Students and Congress Are Back From Their Summer Breaks-Now What?

By Mary Kingston, Public Policy Manager, Coalition for Community Schools

Students across the country have returned to school, decked out in new outfits, backpacks and eager smiles, while Congress reconvenes on Capitol Hill this week after their August recess. Many of us who care about our nation’s students and are dissatisfied with our current federal education law, No Child Left Behind, are wondering whether Congress will get back to work on education to overhaul the law and improve learning conditions and opportunities for our students. Here is a quick rundown of what you need to know about federal education policy and funding for the coming months that will affect our nation’s 50 million students.

Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (No Child Left Behind): Prospects do not look good for a reauthorization this Congress, despite movement on bills in the House and Senate. This summer, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce approved a bill and then the full House approved it. The vote was completely partisan however, with all Democrats voting against it. The Coalition has many concerns about the bill, including its blatant lack of assurances for comprehensive supports for students and adequate accountability for schools, districts and states to ensure an equitable education for all students. Specifically, we are troubled by the absence of language addressing school climate and students’ social, emotional and physical health; the allowance for federal funds currently allocated for vulnerable student populations such as ELLs and Native American students, to be reallocated for other means; and the absence of any accountability for states to address achievement gaps among subgroups of students. Read more about Chairman Kline’s (R-MN) bill here.

Meanwhile, the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee passed its own partisan bill. The Coalition strongly supports much of the language in this bill, particularly since many of the Coalition’s recommendations were adopted into the language (read a summary of the bill’s alignment with the Coalition’s principles here). Chairman Harkin (D-IA) is pushing to get this bill on the Senate floor this fall for a vote, but the chances look increasingly unlikely due to a lack of urgency from the Administration and Congressional leadership, and competing priorities including the conflict in Syria and the countdown to October 1 when Congress must reach a deal on the federal budget.

The Coalition is still actively meeting with key Congressional offices to ensure continued support of our core bills. This month we are bringing several of our national partners with us to meet with staff of Senators Reid (D-NV), Rubio (R-FL), Franken (D-MN), Alexander (R-TN), Whitehouse (D-RI), Enzi (R-WY), Bennet (D-CO), Hagan (D-NC) and Casey (D-PA) to promote the DIPLOMA Act specifically, which will be introduced shortly by Sen. Sanders (I-VT). Read more about the DIPLOMA Act and our other key bills here.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Waivers: In the absence of Congressional action to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, President Obama in September 2011 declared that the Department of Education would issue states temporary waivers from certain provisions of NCLB in return for new responsibilities including revised teacher and principal evaluation systems and a differentiated accountability system for schools.

The main relief schools would get is from the expectation that all students would be proficient by 2014. Since President Obama made this announcement, the Department of Education has issued waivers to 41 states, the District of Columbia, and eight districts in California. Thirty-five of those waivers were approved in the first two rounds, and their flexibility will expire at the end of the 2013-14 school year. Those states will be the first to apply for renewal of their waivers, for which the Department has just released guidance (see the summary of the guidance and initial reactions here).

Though these waivers release states from the impractical goal of 100% student proficiency and frees up the 20% set-aside formerly required for supplemental education services, they also prove a disincentive for urgent reauthorization of a broken law, and create instability and confusion for educators looking for a permanent solution. For these reasons, the Coalition urges Congress and the Administration to push for a reauthorization as soon as possible.

Federal Education Funding: Fiscal Year 2014 begins on October 1, the deadline for when Congress needs to agree on a budget. They will likely continue their recent pattern which is to enact a continuing resolution, or a temporary budget that simply maintains the same funding from the previous fiscal year until they can agree on a new budget. As of now, the Senate Appropriations Committee has approved its spending for education earlier this year, which included a huge proposed increase for early childhood spending with an approval of a $1.6 billion increase for Head Start plus $750 million in new dollars to assist states in improving the quality of their pre-kindergarten programs.

The panel also approved increases in other areas that community school advocates should be pleased about, including: $125 million more each for Title I and IDEA state grants, an increase to after-school programs for an allocation of $1.2 billion, and $100 million for Promise Neighborhood grants, which exceeds the amount of $60 million the program received in Fiscal Year 2013.

Meanwhile, the House appropriations panel indefinitely postponed consideration of FY 2014 education spending, most likely because the House appears likely to propose huge budget cuts that many would oppose. Congress must also agree on whether sequestration (automatic spending cuts to several federal programs, including education) will stay in place or if they can agree to replace it with a more thoughtful, measured approach to reduce the federal deficit. (Currently, federal education spending has been cut 5% in Fiscal Year 2013 due to sequestration). Here’s a sampling from the Committee for Education Funding of how certain programs and their recipients have been affected under sequestration:

· Head Start was cut by $401 million which is currently cutting services to 70,000 low-income children
· Title I was cut $727 million, affecting almost 1.2 million educationally disadvantaged children
· IDEA K-12 funding for special education was cut by $580 million, affecting over 350,000 students with disabilities

It is no doubt a turbulent and uncertain time in Congress, and it is difficult to know when and how reauthorization of ESEA will occur. The Coalition will continue to keep you informed so that you can advocate for policies supportive of community schools and help us make the case at the federal level.

