Chairman, House Education & the Workforce Committee

February 10, 2015

Representative John Kline

US House of Representatives

Washington, DC 20515

Dear Chairman Kline,

On behalf of AASA, The School Superintendents Association, which represents the federal education policy views of 10,000 school administrators across the United States, I write to provide comments on your legislative proposal to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the School Success Act (HR 5). Thank you for your continued leadership on ESEA reauthorization, and for moving so quickly and aggressively to prioritize complete reauthorization in the new Congress. While AASA is unable to endorse HR5 at this time, I am writing to express our support for ESEA reauthorization and our interest in working with you and your committee to improve the legislation as it moves forward.

AASA opposed No Child Left Behind since the legislation was introduced, citing the law’s federal overreach, punitive measures, assumption that federal government knows best what local schools need, and unworkable mandates and requirements. More than a decade of NCLB implementation has demonstrated the problems AASA predicted, and has highlighted how current law relies on ineffective, costly requirements rather than supporting and trusting public school leaders to improve student outcomes. Congress must address the shortcomings of current law. AASA recognizes your efforts and the efforts of the House Education and the Workforce Committee to reauthorize ESEA. AASA strongly believes that reauthorization is crucial to providing the nation’s schools with relief from current law, which is both broken and lacking in the flexibility states and local school districts need to support student learning and achievement.

As ESEA reauthorization efforts enter their eighth year, AASA’s position remains the same: We strongly support and prefer complete reauthorization of ESEA as the best and most meaningful way to provide relief from the broken and outdated constructs of current law to all students and all schools. We remain opposed to the continued use of, existence of, and reliance on ESEA waivers in place of complete reauthorization. We urge you to work with the members of your committee, on both sides of the aisle to advance a bipartisan bill that can pass through the House and to the President’s desk, ultimately delivering a much needed modernization of ESEA to the nation’s schools and the students they serve.

As a starting point for discussions to reauthorize ESEA, this bill is a strong step in the right direction because it restoresa more proper balance between federal, state and local government in public education. HR5 takes the pendulum of federal overreach and prescription 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 necessaryto successfully adhere to their educational missions.

HR5 makes significant improvements in the federal role in accountability, standards and assessments 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
Maintain school improvement for low performing schools, under state direction
Require that assessments measure proficiency and growth models
Remove caps on alternate assessments, allowing the IEP team to ensure that children are assessed in a meaningful, fair and accurate manner
Maintain supplement/supplant language
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
Provide option for 5-, 6-, and 7-year graduation rates.
Reauthorization of the Rural Education Achievement Program (REAP)

For all that HR5 gets ‘right’, there are elements of the bill that give AASA pause, and we welcome the opportunity to work with you and your committee to make these improvements:

Portability: The inclusion of portability within your discussion draft deeply concerns AASA. We are opposed to providing states with an option to reallocate how Title I dollars are administered to districts in a manner that does not consider concentrations of student poverty across and within districts. It is critical that our superintendents retain the right to administer Title I programs and services to the students and schools they deem appropriate, and we are convinced that Title I portability would hinder the efficiency of district Title I programs, place a substantial unfunded administrative burden on districts, and undermine the ability of school personnel to target federal resources to the students who need academic assistance the most.
Maintenance of Effort:AASA opposes the elimination of state and local maintenance of effort. AASA supports current statute on maintenance of effort language as a way to ensure continuity of state and local efforts. We support maintaining a lever to maintain state and local spending. The current MOE provisions provide the greatest protection to those low-wealth districts that generally educate more low-income children. Low-wealth districts generally get the greatest share of their funding from the state and if states are allowed to cut funding, the most vulnerable districts and the most vulnerable children will be hurt disproportionately. Eliminating maintenance of effort language would exacerbate fiscal pressures at the local level as LEAs would have to cover state reductions with local dollars.While we recognize that the Chairman sees this as aligned with returning autonomy to state and local education agencies, we are concerned that removing maintenance of effort provisions eliminates a way for the statute to ensure that the limited—but critical—federal Title I investment is not weakened by deep cuts at the state/local level. Further, current maintenance of effort requirements provide state and local education agencies with a certain level of budget planning stability, knowing that any cuts to state and local dollars will not exceed 10 percent.
Funding: The funding of ESEA programs is something that is ultimately determined by Congressional appropriators. That said, there are two elements of the discussion draft related to funding that give AASA pause. The block-grant/consolidation can be bitter sweet: on one hand, block granting represents increased flexibility for state and local education agencies to leverage/use federal dollars in the most effective way. On the other hand, block granting significant critical programs (like professional development and school climate/environment) has historically represented a thinly veiled attempt to further cut/defund investment, as the flexibility inherent in block-grant funding makes it much harder to prove effectiveness or impact on a large scale. We urge caution in the use of block grants. Second, we are concerned that the funding caps included in your discussion draft represent a deep cut to ESEA support. HR5 sets and freezes the aggregate ESEA authorization level at $23.3 billion, below pre-sequester levels and locking in cuts $1.6 billion below the FY2010 levels. We fully recognize the need for fiscal responsibility, but are troubled by the assumption that investment in education is the element of government spending to trim, and that reducing federal support for educating our nation’s students is the best way to stabilize and grow our nation’s economy. It is unrealistic to expect all students to achieve without providing districts the necessary funding to do this challenging work. The very act of a cutting ESEA funding through authorizing statute is in direct opposition to the title of your discussion draft: student success.
Education Technology: We are deeply concerned that the 2015 legislative proposal to reauthorize ESEA—the primary K12 federal education legislation—completely lacks a program committed to education technology. AASA is concerned by the disconnect between a federal focus on requiring schools to prepare students but then failing to recognize the importance of continued support for education technology and the related professional development. AASA urges the committee to incorporate a dedicated education technology program into its bill. A standalone education technology program ensures that the federal government prioritizes support for digital learning and education technology for all students, regardless of where they live.

AASA welcomes the opportunity to continue to work with you, your staff and the House Education and the Workforce committee on ESEA reauthorization. This reauthorization continues to be a top legislative priority for our members, the nation’s public school superintendents. We look forward to further improvements to this discussion draft, and are hopeful that the version that moves out of committee and to the full House is something we can endorse. Thank you for this proposal, a good starting point for the important work of reauthorizing ESEA.

Sincerely,

Noelle Ellerson

Associate Executive Director, Policy & Advocacy

CC: Ranking Member Bobby Scott