By Josh Rosenblat
WASHINGTON — Progressive education and civil rights leaders reaffirmed their opposition to recent GOP-sponsored bills to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind act, citing educational equality as the most important aspect of any new law.
In a panel discussion Wednesday sponsored by the Shanker Institute, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten came out strongly against many of the provisions in Rep. John Kline’s Student Success Act. Last week, the House Education and Workforce Committee, chaired by the Minnesota Republican,, approved the reauthorization of the 2001 law.
The law has been up for reauthorization since 2007 and, in a broad sense, attempts to update the federal government’s funding and accountability programs for public K-12 education.
“What essentially the House passed is a bill that says, ‘You can keep the federal money, but you states get to decide where you’re going to put it.’ Not that it goes to the kids that need it most,” Weingarten said.
The issue opponents find in the bill deals with the “portability” provision that impacts the distribution of NCLB’s Title I funding. Weingarten said that the provision would directly harm school districts in low-income communities.
“We need a law that actually will help kids who are low-income, kids whose communities may not be able to afford all the resources they may need, a law that actually supplements, not supplants the kind of resources that our state and local [governments] obligate for children. That piece of [the Elementary and Secondary Education Act] must be sacrosanct. That’s part of the reason why many of us are really petrified about what the House passed,” she said.
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten championed educational
equality as the central issue of the debate about the reauthorization of federal education
legislation in a panel discussion Wednesday. (Screenshot: http://www.aft.org/)
Kline, though, claims his legislation does more to invest in low-income families with federal funds because some of the money that would have previously gone to schools would instead follow individual students regardless of what school they attend.
This provision, according to his office, “empowers parents with more school choice options by continuing support for magnet schools and expanding charter school opportunities, as well as allowing Title I funds to follow low-income children to the traditional public or charter school of the parent’s choice.”
This creates an educational equality issue because federal funds would be taken from schools in low-income communities when students have the option to leave and bring the funding behind them to more affluent school districts.
As president of the 1.6-million member teachers union, Weingarten is worried that traditional public school teachers would lose out on the resources they need to be successful.
Similarly, Judith Browne Dianis, a director of a multicultural civil rights group called Advancement Project, said that the expansion of funding for charter schools would continue the trend of school closings in disadvantaged communities. Rewriting the 2001 No Child Left Behind law must ensure that public education remains a “public good,” Dianis said at the panel.
It is the framing of education as a “public good” that is one of the main points of contention between Democratic and Republican lawmakers. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t an opportunity for the parties to come together on many of the issues affecting the civil rights aspects of national education legislation.
Wade Henderson, President and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said Senate GOP leaders, such as Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, have been more receptive to compromise than their peers in the House.
For example, after initially writing a draft of a reauthorization bill without Democratic input, Alexander invited ranking member of the HELP committee Sen. Patty Murray of Washington to discuss topics for a more bi-partisan bill.
“I remain hopeful that throughout this process of sausage making [the end result will be] a little more aligned to the totality of [equity] concerns we’ve talked about,” Henderson said at the panel.
