Every Child Achieves Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. COONS. Mr. President, as the Senate this week considers the first major reform bill for our Nation's public schools in over a decade, I rise to talk about how we can ensure that every one of our country's children goes to a great school no matter his or her ZIP Code or background. Our Nation has long struggled to fulfill our fundamental promise of equal opportunity since our Nation's founding. It is a struggle that, despite many efforts, continues today.

Fifty years ago, as America fought to break down racial barriers in our Nation's classrooms, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act into law. This civil rights act recognized that without actively investing Federal resources in educating America's underserved children, their dreams would remain tragically deferred.

Since then, our country has continued to struggle with this fundamental civil rights challenge. And five decades after Johnson's landmark law and 14 years after President Bush revamped it with the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act, we still haven't found a way to ensure that as a nation, we hold every school to the high standards our children deserve.

This week marks the latest effort in this long struggle. The Senate's reform bill, titled the ``Every Child Achieves Act,'' makes important strides to improve what went wrong in 2001's No Child Left Behind. I would like to start by commending Senator Patty Murray and Senator Lamar Alexander for accomplishing what has eluded the Senate for so many years--a truly bipartisan compromise that deals with some critical but often divisive issues at the heart of America's public schools. They have worked tirelessly on this bill because they understand the urgency of our national education crisis.

In the wake of No Child Left Behind's Federal micromanagement of schools, this bill heeds an important lesson: Communities need to have some flexibility and some space to innovate and find their own solutions to their education problems. But I would urge my colleagues that as we work together to fix many of the law's weaknesses, we not lose sight of some of No Child Left Behind's important accomplishments.

For all its many problems, it exposed uncomfortable realities in America's classrooms and empowered policymakers with real data that simply did not exist before. Most importantly, it refused to lower our Nation's expectations of any school and demanded that every child in America gets the education he or she deserves.

In our drive to decrease the law's rigidity and address its many other challenges, we must maintain those high standards and continue to hold States and school districts accountable. Unfortunately, if it passed today, the Every Child Achieves Act would turn back the clock to a time when local control too often meant national indifference. It would risk letting too many of our children fall through the cracks.

I, myself, have seen how this indifference can hurt America's students. For 20 years, I was actively involved with the national ``I Have a Dream'' Foundation, which works to send some of our country's most at-risk students to college. I had the opportunity to visit schools all over the United States, in some of our most stressed and challenged neighborhoods and some of our most struggling and difficult schools. When I met with students during those visits and asked them about their vision for their own future, while many wanted to become teachers, doctors or scientists, too many others did not believe those kinds of careers could ever be within their grasp.

This, to me, illustrated the twin tragedies of our public education system; the fact that for many students with big dreams, their schools will not give them the chance to realize them, while for too many others, dreams long dead in their families and communities had taught them that daring to dream at all was futile.

These students had fallen victim to what President George W. Bush so accurately described as the ``soft bigotry of low expectations.'' They had internalized the failings of the system around them to mean they were not worth investing in, so they might as well just give up from the beginning.

There are two ways I believe we can and should improve the Every Child Achieves Act to change that message, to raise the expectations we communicate to kids from the day they are born to the day they enter the classroom, to the day they graduate.

The first way is to pass amendments that strengthen Federal accountability provisions and shine a brighter spotlight on the small fraction of our schools that fail our children. Simply put, we cannot allow ourselves to lower our expectations for any of America's schools.

I know for many of my colleagues and for teachers and students around the country, the very word ``accountability'' in the context of education is associated with high-stakes testing and unfunded mandates, but it doesn't have to mean either of those things. Accountability means holding every school and every child to the same high standards because our public schools must work for every student no matter where they are, where they come from or how they learn. Accountability means not allowing schools to maintain the status quo when they fail to graduate large segments of their students. Accountability means refusing to lower our expectation even when the path forward seems hard.

We have already seen what accountability can accomplish for our children. Over the past decade, all students, but particularly disadvantaged students, have graduated at higher and higher rates and are performing in math and reading better than ever before. The national high school graduation rate is currently 81 percent, its highest level on record. Since 2003, the reading gap between Black and White fourth graders has closed by 16 percentage points, and over the same period Hispanic eighth graders have closed the gap in math by 24 percentage points.

Federal accountability is a critical part of ensuring we invest in all American students as if they were our own children. I urge my colleagues to support Senator Murphy's amendment, which I am proud to join and cosponsor. This amendment would strengthen accountability in this bill by requiring States to identify low-performing schools and tailor interventions to help them improve their performance. It also ensures that schools set high goals for--and pay attention to--all students, including students with disabilities, low-income students, English language learners, Latino and African-American students.

The second amendment I wish to address takes on another piece of increasing expectations of urging every one of our children to dream. That amendment is based on my bipartisan bill called the American Dream Accounts Act with Senator Rubio, and it would send the important message to low-income students that a college education can be within their grasp.

For too long, college has been out of reach for the vast majority of poor Americans, but unlike in past decades, economic success today is defined by college access. With the new global economy, Americans with just a high school diploma earn literally $1 million less over their working lives compared to those who go to college. Yet too many of our students who need it most are not given the tools, the resources, and the information to complete a college education.

As the administration has pointed out, just about 1 out of 10 children from low-income families will complete a college degree by the time they are 24--just 1 out of 10. The American Dream Accounts Act is designed to address and break down many of the barriers to college access that our most at-risk students face in seeking higher education. They encourage partnerships between schools, colleges, nonprofits, and businesses to develop secure, Web-based individual student accounts that contain information about each student's academic preparedness, financial literacy, connects them to high-impact mentoring, and is tied to an individual college savings account.

Instead of having each of these different resources available separately through separate silos, an American dream account connects them across existing separated programs and across existing education efforts at the State and Federal level. By connecting across these different silos, it deploys a powerful new tool and resource for students, parents, teachers, and mentors.

Many of the kids I worked with over many years at the ``I Have a Dream'' Foundation have grown up in schools, communities, and families where almost no one around them had the opportunity for a college education. These kids took that to mean college just wasn't for them, that it shouldn't be a part of their plan for their future.

As part of that organization, it was our job to change that perception, and I saw time and again how sending the message that college was a possibility from elementary school on had a powerful and compounding positive impact on these students' ideas of whom they could be and what they could achieve. It demonstrated that exciting and engaging not just young students but their parents, teachers, and an array of mentors has a cumulative, powerful, positive impact.

The American dream accounts would expand on this idea and use modern social networking technology to bring together existing programs and deliver ideas that will work for more and more of our kids. The good news is that by utilizing existing Department of Education funds, this legislation would come at no additional cost to taxpayers.

I urge my colleagues to support my amendment with Senator Rubio. It is amendment No. 2127, and it would authorize a pilot program to begin making the American dream accounts a reality.

We have an opportunity right now to build on the bill that Senators Murray and Alexander wrote to reform our public schools in a way that communicates to every child in every public school that they deserve a high-quality education, the kind of education that tells them not only that they should have dreams but that those dreams are within their grasp.

Mr. President, 55 years after U.S. marshals escorted first grader Ruby Bridges to school, the nature of and need for Federal intervention in public education has surely changed. While schools are no longer closed to certain races by law, too many students are dropping out of school too early or just not receiving an education that prepares them for college and future success.

So while educational inequality is no longer a story of deliberate, legalized racism in need of Federal intervention, it is, unfortunately, still a persistent and tragic national reality that afflicts classrooms from coast to coast.

We have made significant progress due in part to a bipartisan national commitment to raising the bar for all of America's children. We cannot allow ourselves to lower it once again.

I look forward to continuing this important debate and working with my colleagues to make sure this bill strikes the right balance between Federal oversight and local flexibility. We must work together to make sure this bill moves us closer toward the goal President Johnson reached for when he first signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act into law.

UNANIMOUS CONSENT REQUEST--EXECUTIVE CALENDAR

Mr. President, I now ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to executive session to consider the following nominations: Calendar No. 27, Calendar No. 28, Calendar No. 29, Calendar No. 30, and Calendar No. 31, and that the Senate proceed to a vote without intervening action or debate on the nominations; that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate; that no further motions be in order to the nominations; that any related statements be printed in the Record; that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action and the Senate then resume legislative action.

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Mr. COONS. Mr. President, I ask my colleague from Arkansas, through the Chair, first, if we cannot receive consent to take up these nominations which were made over 15 months ago as a group. I wish to briefly describe one of the truly exceptional candidates. If I might also, I think it is important for all of us in the Chamber to recognize that the Court of Federal Claims, while the actual number of cases considered may have decreased, faces a steadily increasing number of complex cases which are subject to statutory case management deadlines that drive the workload of the court and have roughly doubled in recent years from 68 back in 2005 to 113 last year and likely double that this year. So the actual number of cases may be declining, but their complexity and their workload, because of the need for them to be resolved in a certain period of time, have steadily increased, and I will simply suggest to my colleague from Arkansas that looking more broadly at the workload would suggest some of these nominees are worthy of consideration and confirmation.

I will briefly reference one of the five pending nominees, Jeri Somers, who has spent a decade at the DOJ civil division as a trial attorney but recently retired, having served in the U.S. Air Force Reserves as a lieutenant colonel, having spent two decades as a judge advocate and a military judge in the U.S. Air Force. She is a patriot, a veteran, a highly qualified attorney, and I will simply inquire of my colleague, through the Chair, whether any of the five nominees might be subject for consideration for confirmation today.

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Mr. COONS. In conclusion, we have a range of highly qualified nominees. Armando Bonilla would be the first Hispanic judge to hold a seat and has been with the Department of Justice. Thomas Halkowski, a third pending nominee, is a respected partner at Fish & Richardson in Wilmington, one of the preeminent IP law firms in the Nation, and has a wealth of experience at a variety of different Federal courts. I think all three of the nominees I referenced today will make excellent additions. While my colleague and I view the caseload differently, I think the President has nominated able and capable nominees and the court needs and deserves to not have to rely on senior status judges to meet its constitutional and statutory obligations.

So, with that, I will yield the floor, although I will not yield on the issue.

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