Providing for Further Consideration of H.R. 8, North American Energy Security and Infrastructure Act of 2015, and Providing for Consideration of the Conference Report On S. 1177, Student Success Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I am glad the gentleman got to education. We heard 9 or 10 minutes about this corporate welfare energy bill, which is not going anywhere, and it is the reason that I don't think there will be any Democrats supporting this rule. But, yes, in this rule is also a wonderful education bill that we are very excited about, and I think we have many Democrats who will want to tell you about it here today. It is exciting to reach this point.

I share the frustration of teachers, of parents, of students across the country with No Child Left Behind. I was on the State Board of Education in Colorado from 2001 to 2007 when we implemented No Child Left Behind. We saw many of the flaws at that time.

We knew the fallacy of the formula for adequate yearly progress, and it was set up in such a way that all schools would eventually fail. We saw the rigid structure that could even inhibit State and district innovation.

I am proud to say today that the bill under this rule is a major step forward. For those who are thinking of opposing it, realize that, in opposing it, you are ensuring that No Child Left Behind will continue exactly as it is.

There is never a perfect alternative. I am sure, if each of us had the opportunity to write our own education bill, we would have 435 different bills.

What we have before us is a good, realistic compromise that can replace No Child Left Behind with a new Federal education law. It is something that is long overdue for the kids of this country, something that will be a boost in morale to teachers and educators in this country, and something that will encourage innovation at the State and district level. I will talk about some of those provisions that do just that.

Just a few weeks ago I met with some teachers and students at Rocky Mountain High School in Fort Collins, Colorado. They expressed their frustration with what has become everyday challenges in K-12 schools and how detached our No Child Left Behind law from 15 years ago is with the realities of education today.

Teachers are spending less time teaching and more time administering high-stakes test or teaching of the test. Students are spending less time learning. As a result, schools have less time to focus on teaching real skills that students need to be ready for college or to be ready for careers in technical education after high school.

Unfortunately, schools across my district and the country have been experiencing the same frustrations as the teachers and students at Rocky Mountain High who I met with a couple weeks ago.

These frustrations are in many ways the result of the outdated education law, No Child Left Behind, which passed in 2001, which was well intentioned, but imposed a one-size-fits-all accountability system, a flawed one at that, on a diverse set of States and districts across our country.

That is why I am so excited to be here on the floor of the House with the opportunity to speak about the new conference report, the new bipartisan, bicameral ESEA Reauthorization, the Every Student Succeeds Act, which passed 39-1 in our conference committee.

I encourage my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join me and the other conferees in replacing No Child Left Behind with Every Student Succeeds Act.

The Every Student Succeeds Act is the result of years of work by both Chambers. Former Ranking Member and former Chair George Miller, former Ranking Member and Chair Buck McKeon, current Chair Mr. Kline, and

Mr. Scott have worked tirelessly, along with their staffs, over years to be able to put together something that both Democrats and Republicans can feel good about. Because guess what. We both care about kids. We both care about education. It is not a partisan issue.

Now, we might have our differences about how to improve our schools. Let's put all those good ideas on the table. And they were. And they were voiced. We were able to build and improve deeply upon the highly flawed first version of this bill that the House passed, which would have taken Federal dollars away from the poorest schools and given it to wealthier schools.

The House-passed bill would have completely failed students with disabilities by allowing unlimited students to have no accountability by classifying them as students with disabilities for alternative assessments, sweeping under the rug the tremendous amount of progress that students with disabilities have made since No Child Left Behind.

The first version of the bill didn't establish any accountability for graduation or proficiency rates or any parameters for interventions to ensure that we could improve struggling schools.

Now, when the Every Student Succeeds Act finally passed the House, it barely passed. It passed in a purely partisan manner. No Democrats supported the bill, and many Republicans didn't support the bill.

Now, the silver lining of that is that it allowed the process to move forward. I am proud to say, after months of hard work by the staff and the chair and ranking member, the conference committee has succeeded in reporting out a bill that I believe is better than the Senate bill, better than the House bill, and certainly better than No Child Left Behind.

When the conferees met, several Members offered thoughtful amendments that built upon and improved the conference framework even more. For example, Mr. Messer offered an amendment that would allow funds to be used to educate teachers about best practices for student data privacy.

I offered a successful amendment that increases dual and concurrent enrollment opportunities for English language learners, something near and dear to my heart as the founder of the New America School charter school network.

The conference committee took the framework and turned it into a robust bill that replaces No Child Left Behind with a system that works better for students, for educators, for families, and for schools.

When ESEA was first passed in 1965, first and foremost, it was seen properly as a critical piece of civil rights legislation. For the first time, the Federal Government was making a commitment that every child, regardless of race, background, or ZIP Code, deserved a great education to prepare them for success.

