand evidence and accountability in other programs. I hope they do it in education as well. Some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle like to argue that vouchers create options for students and families. Well, that might be true for students of more affluent families, but vouchers don't provide a real choice for the overwhelming majority of students. Vouchers might cover some but usually not all of the tuition of a private school. In some cases a voucher would make just a small dent in the full cost of a private school. That would enable students from more affluent families the ability to afford private schools because they personally have the means to make up the difference. But students from low-income backgrounds would still be priced out of that choice.

Vouchers only provide the illusion of choice to students from low-income backgrounds, and it is those low-income students who ultimately lose out when funds are siphoned away from the public schools that they attend. Perhaps the most important reason I oppose private-school vouchers is because they do not improve student achievement. Study after study has shown that vouchers do not pay out for students or for taxpayers.

In 2012 researchers compared students enrolled in Milwaukee's voucher program compared with students in Milwaukee's public schools. The researchers found little evidence that the voucher program increased the achievement of participating students.

The District of Columbia's voucher program has gone through four congressionally mandated studies from the Department of Education. Each of those studies concluded that the program did not significantly improve reading or math achievement, and that program came at the cost of funding that could have helped improve local public schools.

There are a number of reasons to oppose any amendment that redirects Federal funds to private schools. Public schools already have to deal with scarce Federal resources. This would exasperate the problem. Private schools would not be accountable for the Federal taxpayer dollars they get. Vouchers do very little to expand choices for low-income families. Finally, as I said, studies have shown that vouchers do not increase student achievement.

An amendment to allow public funds--taxpayer dollars--to flow to private schools would be a step in the wrong direction. I strongly urge our colleagues to oppose any amendment that works to voucherize any of our Federal dollars.

I believe that real improvement in student achievement comes when our teachers and school leaders have the resources they need to help our students succeed. We have to work together to strengthen our public school system, not dismantle it.

I hope we can continue our bipartisan work together--we have done well--to help ensure all students have access to a quality public education regardless of where they live or how they learn or how much money they make. That should be our mission.

I thank the Presiding Officer, and I yield the floor.

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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, over the weekend, we all cheered on the women's national soccer team as they beat Japan 5 to 2 in the World Cup. Their teamwork and the skills they displayed on the field were years in the making. Many of the players on the women's national team developed their skills and a love for soccer while attending their public schools growing up.

In fact, before midfielder Carli Lloyd shattered records in the World Cup finals on Saturday, she was the star of the Delran High School soccer team in New Jersey. Unfortunately, not all young girls have the same opportunities today as young boys do to participate in school sports. In our Nation's schools, all girls should have equal opportunities to pursue athletics, whether they just want to help their high school team have a winning season or whether they dream of one day playing in the World Cup final.

Today, I am offering an amendment to help close the opportunity gap in sports between young men and women. Back in 1972, Congress passed what is known as title IX. That is the law that bans discrimination in education on the basis of gender. This law applies to all educational opportunities that have had a huge impact on opening opportunities for young women to play sports.

For the first time, schools were required to provide equal opportunity to girls and boys to play organized sports, and they were required to provide equal benefits and services, like coaches and courts and playing fields. Title IX has truly changed our country for the better. The number of women and girls whose lives it touches is growing every single day. I have seen that firsthand in my own family. When I went to school, the atmosphere was a lot different than it is today. Back then, I could participate in just a very few sports, and it was simply unheard of for women athletes to receive athletic scholarships.

Now, 15 years later, it was amazing to watch my own daughter choose to play soccer, learning to be a part of a team and cheering each other on and learning how to be gracious in victory and in defeat. The differences between my daughter's generation and my own could not be more stark.

Today, more young women than ever are playing sports, but inequality still exists and girls don't have the same opportunities to play sports as boys. In fact, if you add up all of the missed opportunities across the country, young women have 1.3 million fewer chances today to play sports in high school compared to boys. That is according to the National Federation of High School Associations. So the amendment I am offering that we will be voting on shortly will help ensure that schools simply report information about school sports in elementary, middle, and high school.

I thank Senator Mikulski, who has been a champion for title IX, for working with me on this amendment. Under our amendment, schools would report on both access to girls organized sports and the funding for girls sports. For the first time, schools would need to show the public, show all of us, what they spend on travel expenses and equipment and uniforms for both boys and girls sports teams. This information will simply help us shine a light on the persistent inequalities in sports between men and women.

Playing sports isn't just good for a single sports season, it has a positive effect on and off the field. According to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, when young women play sports, they are more likely to have higher grades, and they are more likely to graduate from high school than nonathletes. Research also shows that girls who have opportunities to play sports have lower risk of obesity later in life, lower incidence of depression, and more positive body image than nonathletes.

Congress can help ensure that girls all over our country have the chance not only to improve their athletic ability but also to develop valuable skills like teamwork and discipline and self-confidence. Those skills lead to success on and off the playing field.

I urge our colleagues to vote for this important amendment. Let's give young women and girls equal opportunity in sports. So many girls across the country spent this week dreaming of one day being one of those women champions they saw on television last weekend. Let's make sure they know Congress has their back.

I yield the floor.

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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, this amendment would retreat on our fundamental commitment to make sure that every child has access to a quality education, and it would do it by consolidating almost every K-12 education program we have and turning that funding into a public or private school voucher. It would cut programs for STEM, for literacy, for afterschool--priorities that are important to Members across the aisle, and it would dismantle the important bipartisan work we have done to fix this badly broken No Child Left Behind law in a way that works for parents, teachers, and students. It ignores the research on the impact of concentrated poverty on student achievement and allows States to move Federal resources from our highest needs schools and districts to more affluent ones and to unaccountable private schools.

I know my colleague from Tennessee understands this is a nonstarter for me, and I really urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment.

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