Why new Senate ed bill falls short of LBJ’s “War on Poverty” standard
Improvements must be made for underserved students
President Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, center left, leave the home in Inez, Ky., of Tom Fletcher, a father of eight who told Johnson he’d been out of work for nearly two years, in this April 24, 1964, file photo. The president visited the Appalachian area in Eastern Kentucky to see conditions firsthand and announce his War on Poverty from the Fletcher porch. AP Photo/FILE
Last week, when the U.S. Senate passed the Every Child Achieves Act, a bipartisan group of legislators took a step toward ending the nearly decade-long delay in reauthorizing the nation’s seminal education law.
As the House and Senate begin committee work to merge their two separate bills into one, we should reflect on the origin of this law and keep sight of its original purpose.
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA, was signed into law in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson as part of his “War on Poverty.” At its heart, ESEA was a powerful move by the federal government to promote greater economic and social opportunity for all Americans through a more equitable education system.
Although the new Senate bill has some admirable qualities, it does not go far enough to live up to the original intent of this critical law, and improvements must be made on behalf of historically underserved students.
The Senate bill does the right thing by continuing to require that states test students in math and English Language Arts annually in grades 3-8 and once in high school, and that the results of those assessments be disaggregated by race, income, and special needs, and be made public. This transparency will continue to shine a harsh but important light on the pervasive gaps in opportunity and achievement that have historically been masked by aggregate reporting requirements. When coupled with accountability, this transparency has contributed to significant improvements in achievement, particularly for traditionally underserved populations. It cannot be cast aside.
In its necessary attempt to fix the overreliance on test scores and the unrealistic definitions and requirements of annual school progress, the bill goes too far. It removes the requirement to intervene in persistently low-performing schools that exist in the current version of ESEA (also known as NCLB or No Child Left Behind). The new bill leaves it to the states to define what constitutes “struggling schools” and to decide what – if any – intervention is necessary, a shift that civil rights groups rightly fear will mean there is no mechanism to “meaningfully protect and advance civil rights and achievement for the most vulnerable students.” The combination of these changes will allow states to hide achievement gaps, and ignore rather than invest in the schools that need the most support, essentially losing the law’s focus on equity.
No Child Left Behind relies too much on standardized tests for accountability and, therefore, should consider additional measures of school quality as proposed in the Senate’s bill. Educators 4 Excellence, the organization I help to lead, is a national movement of over 17,000 teachers who believe that in order to protect our most disadvantaged students, we need appropriate checks and balances in place through multi-measure accountability systems. For example, high school accountability metrics could include the proportion of Why new Senate ed bill falls short of LBJ’s “War on Poverty” standard - The Hechinger Report: