Providing for Consideration of H.R. 5, Student Success Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me the customary 30 minutes, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the rule and the underlying bill, H.R. 5, the so-called Student Success Act. The Student Success Act is an ideological attempt to reduce the crucial Federal role in K-12 education.

To be clear, there's no excuse for bad policy that interferes with student learning and prevents opportunity from reaching all corners of this land. There's no excuse for bad classroom practices at the local level. There's no excuse for bad policies at the State level, and there's no excuse for bad policies at the Federal level.

However, we should also make no excuses for good policies at the State level, make no excuses for good policies that help improve classroom practices at the Federal level.

Unfortunately, under this restrictive rule, many of the commonsense amendments that would have helped improve this bill were shut out, including an amendment that I authored that would combat bullying and harassment against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students, to ensure that schools are a safe learning environment for all children.

Under this rule, other amendments that were offered by both my Democratic and Republican colleagues were not included and not allowed to proceed to the House floor for a debate.

My colleague, Ms. Foxx, said that ``local communities have the flexibility they need to meet the needs of their students.'' She stated that that was one of the goals of this bill.

I think the second goal that we should have with Federal education policy is, yes, to give local communities the flexibility to meet the learning needs of their students, but so, too, to not give local communities the flexibility to continue to not meet the needs of their students.

There are too many failing schools across our country--high schools that, year after year, have dropout rates in excess of 50 percent; elementary schools where kids are falling further behind every year.

We need to do everything we can as a society--that means at the State level, that means at the Federal level, that means at the district level--to make sure that, yes, the district has the flexibility and the school has the flexibility to do what works, but not the flexibility to continue to do nothing, which would only consign another generation of American kids, particularly and disproportionately our most at-risk families, to failure.

If the underlying bill becomes law, States wouldn't be required to set performance targets based on student growth, proficiency, or graduation rates. Effectively, it would allow States to define success down, simply to make themselves or their districts look good. The bill doesn't even define low-performing schools, nor does it establish parameters for intervention or timelines for improvement.

I have not heard any Member of this body, on either side, argue for Federal micromanagement. That's a straw man. We want to make sure that reform-minded superintendents are armed with the tools they need to make the tough decisions.

And there's no silver bullet in education. Sometimes it might be converting it into a charter school, sometimes it might be changing the staff, sometimes it might be closing a school, sometimes it might be an extended learning day.

One of the most critical aspects of successful school reform, in fact, is the local buy-in. And that's why I, as well as my colleague, Ms. Foxx, would agree that the Federal Government dictating what they should do is counterproductive towards effective school reform. However, continuing to do nothing is a guaranteed continued recipe for failure.

Mr. Speaker, we need to provide schools with more flexibility to design school improvement systems than the rigid measures under No Child Left Behind. I think we can agree on that. But we can't let them continue to do nothing and fail children.

No child in our country should be trapped in a failing school with little or no recourse or real choice. We need to mend accountability, not end it.

This bill constitutes the Federal Government throwing up its arms and simply letting the States define success downward, making themselves look good, patting themselves on the back saying, ``Job well done,'' when more and more children are falling through the cracks.

We need a Federal role as an honest referee, a disruptive force to break up school district monopolies. We need to use our limited funds to give reform-minded school leaders leverage and resources and cover that they need to ensure that failing schools are subject to dramatic interventions that improve school quality.

No child should ever be trapped in a failing school. And we, as adults, should not be finger-pointing, saying oh, that's the State, that's the district, that's the Federal Government, that's your principal's fault, that's your teacher's fault. That's not the answer. The answer is to make the school work for the kids and make sure that every family has access to a good school.

While No Child Left Behind certainly has its flaws, including the problematic and wrongful definition of adequate yearly progress as a benchmark for success, it, nevertheless, did move us forward when it comes to serving low-income and minority students, students with disabilities and English language learners, and provided a new layer of transparency that prevented school districts from sweeping these problems under the rug.

Unfortunately, here, with this bill, H.R. 5, it takes another step backward, effectively excluding students with disabilities from school accountability systems. Currently, there's a 1 percent cap, saying the students with severe disabilities up to 1 percent of students can take alternative assessments based on alternative achievements standards.

This bill removes that cap, meaning that school district or that State, at their discretion, under this bill can simply say, you know what? We don't think any of our IDEA students, any of our Special Ed students can learn, so we're not going to include them in the accountability metric. They don't have to take the test. Or if they do, we're not going to count it. Or they can do an alternative test, and we'll look at that and sign off.

And we will never know, Mr. Speaker, under this bill. It truly, in our publicly-funded public education system, is continuing to meet the learning needs of all kids, including those with disabilities or not, which is why, across the disability advocacy community, there is strong opposition for this bill.

It's rare that a bill can unite such disparate forces as the Chamber of Commerce, organizations representing teachers, the civil rights community, advocates for the disabled, all in staunch opposition to a bill. Why?

