Letter to Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education - Reissuing Call to Protect Educational Equity, Civil Rights

Letter

November 10, 2014

The Honorable Arne Duncan
Secretary of Education
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue SW
Washington, DC 20202

Dear Secretary Duncan:

In the coming months, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) will begin considering state applications to renew waivers under ESEA flexibility. While we are confident that you share our commitment to improving educational outcomes for all students and closing the achievement gap, we remain concerned that information on the achievement and graduation rates of students of color, students with disabilities, low-income students, and English learners are not factoring into accountability decisions in a meaningful or actionable way under ESEA flexibility. Specifically, we request that all states be required to include clear and meaningful articulation of the role of student academic performance, including the performance and graduation rates of all student subgroups, in school identification and intervention decisions, as previously articulated in paragraph 10 of ED's initial waiver renewal guidance released in August 2013.

While there are certainly provisions of No Child Left Behind that must be improved, the most important legacy of the law remains the requirement that every school be held accountable for the academic performance of all its students, both in aggregate and by student subgroup, and that every school release disaggregated data on student outcomes, including for students of color, low-income students, students with disabilities, and English learners. Since the announcement of ESEA flexibility in 2011, we have collectively written to you on a number of occasions to express our deep concerns with the lack of subgroup accountability for states in designing their accountability systems during the ESEA flexibility process. Regrettably, since that time, upon implementation of state systems, our concerns on this issue have been confirmed with data. Initial data reveal an alarming trend in States: the achievement of individual subgroups of students, especially in non-priority and non-focus schools, is often masked in the state-developed differentiated accountability systems approved by the Department through the ESEA flexibility process.

Emerging data indicate that states are not including subgroup performance outside of priority and focus schools in their accountability systems in a meaningful way. A report released recently by the Education Trust tracked data from three states and found that the performance of individual subgroups of students are not being adequately captured in the accountability systems, resulting in schools receiving top ratings regardless of the low performance of some students within these schools, particularly students of color and low-income students. Put quite simply, when annual measurable objectives for student performance by subgroup play no part in identification of schools for reward or high-achieving status, vulnerable students are being left behind. What's worse, in two states where the Education Trust looked at schools' improvement from year to year, academic achievement for students of color actually declined in a significant minority of schools that received top ratings. In addition, when looking at individual student growth over time, students of color in top-rated schools were much less likely to be on-track than their white peers. Another analysis by the Alliance for Excellent Education found 16 states and territories with ESEA flexibility that had little or no subgroup accountability for high school graduation rates, including states approved for flexibility with graduation rate accountability in possible violation of current regulation on calculation of graduation rates.

States now have been operating under ESEA flexibility for the last several years and possess existing data on the fidelity of school identification systems and whether schools with lagging academic achievement for vulnerable students, including but not limited to priority and focus schools, have improved during that time and how well individual subgroups of students within those schools have fared over time. This data, including student growth, subgroup performance and graduation rates, and the improvement of priority and focus schools should be made publically available and used in the ESEA flexibility renewal process to improve state systems, and ultimately to determine which states are approved for continued ESEA flexibility.

In addition, we share your commitment to equity in our education system and applaud you for the steps you have taken to ensure states work to distribute resources equitably among their schools. In the waiver renewal process, states should continue to work to ensure that resources are distributed equitably among all schools in the state. States should also make information about teacher and resource equity publicly available so that parents, teachers, school leaders, and other stakeholders can easily access this critical information.

Finally, we urge you to make the ESEA flexibility renewal process as transparent as possible. Given the complexity of state accountability systems and the alterations that can take place over time, as well as the fact that renewals may grant States ESEA flexibility for up to four additional years, we request that you make all State requests for renewals, state accountability plans and modifications to those plans, and responses from your Department on these state plans, available on the Department's website.

As we have stated to you in the past, the Federal role in education has been one to promote equity and protect the civil rights of children. Parents, regardless of their background, have a right to know, every year, if their children are learning at grade level and if they are not, that something is being done about it. We urge you to utilize the renewals process to ensure we do not retreat to a time when the achievement of our most underserved students and communities did not count and was masked. Our students deserve better.

Sincerely,

GEORGE MILLER
Senior Democratic Member,
Committee on Education & the Workforce

JUDY CHU
Chair,
Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus

CHAKA FATTAH
Co-chair, Education and Labor Taskforce
Congressional Black Caucus

GREGORIO KILILI CAMACHO SABLAN
Chair, Education Taskforce
Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus

MARCIA L. FUDGE
Chair, Congressional Black Caucus

RUBÉN HINOJOSA
Chair, Congressional Hispanic Caucus

DANNY K. DAVIS
Co-chair, Education and Labor Taskforce
Congressional Black Caucus

RAÚL M. GRIJALVA
Chair, Education and Labor Taskforce
Congressional Hispanic Caucus

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