Every Child Achieves Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I thank my great friends Senator Booker and Senator Bennet for their passionate and moving remarks about the task ahead of us, to make sure that as we reauthorize No Child Left Behind, as we reorder our priorities, that we remember that this law is an education reform law, but it has to be a civil rights law as well. It has to make sure that in the best traditions of this country, we are requiring that every single child gets a quality education.

I want to talk about my amendment that is cosponsored by Senators Booker and Warren, Coons, Durbin, Mikulski, and others. I want to start by telling a story that is, unfortunately, not unfamiliar in probably every corner of this country. I am going to talk about a 16-year-old African-American boy, an eighth grader in an urban middle school in Connecticut. I will call him James for today's purposes.

James had a habit of walking out of class in the middle of instruction. He walked out of class and he would wander the hallways until he would eventually run into a teacher, an administrator, a school resource officer, who would haul him down to the principal's office. His grandmother, who was his primary care giver, would get a phone call. She would come pick him up and then the suspension proceedings would start.

James would get suspended for a few days. He would come back, and the whole cycle would play out again, such that by the middle of his first semester of his eighth grade year, he had been out of school--suspended--more days than he had been in school. One day he was so frustrated when an assistant principal stopped him, once again, as he was wandering the halls that he had an argument. He was a big kid for his age, but he was a total teddy bear. He never hurt anybody. But that day when he talked back to that assistant principal, they called the police and James got arrested. Now he has a criminal record. But the reason he was walking out of class day after day, week after week, was pretty simple: James was an eighth grader who could not read--he could not read. He could barely read. So he had this toxic mixture of frustration and embarrassment every day that he sat in class such that it had no relevance to him and he walked out.

The worst of it is that the school knew he could not read because he had an identified learning disability. It was not a mystery. Yet James got promoted year after year because it was easier to pass him along, easier to push him out, as the suspensions and eventual arrest were on their way to doing, rather than actually give James an education. Now, I only know this story because my wife, who was then a legal aid lawyer in Connecticut, represented James. His grandmother, who just wanted James to get a decent education, would call my wife in tears every time James was found in the hallway and suspended again and again.

My wife actually got the services James needed. But James' story is not unique. Most kids do not have legal aid lawyers fighting on their behalf. Most kids in James' situation have the deck stacked against them: disabled kids who are hard to teach, poor kids who are warehoused in failing schools, Black and Hispanic kids struggling to overcome generations of discrimination.

They do not all have lawyers. They have us in the Congress. This place, Washington, DC, has had its finest moments when it stands up for educational civil rights: the idea that a child in this country should get a quality education no matter their race or their address or their disability. Whether we like it or not, there are these political pressures in America that cause minority kids and disabled kids and poor kids to get an education that is not equal to that of their White or nondisabled or more affluent peers.

The facts are just very stubborn. I can't say them any better than Senator Bennet did earlier today. Today, half of African-American and Latino fourth grade students score below the basic level of reading that we expect of our students. Just one out of every seven African-American eighth grade students scores at a basic proficiency level in math. Nationally, 70 percent of students who attend high school with low graduation rates come from low-income families. These statistics, they represent a stain on the conscience of our Nation.

If this body wants to stay true to its history of standing up for educational civil rights, then we have to make a stand this week to make sure this Every Child Achieves Act ensures that minority and poor and disabled kids get a fair shot at a good education.

Now, right now this bill does not meet this test. That is why the Nation's leading civil rights organizations, from the NAACP to La Raza, to the Urban League oppose this bill in its current form. It is why they have joined together with business groups who want to make sure our educational system stays competitive for everyone, to propose a fairly simple solution to a problem that is also fairly simple.

So this bill requires that schools continue to assess student performance while getting rid of those annual high-stakes tests that were unquestionably bad for schools and for students. No Child Left Behind was a bad bill for my State and for the Nation. So I am glad Senators Murray and Alexander have come together to create something better for our kids.

The bill requires that States track results by what we call subgroups: minority students, disabled students, poor students, and non-English-speaking students.