Any reauthorization of ESEA needs to uphold that same commitment to civil rights that was established in 1965. While the Every Student Succeeds Act isn't perfect, I believe that it upholds that commitment to civil rights that is such an important role for the Federal Government to play.

Most importantly, the Every Student Succeeds Act includes strong accountability provisions that ensure that underimproving schools are identified and improved.

Now, title I in Every Student Succeeds Act has come a long way from the original House bill. The number of Members in the House, including those in the new Democratic coalition and the Tri-Caucus, demanded stronger accountability provisions in the conference report. I am very happy to see that the conference report has delivered.

Specifically, the Every Student Succeeds Act maintains annual statewide assessments, which gives States, districts, teachers, and parents valuable information about how students are performing and the tools they need to improve student performance. This data will be broken down by subgroup, by race, by socioeconomic status, to ensure that no students are swept under the rug.

This bill includes a clear framework for identifying consistently low-performing schools and provides resources and ensures that States intervene to improve them. It fully maintains our promise to parents of students with disabilities, the promise that schools will be accountable to ensure that their child is learning and that the unique learning needs of their children are met.

To be clear, these requirements are not the same top-down, one-size-fits-all accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind. The one-size-fits-all formula of adequate yearly progress is rightfully gone. The accountability provisions in Every Student Succeeds Act creates a framework for States as they create their own meaningful accountability plans.

This means that States can be flexible and innovative to create specific policies that work for them. It is a challenge to States to rise to the occasion in meeting the learning needs of all students while maintaining those Federal rails to ensure that no child is left out.

This bill provides additional flexibility around testing by allowing high-quality, Federally recognized tests to also meet the annual testing requirements in high school. In my district, high schoolers take the Colorado State test, the ACT, and, if necessary, AP or IB exams. That is a lot of testing in the final years of high school.

This new flexibility would mean that a pending application that Colorado has for the ACT to stand in place of the Colorado State test would be specifically allowed in statute under this bill, and I couldn't be more proud of that provision.

This bill also maintains strong support for high-quality charter schools, something that I have made a hallmark of my time here in Congress and have been a coauthor of bills that have passed this body overwhelmingly. That charter school language is reflected in this bill.

The language would improve charter school access and service for all students, give new and innovative charter schools those tools they need to meet their goal of serving at-risk and diverse students that ensure that our limited Federal investment supports the replication and expansion of high-quality, innovative charter schools.

Before I came to Congress, I founded two public charter school networks. I know the freedom to innovate and the flexibility to pursue a unique mission within public education can help charter schools succeed at the highest levels.

This bill also contains a commitment to education technology and innovation. The Investing in Innovation program has also been one of my top priorities in this bill.

In Colorado, the St. Vrain Valley School District, which I represent a good portion of, received a $3.6 million innovation grant to expand programs for at-risk kids in seven schools.

Because of that grant, St. Vrain was able to extend the school year at four elementary schools that serve at-risk kids, target math students at risk of failing at two middle schools that implement the STEM Academy at Skyline High School. I couldn't be more proud of this provision.

Now, this rule also has a corporate welfare giveaway to the oil and gas industry. Thankfully, they are two separate votes. So my colleagues can vote against corporate welfare for the oil and gas industry, one of the most profitable industries on the face of the planet, and vote for kids.

I do encourage my colleagues to vote against the rule, which has the oil and gas corporate welfare bill. If it simply was a straight-up vote on ESEA, I think my Democratic colleagues would join me in supporting the rule. Unfortunately, it is not.

They stuck another bill in there that is an enormous multibillion-dollar giveaway to the most profitable industry on the face of the planet, trying to preserve the fossil fuel industry rather than find a pathway forward to transition toward a lower carbon emission future.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to bring up bipartisan legislation that would close a loophole allowing suspected terrorists to legally buy guns. This bill would bar the sale of firearms and explosives to those on the terrorist watch list.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of the amendment in the Record, along with extraneous material, immediately prior to the vote on the previous question.

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Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, we have before us today an education bill that is a vast improvement over the status quo. I am proud to say it is a result of the work product between Democrats and Republicans working together to finally replace an outdated educational law with one that makes a lot more sense.

It maintains the original goal of ESEA from 1965--that is, to protect the civil rights of all Americans, to ensure that no school district can sweep under the rug or deny a quality education to any student because of their ethnicity or race or income status--and it allows States and districts the flexibility to meet those needs. It allows States and districts the flexibility to do something, but not the flexibility to do nothing. That is the fine line that Democrats and Republicans have worked together to seek and have accomplished with this bill.

