Issue Position: Ensuring our Kids Receive a 21st Century Education

Issue Position

Support Teachers, Drive Innovation, End Inequity, and Update Accountability

Senator Michael Bennet's priorities included in the bipartisan HELP bill:

Get and Keep Great Teachers and Leaders in the Classroom

Senator Bennet's provisions recognize that nothing makes a bigger difference to student learning than great teaching. In order to support great teachers, he has fought to improve teacher training, support quality principals and create opportunities for districts to improve their systems for training, recruiting and retaining the best teachers and principals in the schools where they are need most.

* Establish a competitive grant program for high-performing teacher pathway programs
* Create career-ladder opportunities for teachers and ensure new teachers get the mentoring they need
* Ensure educators have a voice in the policies that affect them
* Authorize the Teacher and Leader Incentive Fund
* Expand Troops to Teachers so that all Title I schools and troops with four years of service are eligible
* Focus on supporting principals
* Elements of the Lead Act, which support training for the most effective principals to lead school turnarounds
* Create English learner educator fellowships to support training teachers to work with English language learners

Spur Competition and Innovation

Senator Bennet's provisions include resources for states and districts to develop innovative reform efforts based on their needs and to ensure that rural school districts have an opportunity to compete for resources. He also pushed for provisions to identify innovative delivery systems, including those utilizing technology, and bring them to scale.

* Authorize Race to the Top with eligibility for districts and early-childhood programs to compete
* Authorize Investing in Innovation
* Authorize Promise Neighborhoods
* Ensure rural districts can compete for funds:
o Support a rural carve out for competitions
o Allow consortia of rural districts to apply together

Increase Flexibility

Senator Bennet's provisions include flexibility for states and school districts to use federal resources where they are needed most, including a provision to allow school districts to extend learning time.

* Consolidate narrow funding streams into larger pots of money
* Allow maximum transferability among Titles while still protecting the most vulnerable students
* Allow the use of resources to extend the length of the school day

End Inequality

Senator Bennet's provisions include closing a long-standing loophole in federal law that often results in low-income schools subsidizing their more affluent counterparts. The loophole also often means that Title I funds do not always meet their intended purpose. In order to receive Title I assistance, districts have to demonstrate that they are allocating their state and local resources equally among their high- and low-poverty schools. Due to a loophole, school districts can meet this requirement without actually accounting for dollars going into each school because they can use other measures like average teacher salary across the district to comply. So, districts often end up providing more local funding to schools in affluent areas because they attract more experienced teachers who make higher salaries. As a result, even with Title I assistance, low-income schools can end up with less funding than higher-income schools.

* Close the comparability loophole

Updating Accountability, Standards and Assessments for the 21st Century

Senator Bennet worked to ensure that the new bill maintains accountability for schools with large achievement gaps and results in states adopting fewer, higher and clearer standards that will prepare students to succeed in college and their careers. He also pushed for a common-sense accountability model that provides parents with useful information about how their children are progressing over time. These provisions ensure that Colorado's state-of-the-art accountability and growth model will work within the new law but also provide flexibility for other states.

* Ensure accountability for schools with large achievement gaps
* Adopt college- and career-ready standards
* Ensure that Colorado's growth model fits the definition of growth
* Allow the Department of Education to collect and disseminate best practices to parents, teachers and school leaders (including the Secretary's Report Card)
* Identify lowest-performing 5 percent of schools every year
* Provide resources for common assessments
* Create a Commission on Assessments for English language learners

Other Bennet Provisions:

* Tie teacher licensing to effectiveness
* Tie student data to teacher preparation programs
* Charter School Quality Act language included to give priority to quality applications that report student growth
* Impact Aid Timely Repayment Act language that will ensure that 14 Colorado districts currently waiting for payments receive them in a timely fashion
* Ensure that early childhood is an allowable use of funds where possible
* Reduce the compliance burden for proving supplement not supplant without weakening this protection
* Eliminate set-asides for Supplemental Education Services and school choice
* Ensure that parents get information "to the extent practicable in a language the parent can understand"
* Competitive grant program in Title III for English language learning programs

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