Every Child Achieves Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, this week the Senate is considering the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. As we have heard from the previous speakers, the issues that are involved in this decision really go to the heart of America and its future.
Public education is the avenue to opportunity for most children in America, and if that avenue is blocked or if it is inadequate, that child will suffer, the family will suffer, and the Nation will suffer. There is hardly a bigger, more important assignment that could come our way than to consider elementary and secondary education.
We are fortunate that we have two good leaders on this issue--two of the best in this Senate, Senator Lamar Alexander and Senator Patty Murray. Senator Alexander is a Republican from Tennessee and a former Secretary of Education. He takes this job and assignment very seriously, and I have spoken to him many times about these issues. My colleague, friend, and fellow leader on the Democratic side, Senator Murray of Washington, and Senator Alexander have done an extraordinary bipartisan job of bringing this measure to the floor. That is not to say that I agree with every provision nor that any Senator does, but to have this reported unanimously from committee by both political parties with the political climate we have in Washington is nothing short of amazing.
We find ourselves on the floor debating the specifics of the Every Child Achieves Act. I am glad this bill maintains Impact Aid assistance for districts such as North Chicago in my home State of Illinois, which is a neighbor to the Great Lakes naval training station.
The bill also preserves the universally agreed upon triumph of No Child Left Behind--to disaggregate data among subgroups of students.
I remember back in 2002, when we passed No Child Left Behind, I was relatively new to the Senate, and I sat back there. Directly behind me was a Senator from Minnesota named Paul Wellstone. To say that Senator Paul Wellstone hated No Child Left Behind is an understatement. Every time I got up and appeared to be supporting it, he would be behind me whispering: Senator Durbin, this is a mistake. Don't you vote for this. You will be sorry. Well, I voted for it.
As I reflect on it, many good things happened, but a lot of things happened that we didn't expect to happen. We had testing, and I think testing is an important part of metrics and measurement to see whether the students are actually progressing. But some parts of the bill went overboard by disqualifying schools and saying they were not up to the job because their test scores didn't hit certain numbers. Teachers would complain to me that they went through all of this education and had experience in teaching, but now they were just teaching to the test. They lost the thrill of being teachers and that diminished them in their ability to help the children.
We also know what happened when it came to some of the other aspects of this bill. Some of the States started dumbing down their State standards so schools would pass the test. It wasn't a pretty sight. It is time to rewrite this broken bill, and the bill that we have before us attempts to do just that.
No Child Left Behind made important advances in how we ensure that all children are being served by public education. As we debate the Every Child Achieves Act this week, we must resist the urge to go too far the other way. What happened with No Child Left Behind was a political curiosity. Here was a new Republican President, George W. Bush, appealing to a Democratic Congress to give the Federal Government more control when it came to K-12 education. That was really a new approach, and it is one that, frankly, surprised many of us. As a result, No Child Left Behind went in directions and to degrees that many of us did not expect. Now we are getting a pushback from those who say it went too far. The pendulum is about to swing back in the other direction. This bill allows States to develop their own State education plan, set their own achievement goals, and hold themselves accountable. Every Child Achieves does not require States to identify low-performing schools or take meaningful actions to provide additional support when the schools are consistently not serving their students. Without these protections, students of color and low-income students could easily be left behind. There are reasonable, commonsense improvements that should be made to this bill to enhance accountability.
We can have federally required accountability and intervention without federally prescribed accountability and intervention.
Let me also say a word about vouchers. The Senator from Washington just spoke about vouchers. I asked her when No Child Left Behind was written and she told me 2002, and I think it was somewhere around that period when we passed the DC vouchers system. We are members of the Senate Appropriations Committee. It was Senator DeWine of Ohio who offered the DC voucher system as an amendment on an appropriations bill. I offered three amendments to his proposal. He proposed that Federal tax dollars be given to individual parents in DC to choose the school they wish, even if it was a private or religious school--not charter schools per se but so-called DC opportunity or voucher schools. I offered three amendments in committee to his proposal.
Here is what they were: First amendment, every teacher in a DC voucher school had to have a college degree. The amendment was defeated. The Republican majority said, no, we don't want to limit the creativity here of these new teachers in voucher schools. The second amendment I offered said the students who attend the voucher schools will take the same tests as the students attending DC Public Schools so we can compare how they are doing. That amendment was also defeated by the majority in the Appropriations Committee. They didn't want to be held to the same standards of testing and achievement. The third one was the most shocking. I said any building used for a DC voucher school had to pass the fire safety code in the District of Columbia. That, too, was defeated.
Years later, I sent staff out to take photos of some of the DC voucher schools. It was depressing. Many of these schools were just schools in name only. They weren't real schools. When we held a hearing before the Appropriations Committee, they couldn't even explain what standards they were teaching to. Is that the kind of system we want to set up nationally and put our tax dollars towards? Is that where families want to send their children? So I agree with Senator Murray. Before we start talking about voucher schools, let's focus on our first responsibility; that is, public education.