But the problem is that when the schools are failing or when minority or disabled students are falling way behind their peers, the bill doesn't require or even ask States or school districts to do anything to fix it--nothing. As a civil rights matter, that is unacceptable.

No Child Left Behind said a lot on this issue, and most of it wasn't helpful or productive. NCLB made the measurement of schools and subgroups a test and only a test. NCLB prescribed in a detailed way what schools had to do to turn around student outcomes, and NCLB punished schools that didn't turn around those outcomes quickly enough.

We have learned a lot from that backwards approach, from this ``Washington knows best'' attitude. That is why the amendment we are offering today takes a very different approach to accountability for vulnerable kids. Under our amendment, States are required to identify the bottom 5 percent of performing schools according to their measurement of performance; they have to identify the dropout factories--the high schools where fewer than two-thirds of the students are graduating; and then they have to identify, again according to their own measurement, schools where subgroups of students--low-income students, students of color, students with disabilities, English learners--aren't meeting their own set of criteria.

This amendment ensures that schools are identified based on a measurement that is set by the State, not by Washington, and it has to include multiple measures, not just test scores alone. Let me say that again. The measurement is determined by the State, and it cannot be based on test scores alone.

Then the amendment says that once you have identified those schools or those student groups who are in need of improvement according to your own measurements, then the State needs to come up with a plan to improve outcomes. Period. Stop. Identify your achievement gaps according to your own comprehensive measurements and come up with a plan to fix the gaps. There is no federally dictated measurement, no federally set intervention, no Federal penalty if you don't succeed. Just identify your problems and come up with a plan to make the problems better. The accountability will then happen naturally, as students and parents and community members have input into that plan and the ability to watch to see if it is working--local solutions, local oversight, local accountability.

In 2006, as a candidate for Congress, I excoriated No Child Left Behind wherever I went. I come from a family of teachers, and I married a former teacher. Now I have two kids, one in the public school system and one on his way there. And I watched firsthand as NCLB failed teachers, parents, and students.

But about a month or so after I was sworn in to the House of Representatives in 2007, I received a visit from the Children's Defense Fund. They had heard how vocal I was in my criticism of the law, and they just wanted me to know that not every State was like Connecticut. They told me stories of places where prior to NCLB kids with disabilities were sent for half a day of ``vocational training'' with the janitor. Nothing was expected of those kids, and more often than not those kids lived up to the low expectations that were set for them.

So maybe the only redeeming quality of No Child Left Behind was that it did expose these inexcusable gaps in performance between disabled and non-disabled kids. It forced States to talk about why Black students year after year were 30 percent behind their White peer students in achievement tests. It caused embarrassment for school systems with schools where the majority of kids got so little out of school that they dropped out before graduation. And it put pressure on all of us to do better.

This is an education bill, but it is not a worthwhile bill unless it is also a civil rights bill. Every single child, no matter their race or their geography, their income or their disability, deserves a first-rate education.

I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this vital amendment that continues our march away from the stringent, inflexible requirements of No Child Left Behind, while ensuring that all of our students receive the support they need to be successful.

I yield the floor.

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, arguably the only good thing that the existing education law did was expose these unconscionable gaps in this country between the performance of minority kids and nonminority kids, between disabled kids and nondisabled kids.

Frankly, this body is at its best when it says that, no matter your rachttp://thomas.loc.gove, geography, disability or income, you deserve access to a quality education. If we can't guarantee that, then the question is this: What good is a Federal education law in the first place?

So this amendment learns from the mistakes of No Child Left Behind, and it simply says two things. States have to identify when they have these unjustifiable yawning gaps between the performance of disabled kids or minority kids and the rest of the school, and then they have to come up with a plan through a community conversation as to how to fix that--period, stop. Identify your problem, your achievements.

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Mr. MURPHY. All this amendment says is that just simply on a State by State basis, identify your achievement gap and then come up with a plan to fix it--no Federal intervention, no Federal prescription of how you fix the problem.

It is a big, big problem in this country that has a very simple solution in this amendment, and it deserves our support.

I yield back.

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