Because the bill represents a step backward for public education in this country. This bill doesn't invest in our Nation's teachers, the most important frontline workers that provide a quality education for kids across the country.

While, to its credit, it eventually replaces highly-qualified teachers with a new teacher accountability system that's tied into student success, which is a key component of my STELLAR Act that I introduced with Representative Susan Davis, it fails to provide teachers with the professional development and support they need to succeed in the classroom.

And during the 3-year transition period, it does away with all measures, indicators and requirements for teacher quality, including getting rid of the definition of highly-qualified teacher. So for 3 years, our Federal taxpayer money that we are custodians of will go, in part, to pay the salaries of people with absolutely no quality input or outbased controls.

While I applaud the eventual replacement of the definition of highly-qualified teacher, and most people agree that we can do better measurement of teacher quality, the answer is simply not to throw up our arms and say we're not going to look at teacher quality.

While H.R. 5 retreats on the significant and constructive Federal role, Ranking Member Miller's Democratic substitute advances a comprehensive vision of school accountability and improvement. The Democratic substitute would ensure that schools take into account student growth, proficiency rates, including disaggregation for groups, including students with disabilities, English language learners, minorities; design targeted interventions for low-performing schools; partner with school districts to use evidence-based criteria to improve school and classroom performance.

It is an advanced vision of school improvement that has received broad unified support from the education reform community, the civil rights community, and the business community.

The Federal Government must ensure that all students receive a high quality, world-class education. We are a country. Education is under the local control of school boards subject to the laws of the State. As a Nation, we cannot abrogate on our responsibility to have a human capital development strategy that allows us to compete with other nation-states in the 21st century.

The Democratic substitute would ensure that schools set high expectations and use quality assessments for students with disabilities. We do not propose, in the Democratic substitute, nor does President Obama support any kind of national standard or national test.

Certainly, some States have chosen to work together to develop core common standards. Other States have developed other high quality standards and assessments. The Federal role should be to not allow States to define the success downward and capitulate the entire generation and consign an entire generation of children to failure.

I'm disappointed the Rules Committee didn't make in order my Student Non-Discrimination Act, which I introduced with Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen and 155 of our colleagues. When you have a bill that has so many cosponsors, I would hope that the Rules Committee would at least allow a debate and floor vote on this bill.

My Student Non-Discrimination Act would establish a comprehensive Federal prohibition on discrimination in public schools based on actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.

Every day, across our country, tragically, kids who are perceived to be gay or lesbian are subjected to pervasive discrimination, harmful to both students and our education system. Surveys indicate that as many as 9 in 10 LGBT students have been bullied.

Just this last week we lost another life to bullying. On Sunday, a young man named Carlos in New Mexico took his own life after being bullied and called derogatory LGBT names since the age of 8. It's hard to imagine the torment that Carlos went through every single day. And unfortunately, too many LGBT students and their families often have limited recourses to fight this kind of discrimination that makes schools an unsafe and unwelcome learning environment for them.

My amendment would simply provide protections for LGBT students to ensure that all students have access to public education in a safe environment, free from discrimination, free from harassment, free from bullying, intimidation and violence.

I would have hoped that every Member of this body would agree that there's a bipartisan consensus that, regardless of what people think of divisive social issues like gay marriage or other LGBT issues, school should be a safe place for all students to learn.

I am pleased that the underlying bill includes constructive language with regard to the expansion and replication of successful charter schools. I'm also pleased that the committee made in order two amendments I offered to improve this flawed bill. The first amendment further improves the Charter Schools Program. I enjoyed working with Chairman Kline and Ranking Member Miller on improving and modernizing the Charter Schools Program. Both the underlying bill and the Democratic substitute contain strong language around helping quality charter schools grow and expand to meet the demands of the more than 1 million kids who remain on charter school waiting lists across our country unable to attend the school of their choice.

A recent Stanford CREDO study found that charter schools that are successful in producing strong academic progress from the beginning tend to remain strong and successful schools as they grow and expand.

My amendment, which I'm offering with Mr. Petri, would allow charter schools to receive Federal funding through the Charter Schools Program to use their grant dollars for vital startup costs like professional development, teacher training, and instructional materials. As a charter school founder, I know that this additional flexibility provided under our proposed amendment would really help get quality charter schools off the ground.

The amendment also allows per-pupil revenue to be more portable across school districts to provide States with the ability to move towards more innovative multidistrict models, including online education or competency-based education, if they so desire.

Finally, my amendment would ensure that charter schools are doing substantial outreach to low-income and other underserved populations. We know that many high-performing charter schools are already leading in this regard in helping our most at-risk families achieve success. We want to ensure that they continue to lead the way in providing access and choice for more families.

I'm also pleased my amendment I offered with Representative Brooks regarding computer science is made in order. My amendment with Representative Brooks would clarify that Federal funds can be used for computer science education. It's particularly important because it relates to funding for teacher preparation and professional development based on the bipartisan Computer Science Education Act, which Representative Brooks and I introduced earlier this year.

In today's knowledge-based economy, it's more important than ever to ensure our education system aligns with the demands of the 21st-century workforce. We need high-quality teachers to have access to training in all relevant fields, including computer science education.

I also worked with Mr. Petri on another amendment regarding charter schools, which I withdrew. But I want to talk about some additional changes that are included in our All-STAR Act that I look forward to continue working with Chairman Kline and Ranking Member Miller to make crucial changes on the Charter School Programs that were included in my amendment with Mr. Petri.

The amendment I offered with Mr. Petri would offer improvements to help grow and replicate high-quality charter schools that are demonstrating outstanding results across the country. There's currently 6,000 charter schools serving more than 2.3 million students. Yet there are over a million students on charter school waiting lists. My amendment would have increased the overall authorization for this high-impact, low-cost program to $330 million so that with our limited Federal resources we have the maximum impact on increasing choice and learning opportunities for families.

My amendment would also have allowed for the continuation of the Charter Schools Program grants from the Replication and Expansion of High-Quality Schools Program, a very successful program that helps more families access the highest-performing charter schools.

In this time of austerity and constrained public resources, we need to maximize the impact of every dollar spent by making sure we only invest in what works, fostering innovative new approaches both for results as well as for cost savings to achieve even greater gains in student achievement. That means investing in those public charter schools that are getting great results as well as allowing charter school operators with a strong evidence base of student achievement, particularly with our most at-risk kids and families, along with robust management capacity, to replicate and expand so they can serve more students.

I look forward to continuing the work with Chairman Kline and Ranking Member Miller to include some of those priorities in the ESEA reauthorization and further legislation.

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Mr. POLIS. The gentlelady said the U.S. ranks 18th on the quality and quantity of high school diplomas. This bill is a recipe to do even worse--worse on the quality by allowing States to define success and their standards down and worse in the quantity by removing graduation requirements as one of the issues that the Federal Government looks at with regard to the success of State formulas.

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Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, what I was going to discuss with the gentlelady is that the CutGo issue was resolved, as she mentioned, and waivers that are routinely granted on a broad variety of amendments simply could have been approved by the Rules Committee, as is customary, and advanced this amendment to the floor.

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Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the remainder of the time.

First, in response to the gentlelady's, Ms. Foxx's, allegation that Members on our side of the aisle have misrepresented the bill, that is completely false.

The bill does, in fact, remove the 1 percent cap for students with disabilities. A school district or a State can say, We are not even looking whether students with disabilities are making progress at all. Perhaps we are excluding every child with an IEP; we are excluding every child that receives IDEA funding, Federal funding, for taxpayer money that we are custodians for.

In addition, it allows States to define success downward. Rather than having meaningful college and career-ready standards, a State can simply say, We write our standards such that we are going to make all of our students brilliant because they are all going to pass it, then we are going to pat ourselves on the back and say, ``Job well done.'' Those kids might not be ready for college and they might not be ready for careers. We, as a nation-state, cannot afford not to do better with regard to serving our public kids.

This bill slashes education funding. I don't know how you call moving $3.6 billion worth of programs into a $2 billion block grant anything less than slashing education funding.

What is being eliminated? School improvement grants, turning around some of our lowest performing schools and giving them the opportunity to succeed. Race to the Top, which has encouraged reforms at the State level, including my home State of Colorado, which replaced teacher tenure with an evaluation system, with bipartisan support.

Investments in innovation: replacing these important, tangible programs that are some of the highest-leveraged dollars that the Federal Government spends, which is amorphously block-granting money to States, sending more money into the ``system'' without any reforms or any accountability required.

As elected officials who are concerned about our Nation's welfare and as providers of 10 percent of education funding, we in the Federal Government have an obligation to provide transparency and accountability and, yes, to be a referee in the K-12 education system. We have an obligation to ensure that schools cannot fail kids year after year. We cannot retreat from the goals of No Child Left Behind, and while it was flawed, it has shined light on achievement gaps for minority and low-income students, and has unleashed State- and local-based reforms that we are just beginning and continue to benefit from. We need to use what we have learned from our experiences under No Child Left Behind to build on what reform-minded States and districts are doing. We need to encourage flexibility, improve and streamline the Federal role, invest in what works, and change what doesn't work.

I look forward to working together across the aisle to provide more transparency, accountability and to ensure funding equity in our Nation's schools. H.R. 5 would bring us back to a time in which adults had every incentive to hide poor student performance and students were left to attend failing schools for generations--without choice and without recourse.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' and defeat this partisan bill. I urge a ``no'' vote on this restrictive rule and the bill. I encourage my colleagues to move forward in improving our public education system.

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