I also want to talk about an amendment that may be offered by Senator Burr of North Carolina on Title I formulas. Title I is the single largest source of Federal funding for elementary and secondary education. It helps States and school districts address poverty and the needs of low-income students. This was the inspiration for the Federal Government to make a massive investment and commitment to education in the 1960s, and the reason behind it was because we saw the gross disparities in school districts from State to State and from district to district. We believed then, as I believe now, that kids from poor families don't have a fighting chance if they don't have the chance of a good education. Title I was designed to send those dollars to help those school districts educate those children.
Now, the amendment that is proposed by the Senator from North Carolina, Mr. Burr, would devastate low-income students in my home State of Illinois. It would reduce Illinois's title I share by an estimated $180 million a year. That is a 28-percent reduction in Federal assistance in my State of Illinois to help poor, low-income, and minority students--a 28-percent reduction. Chicago public schools alone would lose $68 million. I just have to say for the record, they are struggling even today to meet their budget needs and their pension requirements. This kind of cut would be devastating.
I think about the violence in the great city of Chicago and many other cities as well. I think about the responsibility of the Chicago public school system which educates almost 400,000 students. A $70 million cut to Chicago would mean that these kids in low-income families would struggle and many would not succeed in achieving a good education. Is that the best we can do? I think it is a mistake.
I have to serve notice on my colleagues. I don't know what procedural tools are available to us, but when it comes to an amendment that takes that kind of money away from critically important school districts in my State, I am going to use every tool in the box to stop this from coming to the floor and passing. There is just too much at stake. I hope my colleagues will join me in this effort to stop this as well.
Finally, let me talk about an issue that is near and dear to all of us and especially to the Presiding Officer--criminal background checks. In the State of Illinois, if you want to be a teacher--before you can even be a student teacher--you have to go through a criminal background check. What does that consist of? Being fingerprinted and having your fingerprints and personal information turned over to our State police and the FBI. We take this very seriously in Illinois, and we are not the only State. There are many States that do exactly the same thing. We don't want anyone in the classroom, anyone in an unsupervised situation with small children around, who is going to be a danger to those children, period.
There are two proposals before us. One is being offered by the Senator from Pennsylvania, and it is a criminal background approach which I cannot support. The reason I cannot support it is because it imposes new Federal criminal background check standards in addition to what I just described in Illinois. We already have fingerprinting and a criminal background check that goes to the State registry of crime as well as the FBI, which provides the basic information you need to know as to whether this potential teacher has anything in their background that is worrisome or would disqualify that teacher. It is already being done. The amendment being offered by the Senator from Pennsylvania says now we are going to make sure they go through a second check, a federally mandated criminal background check, which sends the school districts in Illinois to the same agencies I just described; in other words, a second check which under Illinois law would be at the expense of the school district--that goes to the State police, the FBI, and others. Come on. Why would we waste our money--precious Federal money that we need for education--in duplicating background checks? It makes no sense whatsoever.
So I commend the Senator from Pennsylvania for being concerned about this. There isn't a parent or grandparent alive who doesn't share his concern, but let's not impose an additional Federal mandate on States that are already doing a professional job. If States say we have a background check in place that conforms to what the standards are in Washington, why should they have to do it a second time?
Senator Whitehouse of Rhode Island makes that proposal. He has an alternative amendment. He proposes that the State background checks meet a list of Federal compliance requirements, while explicitly ensuring that states would not need to duplicate background checks for current employees who have already met these requirements and have been cleared. I think that is better. That eliminates the duplication and eliminates the wasted dollars on a second, unnecessary duplicative background check.
I might add that the Senator from Pennsylvania and the Senator from Rhode Island addressed the concern about mistakes. If there is a name sent in by mistake and a potential teacher is disqualified and it turns out the information is erroneous, there is a due process provision in Senator Toomey's bill and one that I think is more complete in the bill offered by Senator Whitehouse.
It wasn't that many years ago, our colleagues may remember, that our colleague Senator Ted Kennedy ended up on a no-fly list. He kept saying: Why am I on a no-fly list? It was a mistake. It was a government mistake that identified him as a danger to the country. Mistakes can be made. There needs to be a due process requirement in here so those accused of something that they are not guilty of have a chance to have their day to tell their story as best they can.
The bottom line is that this bill is one of the most important we will consider. I thank the chairman and ranking member for the time they put into this, and I thank them for their bipartisan efforts. There will be some disagreements on the amendments before us, but I think we are all in common agreement. If we don't get this right, many of the other things we do don't mean much.
If we don't provide that avenue of opportunity to kids from lower-income, impoverished families, they are not likely to enjoy life as they might with a good education and realize the American dream. This is our step in the right direction. I hope we can make it even stronger as we consider amendments.
I yield the floor.
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