Every Child Achieves Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, I rise to address an amendment I am proposing to the bill, the Every Child Achieves Act. I am not going to ask to call up the amendment at this time, but I certainly would like to do so at a later point in the day. I hope this amendment will be part of any effort to wrap-up debate on this bill because it addresses an important component that is being left out of discussion on the Every Child Achieves Act.

The Every Child Achieves Act is the authorization act, but it leaves out the vision for school policy. This is a bipartisan bill. It is a bill that would give a lot more flexibility to our States, and it has been an important effort to address many shortcomings in the former act, the No Child Left Behind Act, that in fact left a lot of children behind. In my discussions with educators throughout the State of Oregon, with parents, administrators, and teachers, they found a great number of difficulties and problems with an act that was undermining the success of our public schools, leaving a huge number of children behind, and focusing on what these educators referred to as ``the bubble''--that is, those children who are close enough to the testing line to get them over the top, while decreasing attention paid to those children who could already meet the testing line or those they think were not able to get to that line. That is not a holistic, comprehensive education system addressing the needs of all our children. So I am delighted to see this reform on the floor of the Senate. The focus on assisting every child in achieving is appropriate.

But we cannot achieve a world-class education system that responds to a world knowledge economy, preparing our children to be fully successful members of that world knowledge economy, if we do not provide the resources necessary for our schools to thrive. It strikes me as a real failure of our legislative process that a generation after I went through elementary and secondary education, we are a far richer nation, but our schools have far fewer resources.

My children have been attending public schools in the same blue-collar school district I grew up in. I have a firsthand view of the difference between what the school provided when I was there and what has been provided while my children are there. The short conclusion is that our classrooms are more crowded and our schools are unable to provide the same range of options that benefited my generation.

How is it that we are a much richer nation, but we are undervaluing and underfunding our elementary and secondary education system in this Nation? Well, we can tie that back to a lot that has transpired, including a huge growth in inequality in our Nation. But here is the key point: While we sit here on the floor debating better education policy, shouldn't we also be recognizing explicitly this huge failure to provide basic resources to the elementary and secondary education system?

The funding cuts that are currently anticipated under the sequester would bring Federal investments and programs under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to their lowest levels since fiscal year 2002.

Let me repeat that: the lowest level since fiscal year 2002. Of the lowest achieving 5 percent of schools that receive funds under part A of title I of such act, about two-thirds of students are not meeting their grade-level standards. It is certainly a more difficult task for teachers to enable students to meet those standards when our classrooms are more crowded.

The proposed appropriations act cuts funding for part A of title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 by $850 million as compared to the President's budget and the Democratic funding alternative.

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Mr. President, research shows that high-quality early education is critical to the educational development of every child. There, too, we are underfunding the effort. The proposed appropriations act provides no funding for preschool development grants and a cut of $750 million as compared to the President's budget and the Democratic alternative.

Now, this is happening--this underfunding of education--within the construct known as the sequester. The sequester was partially alleviated 2 years ago by a budget deal known as Ryan-Murray. That Ryan-Murray agreement led to saying that according to the sequester principle defense spending and nondefense spending would be treated equally. If one is capped, the other is capped. If one is raised, the other is raised.

That fundamental understanding led to an improvement over the last 2 years. But that improvement is gone. So at the very moment, we are talking about better education policy, and we are talking about worse education funding. That is simply wrong--wrong for our children, wrong for the next generation and the success of America. So let's embrace that second half of the conversation and through my amendment--amendment No. 2203--call for an intense negotiation to occur, essentially to restore appropriate funding on the nondefense programs.

This is a rational counterpart to the debate over the bill that we have before us right now. It is certainly important for America to recognize that you cannot, on the one hand, call for better education policy and on the other hand devastate the funding for early childhood education and devastate the funding for K-12 education and feel like you have done something to make American education work better, because you have not.

If you have underfunded education, you have undervalued our children, and you have undermined the future success of our Nation. I hope that amendment No. 2203, which calls upon the House and Senate to come together and address this failure of funding, will be a significant part of our conversation as we work to wrap up debate on the Every Child Achieves Act.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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