Public Education Reinvestment, Reinvention, and Responsibility Act

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to offer a new plan for Federal education spending to refocus our national education policy on helping states and local school districts raise academic achievement for all children, putting the priority for federal programs on performance instead of process, and on delivering results instead of developing rules.

In broad terms, the public Education Reinvestment, Reinvention, and Responsibility Act-better known as the "Three R´s"-calls on states and local districts to enter into a new compact with the federal government to work together to strengthen standards and improve educational opportunities, particularly for America´s poorest children. It would provide states and local educators with significantly more federal funding and significantly more flexibility in targeting aid to meet their specific needs. In exchange, it would demand real accountability, and for the first time consequences on schools that continually fail to show progress.

From my visits with parents, teachers, and principals over this past year, it is clear that we as a nation still share a common love for the common school, for its egalitarian mission, for its democratizing force, and for its unmatched role in helping generation after generation rise and shine. Unfortunately, we are asking schools to do more than they were designed to do, to compensate for disengaged parents and divided communities-for instructing teenage girls on how to raise their children while they try to raise the GPAs, to nourishing the bodies and psyches of grade-schoolers who often begin the day without breakfast or affection, to policing school halls for guns and narcotics.

At the same that schools are trying to cope with these new and complex stresses and strains, we are demanding that they teach more than that have ever taught before in our history. The reality is that in this high-tech, highly-competitive era, there are fewer low-skilled industrial jobs available, and a premium on knowledge and critical thinking, meaning it is no longer enough to provide some kids with just a rudimentary understanding of the basics. Employers and parents alike with better teachers, stronger standards, and higher test scores for all students, as well as state-of the art technology and the Information Age skills to match.

It is a tribute to the many dedicated men and women who are responsible for teaching our children that the bulk of our schools are as good as they are, in light of these intensifying pressures. But the strain is nevertheless building, and with it serious doubts about our public schools and their capability to meet these challenges. Just this fall the Democratic Leadership Council, of which I am proud to serve as chairman, released a national survey showing that two-thirds of the American people believe our public schools are in crisis.

I was surprised by that high percentage, which may be skewed somewhat by lingering shock over the growing incidents of school shootings. But we must admit that our public schools are not working for a lot of our kids. And, as a result, I believe that our public education system is facing an enormously consequential test, which will go a long way toward determining our future strength as a nation. It is a test of our time whether we can reform and in some ways reinvent our public education system to meet these new demands, without compromising the old ideals that have sustained the common school for generations.

For us to pass this test, we have to first recognize that there are serious problems with the performance of many public schools, and that public confidence in public education will continue to erode if we do not acknowledge and address those problems soon. While student achievement is up, we must realize the alarming achievement gap that separates minorities from Whites and low-income students from their more affluent counterparts. According to the state-by-state reading scores of fourth-graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the achievement gap between African American and White students grew in 16 states between 1992 and 1998. The gap between Hispanic and White students grew in nine states over the same period of time. We must also question whether our schools are adequately preparing our youth to enter the global economy when, in international students, U.S. 12th graders score below the international average in mathematics and science compared to 21 other nations.

We also have to acknowledge that we have not done a very good job in recent years in providing every child with a well-qualified teacher, a critical component to higher student achievement. We are failing to attract enough good minds in the teaching profession-one survey of college students in 21 different fields of study found that education majors ranked 17th in their performance on the SAT. We are failing to adequately train enough of these aspiring teachers at education schools-in Massachusetts last year, to cite one particularly egregious example, 59 percent of the 1,800 candidates who took the state´s first-ever certification exam flunked a literacy test that the state board of education chairman rated as at "about the eighth-grade level." And, we are failing to deliver teachers to the classroom who truly know their subject matter-our national survey found that one-fourth of all secondary school teachers did not major in the core area of instruction, and that in the school districts with the highest concentration of minorities, students have less than a 50 percent chance of getting a math or science teacher who has a license or a degree in their field.

With that said, we also have to acknowledge that while more money alone wont solve our problems, we cannot honesty expect to reinvent our schools without it either. The reality is that there is a tremendous need for additional investment in our public schools, not just in urban areas but in every kind of community. Thousands of crumbling and overcrowded schools to modernize. Two million new teachers to hire and train. Billions in spiraling special education costs to meet.

We also have to recognize the basic math of trying to raise standards at a time of profound social turbulence that we will need to expend new sums to reach and teach children who in the past we never asked to excel, and who in the present will have to overcome enormous hurdles to do so. I believe any child can learn-any child-and that has been proven over and over again in the best schools in both my home state of Connecticut and in many of America´s cities.

There are in fact plenty of positives to highlight in public education today, which is something else that we have to acknowledge, yet too often don´t. I have made a concerted effort over the last few years to visit a broad range of schools and programs in Connecticut, and I can tell you that there is much happening in our public schools that we can be heartened by, proud of, and learn from.