Beginning in 2011, the Department of Education embarked on an unprecedented process of granting annual ESEA waivers to States and some districts. Now, you have heard that waiver process blasted from the other side. Absent that waiver process, under the formula of adequate yearly progress, nearly every State and district would have been labeled a failure. So I hope that my colleagues are grateful for a waiver process that has succeeded in granting waivers not only to my home State of Colorado, but to most States and districts across the country.

Now, of course, the waiver process opened up a Pandora's box. We can all agree it gave too much power to a single Federal agency. Not knowing who the next President is going to be, that should be something that Democrats and Republicans are concerned about.

While President Obama and Secretary Duncan's use of the waiver process allowed States to get out from under a flawed law, we can't necessarily count on the next President to be as generous with the waiver process in the No Child Left Behind, which is why it is completely appropriate and why you see so many Democrats, Republicans, educators, and school board members lining up to say: You know what? We need better statutory guidance, and we need to eliminate the one flawed Federal measurement of adequate yearly progress and replace it with an accountability system that works at the State and district level and maintains the Federal commitment to civil rights for all students.

Now, I personally agree with some of the reforms that resulted from the ESEA waivers, but a complex annual waiver process is at the whim of whoever the chief executive is at a certain time. It is not sound policy over time to improve our public schools.

I am proud to say this bill, ESEA, has broad support from a diverse coalition of stakeholders. It has support from superintendents, teachers, the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the National Center for Learning Disabilities, the National Council of La Raza, Third Way, the STEM Education Coalition, the National Governors Association, and many others who are very well-regarded organizations that support the bill. And just over the past few days, I have heard from constituents who support the Every Student Succeeds Act.

I have spent most of my public career in education. I believe that education is the single most powerful tool for creating opportunity, for ending poverty, for lifting people into the middle class and beyond.

I have served as chairman of the State Board of Education of Colorado. I founded two charter schools. I served as superintendent of a charter school, the New America School. During my time in Congress, I have sat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee. And on a personal note, I have a preschool-age son.

Nothing could be more important for the future of our country than improving our public schools. Education is important to me, just as it is important to thousands of families in my district and parents everywhere. The Every Student Succeeds Act is a good bill that will move our education system forward.

I am proud to support the conference report, though, again, I am opposed to the rule and H.R. 8, the corporate welfare for the oil and gas industry bill, which was, unfortunately, put under the same rule as an education bill that I think many of us can agree on.

I want to talk about some of the specific language around charter schools that I worked hard to include in this bill.

I am proud to say that this version of the bill maintains strong Federal support for new and innovative charter schools as well as allowing for the replication and expansion of public charter school models that we know work for at-risk kids.

It is one of the great things about education. For every challenge we face, for every problem we see in public education, we also see an example of what works: a great teacher in a classroom defying the odds by helping at-risk students achieve; a great school; a great principal; a great site leader who has turned around a low-performing school, improved graduation rates, and made sure that more kids have access to college.

These stories are a reality in districts like Denver Public Schools, Jefferson County Public Schools, Boulder Valley School District, Poudre School District; and in districts across the country, there are examples of what works and what doesn't work.

The truth is that the Federal Government and States need to ensure that districts change what doesn't work, and one of the best ways to do that is to take proven models of success and expand and replicate them. One of those models that can work is public charter schools.

I am proud to say the public charter schools have been embraced in my home State of Colorado. Denver Public Schools, which serves a high percentage of at-risk kids, has over 20 percent of their children choosing to attend public charter schools. Our State also enjoys strong school choice across all public schools and even between districts.

This bill improves upon the charter school language by allowing the grants to be used for expanding and replicating successful models and upping the bar on authorizing practices and ensuring that quality public charter schools are meeting the needs of learners across the country.

Many of these charter schools wouldn't get off the ground without these Federal startup grants because they don't receive any public funds or State funds--in my home State of Colorado, until June of the year they open; in other States, it might be a little bit different. But generally speaking, all of those planning costs and operating costs for that year, until they open, are not compensated because they have no student enrollment at that point.

Believe me, it takes money to get public charter schools off the ground. They raise money from philanthropy. Some school districts who want more public charter schools help seed them, too. And the Federal investment, along with that, will help ensure that these great educators and great ideas have a chance to actually start a public charter school that meets a real learning need in the community.

I couldn't be more proud that those priorities of the All-STAR Act and the charter school bill passed overwhelmingly by this body in two different legislative sessions are reflected in this final bill.

I encourage my colleagues to vote ``no'' and defeat the previous question, to vote ``no'' on the rule, to vote ``yes'' on the education bill, and to vote ``no'' on the corporate welfare for the oil and gas industry bill.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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