Bipartisan ECAA Doesn’t Go Far Enough to Guarantee Equitable, Quality Education for All

Late last week, the once unthinkable happened. The Senate voted 81-17 to pass a bipartisan Every Child Achieves Act (ECAA), its proposed reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law due for a major overhaul since 2007. While its passage is a refreshing, albeit surprising, show of bipartisanship, the bill does not go far enough to guarantee equal or quality education for all. It significantly rolls back the federal role in accountability and provides no strong guardrails to ensure PreK-12 students, particularly those most disadvantaged and shortchanged, obtain the education they deserve. Here’s our take on the big issues--from accountability to educator quality and early learning:

Accountability:

One of the biggest issues in the ECAA debate revolved around the federal government’s role in holding schools accountable that fail to provide a quality education for all students. As passed, ECAA would roll back the strong federal accountability mandates put in place by NCLB, leaving almost all decisions about how to identify low-performing schools--as well as whether and how to intervene in them--to states.

Under ECAA, students’ results on annual state standardized tests would retain a role in state accountability systems, with the addition of high school graduation rates and English-language proficiency. And ECAA did preserve the reporting of school performance data by different student subgroups. Otherwise, states could determine which measures to use to determine school performance, what schools’ goals should be on these measures, and if and when to intervene in low-performing schools that fail to meet these goals. A group of Democrats, led by Chris Murphy, introduced an amendment that would have required states to also establish goals for different subgroups of students, and to factor these subgroups’ performance into their system for identifying low-performing schools. Additionally, it would have required states to identify certain schools as low-performing: the bottom five percent of schools on the state’s overall performance measure and high schools graduating less than two-thirds of their students.

However, even this seemingly low bar for ensuring that failing schools are addressed in return for federal funds proved to still be too much for the Senate, particularly its  Republicans: of the 43 votes in favor, only  one came from across the aisle.

Educator Quality:

Given ECAA’s rollback on accountability, it comes as no surprise that the bill fails to require states to adopt, implement, or improve new teacher evaluation systems--they can simply choose to do so if they wish. Nearly 40 states have adopted new more rigorous teacher evaluation systems as a result of federal waivers from NCLB and the Race to the Top grant competition. Data from these new systems help states and districts make important in-service decisions on how best to develop, support, leverage, and sustain teachers’ impact at scale.  Should this bill become law, the waivers initially requiring new teacher evaluation systems will become ineffectual--and without this political cover, states could significantly scale back or abandon their teacher evaluation and improvement efforts.

ECAA also eliminates the Highly Qualified Teacher (HQT) provision, which required states to ensure that teachers hold a bachelor’s degree, full state certification, and knowledge of the subject they teach and that such teachers were equitably distributed between high- and low-poverty schools. Instead, the bill allows states to determine how best to define educator effectiveness and use funds to ensure effective educators are equitably distributed. The elimination of HQT is a strong step forward in that it encourages states to define educator quality based on outputs rather than inputs and strive to increase the number of teachers who are effective in improving student achievement. And it is unlikely states will upend their current teacher licensure and certification requirements. However, without the requirement that states implement and improve their teacher evaluation systems, the means by which states have to achieve the worthy goal of equitable teacher distribution could be moot.

While ECAA could lead to states backtracking on teacher evaluation as a lever for ensuring teacher improvement and equity, the bill includes a few amendments from senators who gave nod to educator quality. For instance, Sen. Booker (D-NJ) and Sen. Bennett (D-CO) introduced an amendment to address educators’ working conditions. The amendment would allow states to use Title II funds to regularly assess educator supports and working conditions, publicly report on their results, and develop a plan to address them. And an amendment from Sen. Carper (D-DE) would require a description of how states will use federal funds to improve preparation programs and supports for principals and other school leaders. Though these amendments are promising, there is still no guarantee states will actually follow through.

School Funding/Resource Equity:

As with NCLB, states would need to maintain their own funding at a certain level in order to access federal Title I funds, a provision known as “maintenance of effort.” But under ECAA, the Title I formula would change to place a greater emphasis on poverty and less on population--the idea being that states with poor rural districts get shortchanged by the old formula. And the method for calculating states’ allotment would be streamlined from four formulas to one as a result of an amendment introduced by Sen. Burr (R-NC). However, this change would not take effect until Congress allocates $17 billion for Title I (the current program has been steadily funded at $14.5 billion for the past three years), an event unlikely to happen under this Congress.

Still, Burr’s amendment is cause for concern. While its goal is to reduce the current formula’s bias towards wealthier states with large populations, the amendment focuses on what states ought to receive based on their current levels of spending rather than what kids in poverty actually need. And though it intends to reduce allocations to states with already high levels of per-pupil spending, a recent analysis suggests high-spending states could receive more under the new formula. This is because the new formula prioritizes states’ total number of students living in poverty and altogether ignores concentrations of poverty within a state. Which is to say, states with high concentrations of students living in poverty could actually lose.

While Burr’s amendment seeks to streamline and improve the current complex Title I formula, it fails to ensure the most disadvantaged students receive the funding and resources they need to succeed.

School Funding Portability:

The last few weeks of ESEA reauthorization arguments were ground zero for a battle over a long-running conservative education priority, known as "Title I portability." It's a relatively straightforward concept: under a portability system, federal Title I dollars are essentially assigned to individual students from low-income families.

That may sound simple to the point of banality (shouldn't the federal government assign dollars to the individual students who need them?), but it would dramatically change how the federal government distributes funding to support low-income children's educations. At present, the federal formula for allocating Title I dollars is weighted to send more money to districts and schools with high concentrations of poverty. That is, wealthy districts with only a handful of low-income students get little or no Title I support from the federal government. As a result, most portability proposals would lead to large funding cuts for high-poverty districts.

As passed, ECAA does not include portability, as the amendment from Republican Sen. Tim Scott failed.

English Language Learners:

The Senate’s ECAA debate resulted in the passing of one amendment (loosely) related to dual language learners (DLLs):  Senator Brian Schatz’s (D-HI) amendment authorizing a study of Native American language immersion schools that will examine the impact of these programs on student outcomes. Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) filed an amendment to provide for a study of DLL language screening in federally funded early childhood education programs, but that ultimately, was never brought to the floor.

The ECAA maintains Title III as a separate program geared towards providing districts with funding specific to English Learners (ELs), but eliminates its main accountability provision. In other words, districts will no longer have to set Annual Measurable Achievement Objectives (AMAOs) to track the progress language learners make in acquiring English proficiency, attaining English proficiency and on meeting set performance targets on state assessments. The few EL accountability provisions that do exist in the bill are all under Title I. These changes are linked to the decreased accountability within the bill overall - an issue that has garnered significant attention from multiple civil rights groups.

Taken together the ECAA does little to ensure that states have either the capacity or incentive to support the varying needs of their diverse populations of language learners.

Early learning:

The Every Child Achieves Act could create more flexibility for states to use federal funding for early learning. With the passage of ECAA, Title I now explicitly states that funds can be used to support early education programs for eligible children, birth through pre-K. In Title II, funds can be used for teacher and principal professional development to improve instruction in the early grades. Title II funds can also be used to ease the transition between pre-K or Head Start programs and kindergarten by allowing educators in public schools and community providers to collaborate in joint professional learning. The bill also expands the federal charter school program to allow for early childhood programs.

In addition, parts of Senator Patty Murray’s (D-WA) Literacy Education for All, Results for the Nation (LEARN) Act are included in Title II. This new program would focus on improving literacy from birth through 12th grade, with one grant program for birth to K and one for K-12. However, state’s applications must include a plan to coordinate kindergarten through 5th grade teachers and literacy activities.

The coordination of funds for early learning was formalized for states through Senator Murray’s Early Learning Alignment and Improvement Grants (ELAIG). This program would allow states to coordinate existing federal funds for children birth to six-years-old. Although the grant facilitates the expansion of seats in birth to pre-K programs, the federal limitations in ELAIG allow each state to create their own definitions of high-quality programs, which means quality would continue to be highly variable. During the debate of the full Senate, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) proposed an amendment to Murray’s ELAIG that would ensure that states support early education programs that do not allow for the expulsion or suspension of participating children.

Modelled after the Strong Start for America’s Children Act of 2014, Senator Bob Casey’s (D-PA) amendment would have ensured universal pre-K for families earning 200% below the federal poverty line, cemented Early Head Start and child care partnerships, and helped to sustain funding for the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting program. This amendment would have been a good step forward for creating high-quality learning environments from birth to kindergarten entry, but did not pass.

What to Watch For:

Of course, just because the Senate’s version looks this way doesn’t mean that the reauthorization bill that ends up on Obama’s desk will...assuming a bill makes it there at all. For example, portability is a key Republican priority, but there’s virtually no Democratic support for it in either house, and the White House appears to see it as a veto trigger. As a result, the Senate’s passage of the ECAA is best understood as clearing a procedural hurdle that doesn’t fundamentally address the substantive differences of opinion in play.

Over the coming months, New America’s Education Policy Program will continue to weigh in on the biggest ESEA reauthorization issues as the House and Senate conference and try to produce a reconciled bill that will pass muster with both houses and avoid the President’s veto pen."