Every Child Achieves Act of 2015

Floor Speech

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, we are here today to consider the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the bill that has been known
for years as No Child Left Behind. It is a bill the Congress was
supposed to reauthorize more than 7 years ago.

When school kids come to visit me in my office here, I often ask
them: What would happen if you showed up and were told that your
homework was 7 or 8 years late? That is how long it has taken us to get
to this place.

As the Presiding Officer may know, before I came to the Senate, I had
the honor of being the superintendent of the Denver Public Schools
district, which now has 95,000 children in it, 67 percent of whom
qualify for free and reduced lunch.

I should note that we got some sad news in the last month or two. For
the first time in our country's history--for the first time in the
history of the United States--over half of the children attending
public schools in our country qualify for free and reduced lunch. That
is due to two decades of stagnant middle-class family incomes and the
effect of the worst recession since the Great Depression.

What people in Washington need to understand is that when it comes to
education in this country right now, our kids don't have a fair fight,
especially our kids living in poverty. If you were born poor in the
United States of America, you will have heard 30 million fewer words
than your more affluent peers when you show up for kindergarten. Ask
any kindergarten teacher in the country whether that makes a
difference, and they will tell you it does.

What are we doing as a country to fill that gap? Not much. By the
time kids get to elementary school--their early years--only one out of
five is reading proficiently of the kids who were born poor and 20
percent are reading at grade level. Ask any middle or high school
teacher whether that is going to make a difference when that child gets
to middle school or high school.

Where does it end in the land of opportunity for kids who are born
into poverty in this country? If you are born poor in the United States
of America, your chances of getting a college degree, or the equivalent
of a college degree, is 9 in 100, which means--in this global economy
of ours--that every year becomes less and less forgiving to people who
have less of an education. And 91 out of 100 of our kids are going to
be constrained to the margin of the economy and the margin of the
democracy from the very outset.

There are 100 desks in this room. There are 100 chairs in this room.
If we weren't the Senate but instead kids born into poverty in this
country, not even those three rows of desks over there in that corner
would represent people graduating from college. Everybody else in this
room would not have the benefit of a college degree. We would never
accept those odds for our own children. The people in the Senate would
never ever accept those odds for our own children. If our kids faced
the odds of showing up to kindergarten having heard 30 million fewer
words than their peers and if you knew it was assured that your child
had a 20-percent chance of reading at grade level when they got to
elementary school, I guarantee you would leave this place. You would
leave the Senate, and you would go home and address the problem.

But when it comes to public education--especially when it comes to
our kids who are living in poverty in this country--we stop treating
them as if they were our kids. We are treating them as if they were
someone else's kids. We are leaving it to luck as to whether a kid can
fill that 30-million-word gap.

I am sure the Presiding Officer knows this. There are entire cities
in this country and rural areas in this country where school choice
would be meaningless because there is not a good school to choose from.
There is not a school in the neighborhood or in the city that anybody
in this body would send their kid to. That is where we are.

Over the last decade or so, we made progress in many places across
the country. The Denver Public Schools is one of those places. It is
the fastest growing urban school district in the United States.

In 2005, the kids who attended Denver Public Schools were dead last
in terms of student growth compared to any school district of any size
in the State of Colorado. For the last 3 years Denver Public Schools
has led the State in terms of its student growth, both for kids who
receive free and reduced lunch and kids who do not receive free and
reduced lunch. Thirty percent more kids graduated and went to college
this year than in 2005.

Now, I am the first to say that we have a long, long way to go in
Denver to make sure that the ZIP Code you are born into doesn't
determine the educational outcome you get, but we are making
substantial progress. And I say that if we could say as a country that
every single urban school district since 2005 showed a 30-percent
increase in kids going to college, we would be feeling a lot better
about where we are headed.

There is a lot of debate in this body about what tax policy ought to
be and whether we ought to think about redistributing wealth and who
should pay what share of taxes. Some people view it as everything ought
to be decided out there by the market. I understand that point of view.
But if that is your point of view, you better be doing everything you
can to be sure that every single kid in the country has an excellent
shot at an education, because if you don't, then you are basically
saying, if you have the bad luck to be born to a poor family in this
country, you are on your own. You are on your own, and you have a 9-in-
100 chance of getting a degree that is actually going to allow you to
compete in the global economy.

One thing I know about kids who are born in this country, they don't
get to pick who their parents are. They don't get to decide whether
they are born into a ZIP Code that is going to fill that 30-million-
word gap by the time they get to kindergarten or that is going to give
them excellent school choices or that will allow them to go to college.

Today, while we are not talking about higher education, this is very
much a part of this K-12 conundrum because college has become harder
and harder to afford, even at a time when it is much more important for
people to succeed.

I saw some data the other day that said that for the average cost of
tuition in this country, the average cost of college, a family in the
bottom quartile of income earners, after you account for student loans,
grants, and student aid, would have to consume 85 percent of their
income to afford 1 year of college; whereas, if you are in the top
quartile, it will cost you 15 percent of your income. Is that fair? It
didn't used to be this way. In the 1970s, it wasn't this way. In the
1970s, a Pell grant covered 76 percent of what it cost to go to the
average college in this country. We are rolling up the carpet on the
next generation of Americans, and I don't think it is fair. I don't
think it is right.

We should be having a debate about the size and scope of government.
I believe that. We should have that debate. But as we are having that
debate, we should keep in mind that we have an obligation to fulfill to
honor the obligation our parents and grandparents fulfilled for us,
which is to make sure that if you were willing to work hard, if you
were willing to study hard, that college was going to be something that
was attainable and it wasn't going to strangle you in debt.

Too many families across Colorado are facing this challenge, and the
saddest thing I hear in my town is when somebody comes and says: We
can't afford to send our kids to the best college they got into. What a
waste that is--what a waste for that student, what a waste for our
society. So there is more for us to do on college affordability.

But today we are talking about the Elementary and Secondary Education
Act. I think we actually make substantial progress in this bill. I want
to say how pleased I am with the leadership of Chairman Alexander and
the ranking member Patty Murray. They have done an exceptional job of
managing this bill through our committee.

We have a very diverse committee. We have the junior Senator from
Vermont on the committee and we have the junior Senator from Kentucky
on the committee, and because of Chairman Alexander's leadership and
the work and leadership of the ranking member Senator Murray, the bill
actually passed out of the committee unanimously. Imagine that--around
this place, where we can't even agree on how to publish a report or
what time we should come to work, we have a committee in the U.S.
Congress where Republicans and Democrats unanimously agreed on a bill.
Let me tell you, it wasn't easy. If it were easy, we would have done it
on time. We would have done it 8 years ago when we were supposed to do
it--when our homework was due--but I suppose it is better late than
never, and I am very pleased with the product.

There is more I would like to add, but I think--I know the teachers,
principals, and school leaders across Colorado need us to fix No Child
Left Behind, and I hope we can finally get it done this time.

This bill is a good starting point. It eliminates NCLB's one-size-
fits-all approach to education, which we know will not work, and it re-
empowers those who are closest to our kids to make the decisions that
need to be made for their benefit. This bill includes many key
elements. Importantly, it includes the requirement for annual
assessment. I know testing is not popular. I have three kids in the
Denver Public Schools. My three daughters go to those schools. I get an
annual report on what the testing looks like. I believe we are
overtesting our kids, but I don't think that is because of the Federal
requirement.

I see the Senator from Tennessee.

Does the Senator want to speak?

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Mr. BENNET. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I think there is a lot we can do to streamline those tests, but it is
not the Federal requirement that is causing it, it is the way the
Federal requirement works with State assessments and district
assessments, and we have to do a better job. I also think we ought to
think differently about the testing we are doing for teaching and
learning, which needs to be continuous, ongoing, and inform a teacher's
instruction and inform the principal's leadership at the school.

The testing that is done for accountability should be a lot less. We
heard testimony from the superintendent of the Denver Public Schools,
Tom Boasberg, who told us he thought that for accountability purposes,
probably all we need is 4 hours a year in reading and math. I know the
Bennet girls would settle for that. They would agree with that. They
would do that deal. But until somebody comes up with a better way of
measuring where kids are, we need the annual assessments. We have to
have them because it is the only way you can show growth.

When No Child Left Behind started, it asked and answered a completely
irrelevant question--a question that was so frustrating to the teachers
I knew in the Denver Public Schools and to our principals. It asked:
How did this year's fourth graders do compared to last year's fourth
graders? This is a completely irrelevant question.

