Student Success Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. MOORE. Mr. Chair, I rise today to offer an amendment, along with my colleagues Frederica Wilson from Florida and Danny Davis of Illinois.

This amendment is straightforward. It is protective in nature, and it ensures that high poverty schools are not adversely affected by H.R. 5's proposed change in the funding allocation formula for teacher support and development under title II of the ESEA.

Now, if we don't adopt this amendment, we may inadvertently break a long bipartisan agreement that we've had regarding our fundamental need to ensure that our low-income students are not assigned less qualified teachers than their advantaged peers. The reality is that a school district serving students in poverty faces many challenges in recruiting and in retaining teachers as well as other qualified staff. I believe that the Rules Committee made this in order because it wanted the body to have an opportunity to meet this long bipartisan agreement.

H.R. 5, as current drafted, would totally eliminate the current formula, which focuses on funding students in poverty, and replaces it with a formula that equally weights poverty and population. As written, we have strong reason to fear that H.R. 5 would result in Federal dollars being siphoned from States and schools with the poorest students and awarded to the States and schools without similar levels of poverty.

Our amendment, again, simply requires that this change to the funding formula not be enacted if our fears are realized and if the Secretary of Education determines that such a change would reduce funding to districts serving students in poverty. This amendment would not add a penny to the cost of the bill. Our intention is only to safeguard the very teacher supports to help us close the achievement gaps for low-income students.

The bill we are considering today, H.R. 5, consistently backs away from our longstanding Federal commitment to direct funding to students with the greatest need, including those attending high poverty schools.

There are a lot of factors that affect a child's performance in school, and some of these we just can't control, but this is one thing that we can control--the level of quality of the people standing in front of our children.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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