Every Child Achieves Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, making sure our Nation's students get a quality education is critical for our ability--our country's ability--to lead the world in the years to come, and a good education can be a ticket to the middle class. It is also important for building an economy from the middle out, not just from the top down.
Of course, yesterday the House of Representatives passed their partisan bill to reauthorize the Nation's K-12 education bill. While that is another important step in the process to finally fix the badly broken No Child Left Behind law, I am disappointed that House Republicans have chosen to take a partisan approach in their bill that is unacceptable to Democrats and will never become law.
I appreciate the work that ranking member Bobby Scott put into the House Democratic substitute. I am looking forward to coming together with him as well as Chairman Kline in a conference. I truly hope House Republicans will be ready to join ranking member Bobby Scott and other House and Senate Democrats, Senate Republicans, and the administration as we work to get this done in a way that works for all students and families. I am looking forward to continuing that work here today in the Senate.
Again, I truly want to thank my colleague, the senior Senator from Tennessee, for working with me on our bipartisan bill, and I appreciate Chairman Alexander's cooperation in working in a bipartisan way through this process. I join him this morning in encouraging our colleagues to file their amendments so we can continue making progress on this important piece of legislation.
Our bipartisan bill, the Every Child Achieves Act, is a good step in the right direction to fix No Child Left Behind. It gives our States more flexibility, while also including Federal guardrails to make sure all students have access to a quality public education. We are not done yet. I want to work to continue to improve and strengthen the bill.
One example, today we will talk about an amendment to help shine a light on inequalities in education that still exist in our country. I thank Senator Warren for offering her amendment. I look forward to that discussion. That amendment will help States, districts, and schools better analyze student achievement data so they can help their students achieve. So I hope our colleagues will pass that amendment.
I am looking forward to getting started again today to work through this issue and a number of others we have, and I hope to continue to work in a bipartisan way to make sure all students have access to a quality education, again, regardless of where they live or how they learn or how much money they make.
I look forward to today's discussion. Again, I thank our colleagues on the other side of the aisle for working with us to fix this badly broken bill.
I yield the floor.
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Mrs. MURRAY. Madam President, I know Senator Brown is on his way. But I just want to let Senators know that too often our Nation's students show up to school hungry or lacking adequate school supplies. Many of our teachers, as we know, are really struggling to provide students with an education, while they are also dealing with the compounding problems brought on by poverty.
Site resource coordinators, which this amendment addresses, operate through a community school model, are able to bolster the number of resources in schools, and increase the number of services offered to students and their families.
So what this amendment does is that it would further that goal by allowing title IV funds to be used for site coordinators.
I thank Senator Brown for offering this amendment.
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Mrs. MURRAY. Madam President, I join with the chairman in thanking the Senators from Pennsylvania and West Virginia and for working with our staffs to create this new version. I think this amendment gets at a real problem by ensuring that suspected abusers do not transfer to other States and districts. It is a positive step. I urge its adoption.
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