Senator Mitch McConnell

Majority Leader

U.S. Senate

Washington, D.C. 20510

Senator Harry Reid

Democratic Leader

U.S. Senate

Washington, D.C. 20510

Senator Lamar Alexander

Chairman, Senate HELP Committee

U.S. Senate

Washington, D.C. 20510

Senator Patty Murray

Ranking Member, Senate HELP Committee

U.S. Senate

Washington, D.C. 20510

Dear Senators,

On behalf of AASA, The School Superintendents Association, I write to express our support for the Every Child Achieves Act (ECAA) of 2015. AASA applauds your commitment to moving this bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), nearly eight years past due. This letter is drafted in response to the manager’s amendment, and AASA will continue to communicate our positions on amendments as appropriate.

As we wrote in a joint letter supporting ESEA reauthorization with 49 of our state associations in April: “The current ESEA expired more than 7 years ago, meaning that our nation’s K‐6 graders have spent every day of their K‐12 experience—to date—under an outdated and broken ESEA. Our students want and deserve more. Though Congress has been engaged in efforts to reauthorize ESEA for the past seven years, we cannot continue to ask our nation’s schools and the students they serve to live under the patch‐work approach offered by the administration’s waivers. Congress alone can and should address the shortcomings of current law and the waivers.” Your legislative proposal is a bold response to this call to action and a very strong step in the right direction.

This bill restores a more proper balance between federal, state and local government in public education. ECAA takes the pendulum of federal overreach and prescription rampant in current law and places it more squarely in the area of state and local expertise and autonomy. The bill recognizes the importance of empowering state and local leaders to use their professional knowledge and proximal location to make the decisions necessary to successfully adhere to their educational missions. It corrects flawed policy related to standards, accountability and assessments to ensure that all students are better positioned to learn and achieve.

ECAA makes significant improvements in the federal role in public education that AASA supports. These improvements include:

  • Maintain student disaggregation by subgroup
  • Eliminate the 100 percent proficiency mandate
  • Eliminate SES/Choice
  • Eliminate Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and Annual Measurable Objectives (AMO)
  • Return ownership of the accountability system to the state/local level
  • Use of multiple measures throughout the K‐12 spectrum
  • Maintain school improvement for low performing schools, under state direction
  • Maintain supplement/supplant language
  • Maintain education technology program
  • Reduce federal overreach into school improvement/turnaround strategies
  • Put states in charge of designing a teacher evaluation system
  • Eliminate requirements related to Highly Qualified Teacher provisions
  • Reauthorize of the Rural Education Achievement Program (REAP)
  • Does NOT include Title I portability or vouchers
  • Preserve Title I Maintenance of Effort
  • Preserve current comparability calculation
  • Does NOT include funding caps

We will send an additional letter in response to amendments as filed. Key amendments/AASA positions are described here:

  • Title I Portability/Vouchers: AASA strongly is opposed to Title I vouchers and portability. Public dollars should remain in public schools. Please note that any amendment related to vouchers or tuition tax credits will reverse our position of support, something that carries through to portability as well, both private and public. We cannot reiterate more strongly to follow the bipartisan lead of the HELP committee.
  • Expanded Accountability: AASA is opposed to any expansion of federal accountability. Much of the frustration with NCLB lies with the overly prescriptive nature of accountability. The very deliberate effort of clearing the field of this overreach should not be reversed before state and local education professionals have an opportunity to demonstrate what they can do for their schools and students with the bill’s current accountability provisions, which preserve the critical federal guardrails of data disaggregation and graduation rate calculation. The reality is that any effort to expand federal accountability metrics presumes that state and local educators are out to ‘get’—rather than to support and serve—our nation’s students.
  • Expanded Data Collection: AASA applauds the bill’s core focus on equity, and we welcome conversation about improving the ways state and local education agencies can work to identify and close gaps that exist within and between schools. That said, AASA is deeply concerned with—and opposed to—any amendment that would expand data collection beyond the indicators and items currently collected by the Office of Civil Rights and reporting requirements in the bill as passed out of committee.
  • Background Checks: AASA is opposed to an unfunded, prescriptive federal background check law for school employees when every state has a background check law in place and many states are updating their laws to strengthen them beyond what is proposed. While we support the inclusion of any provisions that requires one school district to disclose misconduct by a school employee with another school district, this amendment epitomizes inappropriate federal overreach and places huge administrative burdens on districts that are not likely to lead to safer school environments.
  • Increased Transparency for Charter Schools: AASA supportsamendments focused on increasing the transparency and accountability for charter schools. We believe that all entities receiving federal education dollars should be subject to the same reporting/accountability requirements, a position that is especially critical in a bill and climate that continue to support growth in the charter sector.
  • Community Schools: AASA supports the community schools model and amendments related to expanding the opportunity for LEAs to provide comprehensive services to needy students and families.
  • Student Data/Privacy: AASA supports policies that provide coherent and easy-to-understand guidance for parents and educators regarding FERPA, PPRA, and COPPA and their protections of the privacy and security of student data. AASA supportsefforts to update federal privacy statute and related regulations that update definitions to address the realities of the digital age, making it possible to protect data while ensuring appropriate use of student data for legitimate educational needs and reforms. AASA is opposed to efforts to reauthorize privacy statute in conjunction with ESEA. Student data/privacy is broader than K12. While the two policies need to coordinate, they must remain separate. AASA is opposed to the Student Privacy Protection Act (S 1341, Vitter) as both a stand-alone bill and an ESEA amendment.

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In closing, the nation’s public school superintendents are very appreciative of your efforts to reauthorize ESEA and the specifics of the proposal to be debated this week. We look forward to continuing to work with you and the Senate HELP committee as ESEA reauthorization remains a top legislative priority for our members, the nation’s public school superintendents.

Sincerely,

Noelle Ellerson

Associate Executive Director, Policy & Advocacy

CC: U.S. Senate