There is the John Barry Elementary School in Meriden, Connecticut, which was singled out by the U.S. Department of Education as a Distinguished title I School for its work with disadvantaged students. Like many urban schools, Barry has to contend with a high-poverty, high-mobility student population, but through Reading Recovery and other interventions, Barry has had real success improving the reading skills of many of its students.

There is the Side by Side Charter School in Norwalk, one of 17 charter schools in Connecticut, which has created an exemplary multiracial program in response to the challenge of Sheff v. O´Neill to diminish racial isolation. With the freedom that goes with its charter, Side by Side is experimenting with a different approach to classroom assignments, having students stay with teachers for two consecutive years to take advantage of the relationships that develop, and by all indications it is working quite well for those kids.

And there is the BEST program, which, building on previous efforts to raise teacher skills and salaries, is now targeting additional state aid, training, and mentoring support to help local districts nurture new teachers and prepare them to excel. In this regard Connecticut is far ahead of most of the country in adapting its teacher quality programs to meet today´s challenges-setting high performance standards both for teachers and those who train them, helping novices meet those standards, and holding the ones who don´t accountable. The result is that Connecticut´s blueprint is touted by some, including the National Commission on Teaching and America´s Future, as a national model for others to follow.

A number of other states, led by Texas and North Carolina, are moving in this same direction-refocusing their education systems not on process but on performance, not on prescriptive rules and regulations but on results. More and more of them are in fact adopting what might be called a "reinvest, reinvent, and responsibility" strategy, by (1) infusing new resources into their public education systems; (2) giving local districts more flexibility; and (3) demanding new measures and mechanisms of accountability, to increase the chances that these investments will yield the intended return, meaning improved academic achievement for all students.

This move to trade flexibility for accountability, and to focus on performance instead of process, is not the definitive answer to passing the test I outlined earlier, of adapting our public schools to the rapidly-changing environment around us. There are obviously other parts of the equation, none more important that parental involvement. Everything we know from research indicates that an engaged parent makes a crucial difference in student achievement, particularly in terms of reading, and we have to do more to get parents to play a more active role in their children´s learning. But when it comes to improving the delivery of public education, the reinvestment and reinvention approach is the best solution I have heard yet, and probably our best hope for extending the promise of equal opportunity into the new century.

In Congress, our opportunity now is with the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Today, nearly $15 billion in Federal aid flows through ESEA programs to states and local education authorities, and other educational entities annually. While this constitutes a minute fraction of all the money spent on public education each year, it is still a lot of money, and past experience shows that Federal money has a habit of influencing local behavior. If we can reformulate the way we distribute those additional dollars, and peg our national programs to performance instead of process, we can go a long way toward encouraging more states and local school districts to reinvest and reinvent public education, while taking more responsibility for its outcomes.

Unfortunately, Congress seems more interested in being an agent of recrimination. We spend most of our time positioning ourselves for partisan advantage rather than trying to fix serious problems. We reduce a complicated issue to a simplistic multiple choice test, forcing a false choice between more spending and programs, or block grants and vouchers. And, the answer we are left with is none of the above.

Mr. President, I am pleased to join my colleagues Senators BAYH, BREAUX, GRAHAM, KOHL, LANDRIEU, LINCOLN, and ROBB in introducing this ground breaking legislation that signifies that there is a better way, a third way to address education reform. It builds on the progress many states have already made through the standards movements. It calls for streamlining and consolidating the maze of programs under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act into five goal-oriented titles, each with more money and fewer strings attached, and all of them geared toward encouraging innovation, promoting what works, and ultimately raising academic achievement for all students.

We would concentrate our efforts on closing the achievement gap between the haves and have-nots, fostering English proficiency for immigrant children, improving the quality of teaching for all children, promoting choice and competition within the public system, and stimulating innovative and high performance educational initiatives. We would ask the states to set performance standards in each of these areas, and in exchange for the new funding and flexibility we provide, we would hold states accountable for delivering demonstrable results. We would reward success and, for the first time in the history of ESEA, punish chronic failure.

We agree with our Democratic colleagues that we need to invest more resources if we want to meet the new challenges of the new century, and prepare every student to succeed in the classroom. That is why we would boost ESEA funding by $35 billion over the next five years. But we also believe that the impact of this funding will be severely diluted if it is not better targeted to the worst-performing schools and if it is not coupled with a demand for results. That is why we not only increase Title I funding by 50 percent, but use a more targeted formula for distributing these new dollars to schools with the highest concentrations of poverty. And that is why we develop a new accountability system that strips federal funding from states that continually fail to meet their performance goals.

We also agree with our Republican colleagues that federal education programs are too numerous and too bureaucratic. That is why we eliminate dozens of federally microtargeted, micromanaged programs that are redundant or incidental to our core mission of raising academic achievement. But we also believe that we have a great national interest in promoting broad national educational goals, chief among them delivering on the promise of equal opportunity. It is not only foolish, however, but irresponsible to hand out federal dollars with no questions asked and no thought of national priorities. That is why we carve out separate titles in those areas that we think are critical to helping local districts elevate the performance of their schools.

The first would enhance our longstanding commitment to providing extra help to disadvantaged children through the Title I program, while better targeting $12 billion in aid-a 50 percent increase in funding-to schools with the highest concentrations of poor students. The second would combine various teacher training and professional development programs into a single teacher quality grant, increase funding by 100 percent to $1.6 billion annually, and challenge each state to pursue the kind of bold, performance-based reforms that my own state of Connecticut has undertaken with great success.

The third would reform the Federal bilingual education program and hopefully defuse the ongoing controversy surrounding it by making absolutely clear that our national mission is to help immigrant children learn and master English, as well as achieve high levels of achievement in all subjects. We must be willing to back this commitment with essential resources required to help ensure that all limited English proficient students are served.

Under our approach, funding for LEP programs would be more than doubled to $1 billion a year, and for the first time be distributed to states and local districts through a reliable formula, based on their LEP student population. As a result, school districts serving large LEP and high poverty student populations would be guaranteed federal funding, and would not be penalized because of their inability to hire savvy proposal writers for competitive grants.

The fourth would respond to the public demands for greater choice within the public school framework, by providing additional resources for charter school start-ups and new incentives for expanding local, intradistrict choice programs. And the fifth would radically restructure the remaining ESEA and ensure that funds are much better targeted while giving local districts greater flexibility in addressing specific needs. We consolidate more than 20 different programs into a single High Performance Initiatives title, with a focus on supporting bold new ideas, expanding access to summer school and after school programs, improving school safety, and building technological literacy. We increase overall funding by more than $200 million, and distribute this aid through a formula that targets more resources to the highest poverty areas.

The boldest change we are proposing is to create a new accountability title. As of today, we have plenty of rules and requirements on inputs, on how funding is to be allocated and who must be served, but little if any attention to outcomes, on how schools ultimately perform in educating children. This bill would reverse that imbalance by linking Federal funding to the progress states and local districts make in raising academic achievement. It would call on state and local leaders to set specific performance standards and adopt rigorous assessments for measuring how each district is faring in meeting those goals. In turn, states that exceed those goals would be rewarded with additional funds, and those that fail repeatedly to show progress would be penalized. In other words, for the first time, there would be consequences for poor performance.

In discussing how exactly to impose those consequences, we have run into understandable concerns about whether you can penalize failing schools without also penalizing children. The truth is that we are punishing many children right now, especially the most vulnerable of them, by forcing them to attend chronically troubled schools that are accountable to no one, a situation that is just not acceptable anymore. This bill minimizes the potential negative impact of these consequences on students. It provides the states with three years to set their performance-based goals and put in place a monitoring system for gauging how local districts are progressing, and also provides additional resources for states to help school districts identify and improve low-performing schools. If after those three years a state is still failing to meet its goals, the state would be penalized by cutting its administrative funding by 50 percent. Only after four years of under performance would dollars targeted for the classroom be put in jeopardy. At that point, protecting kids by continuing to subsidize bad schools becomes more like punishing them.

I must address another concern that may be raised that this is a block grant in sheep´s clothing. There are substantial differences between a straight block-grant approach and this streamlined structure. First, in most block-grant proposals the accountability mechanisms are vague, weak and often non-existent, which is one reason why I have opposed them in the Senate. Our bill would have tangible consequences, pegged not just to raising test scores in the more affluent suburban areas, but to closing the troubling achievement gap between students in poor, largely minority districts and their better-off peers.

This leads me to another way this bill is different. Unlike many block-grant supporters, I strongly believe that we have a great national interest and a national obligation to promote specific educational goals, chief among them delivering on the promise of equal opportunity, and that is reflected in our legislation. While it makes sense to streamline and eliminate as many strings as possible on Federal aid, to spur innovation and also to maximize the bang for our Federal buck, it does not make sense to hand over those Federal bucks with no questions asked, and thus eliminate the Federal role in setting national priorities. That is why, in the restructuring we have developed, we have maintained separate titles for disadvantaged students, limited English proficient students, teacher quality, public school choice, and high quality education initiatives, all of which, I would argue, are critical to raising academic achievement and promoting equal opportunity. And that is why of the more than $6 billion increase in annual funding I am proposing, $4 billion would be devoted to title I and those students most in need of our help.

It is a fairly common-sense strategy-reinvest in our public schools, reinvent the way we administer them, and restore a sense of responsibility to the children we are supposed to be serving. Hence the title of our bill: the Public Education Reinvention, Reinvestment, and Responsibility Act, or the Three R´s for short. Our approach is humble enough to recognize there are no easy answers to turning around low-performing schools, to lifting teaching standards, to closing the debilitating achievement gap, and that most of those answers won´t be found here in Washington anyway. But it is ambitious enough to try to harness our unique ability to set the national agenda and recast the federal government as an active catalyst for success instead of a passive enabler of failure.