Today, because of the work that has been done in Colorado leading the
way, States all over the country now measure the growth of kids. What
we ask is, How did this year's sixth graders do compared to how they
did as fifth graders, compared to how they did as fourth graders, and
compared to everybody else in the State who has a statistically similar
test history? Why is that important? Because it allows you to establish
growth or show growth. Then one can actually evaluate how well a school
is doing, because it used to be in No Child Left Behind, under adequate
yearly progress--which asked that long question of how did this year's
fourth graders do compared to last year's fourth graders--it used to be
we measured what was called status: How proficient were the kids, how
lucky were those kids. You might have a school where kids were
proficient but were actually losing ground in terms of academic
proficiency, and we were rewarding those schools. We were calling those
schools blue ribbon schools. There were also schools in poorer parts of
town where teachers were killing themselves, students were killing
themselves, and they weren't proficient because they started so far
behind, but they were getting more than a grade level or two grade
levels of increased proficiency during the course of the year. Do you
know what those schools were called under No Child Left Behind? Those
schools were called failing schools. We called those teachers failing
teachers. We called those students failing students, those who were
achieving 2 years of growth. Their more affluent peers might have been
losing ground, and we were saying they were winners. We have moved past
that. This bill now acknowledges that. I wish this bill required
growth--which it doesn't--but I believe States and districts will use
growth to measure data.

The bill also continues to require that States and districts
disaggregate data so we can actually understand where kids are. That is
really important. Before No Child Left Behind existed, we had
absolutely no idea. Now we know. The hard truth is that kids of color
in this country aren't doing nearly as well as Anglo kids in this
country. Kids living in poverty aren't doing nearly as well as their
middle-class or more affluent peers. We need to do better.

I run into people periodically who say to me that you can't fix it
unless you fix poverty. You can't fix the education system unless you
fix poverty. Don't tell kids in my city who are living in poverty that
that is true. Outside of every one of our schools it says ``school.''
It doesn't say ``orphanage.'' It says ``school.'' We need to make sure
every one of those schools is delivering for every kid in our
community, no matter where they come from. Otherwise, what is left of
us? What is left of this land of opportunity?

Before No Child Left Behind existed, we had an impression, a vague
sense of the inequities in our educational system. Now we understand
how deep they are, how rooted they are, and we have to continue to
build on the successes we have seen in high-quality schools working in
poor neighborhoods that have actually delivered for kids all over the
country.

This new bill--and I see the Senator from Texas is here and I will
yield to him as soon as he is ready.

The new version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
importantly empowers States to design their accountability systems,
giving them more flexibility while ensuring that essential information
is included. I think that is an important recognition, led by Chairman
Alexander, that there was a real overreach in No Child Left Behind.

As a former school superintendent, I can say I used to wonder all the
time why Washington was so mean to our teachers and to our kids. What I
have realized since coming here is that it is not that everybody here
is mean. They mean well. But this place is the farthest place in the
universe--I mean that literally, I don't mean that figuratively--this
is the farthest place in the universe from a classroom in the Denver
Public Schools or a classroom anywhere in this country, and I think No
Child Left Behind in many ways was an overreach. The last thing I want
to be told as a superintendent is how to do my work in Denver. I want
to insist that we do the work. I want to insist that children all over
this country have a chance, no matter what State they are born into, no
matter what neighborhood they are born into, but I don't want people
here telling people how to do that work. There is a distinction.

I have more to say about this, but I see my friend from Texas is
here, so I will yield to him. Before I do, I just congratulate the
chairman of the committee who is here on the floor, Senator Alexander
from Tennessee, for his extraordinary leadership on this bill.

Again, I remind my colleagues who are listening to this, what a
rare--rare--occurrence this is. This is a bill that passed unanimously
out of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and that
would not have happened without the leadership of Senator Lamar
Alexander and Senator Murray, the Senator from Washington.

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, while we wait on another colleague, I
thought I would talk about another aspect of this bill that I think is
very important.

For the first time in this country's history, finally, the Elementary
and Secondary Education Act is going to require districts to report
actual per-pupil expenditures, which will shed light on extraordinary
funding inequities in this country.

We are one of three countries in the OECD, because of the way we fund
our public schools in the United States, that actually spends more
money on more affluent kids than we do on kids living in poverty. That
is not well understood, but that is a fact. That is the truth.

We need to be concerned with closing the achievement gap in the
United States, because if we look at the academic outcomes for kids in
this country and extrapolate those outcomes against the changing
demographics in the United States, we are not going to like what we see
in the middle of the 21st century if we don't make these changes. One
would think, if anything, that we would be spending more money on kids
living in poverty, coming from disadvantaged backgrounds than we do on
kids coming from advantaged backgrounds. But we do the opposite in the
United States, and the Congress, for decades, has looked the other way.

I believe we need to close this loophole. It is called the
comparability loophole. We don't do that in this legislation, but at
least the requirement where we move to reporting based on actual rather
than average expenditures is an important step in the right direction.

I yield the floor.

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