Coalition Principles Gain Traction in Senate ESEA Bill, But Key Tensions around Federal Role Remain

By Mary Kingston, Public Policy Manager, Coalition for Community Schools

Clear Progress for the Coalition’s Principles

Last week, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee marked up Chairman Harkin’s (D-IA) version of a 1,150-page Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) bill (summary of the bill available here).  Now six years overdue, lawmakers acknowledge that states are crying out for reauthorization and have been suffering under the punitive measures of the current form of the bill, No Child Left Behind.  And they see the Administration’s waivers as only a temporary (and to some lawmakers, unconstitutional) fix.

Because it was not a bipartisan effort to start with, Chairman Harkin’s bill predictably passed out of committee on a party-line vote (with all Democrats voting for it, and all Republicans opposing). A couple dozen amendments were offered, most of which fell on a party-line vote as well. Chairman Harkin is hopeful that the bill will make it to the Senate floor as early as this summer, where the committee’s Ranking Member Lamar Alexander (R-TN) believes members can have a more robust debate and come to consensus on a bipartisan bill that they were not able to do last week in committee.

Though the fate of the bill is unclear, what is clear is that the Coalition has made great progress in further embedding some of our key policy principles into the bill, making it a stronger bill for community schools and for children, school staff, families and communities. Prior to the markup, Coalition staff submitted to the Chairman line-by-line recommendations to his 900-page 2011 draft bill to strengthen language reflecting our core principles, and the Chairman’s staff told us they found our recommendations extremely helpful, and included twelve or so of them in their bill. The increase in the number of our key terms that appear in the bill as compared to Sen. Harkin’s 2011 bill is also promising, including:

• Family: 268 times vs. 236 times in 2011
• Community-156 times vs. 92 times in 2011
• Partnership-60 times vs. 42 times in 2011
• Coordination-65 times vs. 49 times in 2011

The bill explicitly references community schools in two places: in Title I, where it lists the “community school model” as an effective strategy for parent and family engagement (pg. 199), and in Title III, again listed as an effective strategy for family engagement as it applies specifically in this section (3115) to Native American and Alaska Native children. In this section, an allowable activity for these funds is: “Implementing community school models and related activities, such as opening school facilities to community-based organizations, establishing parent institutes, operating or supporting co-location with family literacy programs, and establishing co-location with public assistance programs” (pg. 467). The Coalition is pleased that community schools were referenced in these two places, particularly in Title I language that applies to the largest category of students in ESEA, the 11.5 million children that receive the roughly $14.5 billion allocated through Title I. These references in the bill reflect our principle to strengthen family and youth engagement.

We were also happy that the bill maintained a fifth turnaround model in Title I from the Chairman’s 2011 draft bill called the whole school reform model that would allow the community schools model as a permissible intervention strategy for the 5% of lowest-performing schools in each state as referenced under the School Improvement Grants program. This inclusion upholds our principle of ensuring that community schools is integrated as an allowable school intervention model.

The Chairman also addressed our principle calling for a comprehensive accountability framework that goes beyond test scores. As a result, the bill requires states and districts to report on:  school climate data, including discipline and school violence rates; data on pregnant and parenting students in the state; the number of districts in the state that implement positive behavioral interventions and supports; the number of districts in the state that implement school-based mental health programs; and the types of programs schools offer, including the number of AP classes and full-day kindergarten. We see this additional required data as an important step forward not only for transparency purposes but for ensuring more schools are providing the comprehensive supports and opportunities that community schools envision.

These measures represent tangible progress, and since Congress tends to start with the prior version of proposed bills in future debates we believe we have a set a good foundation for when the serious legislating begins.

A Stalemate on the Proper Federal Role in Education

Despite the gains we as a community made in the bill, the bill itself is extremely unlikely to become law. Since Chairman Harkin’s bill got no support from Republicans in the committee, it’s difficult to see many Republicans supporting the bill-even with some Republican amendments-on the Senate floor.

Further, the House education committee Chairman, John Kline (R-MN), just released his partisan bill to reauthorize ESEA, and it is so at odds with Harkin’s bill that it would be nearly impossible for the House and Senate to conference these two bills as they’re written in order to get a bill to the President’s desk. (Kline’s bill, for example, removes the separate categories of funding in Title III reserved for English Language Learners and immigrant students, and merges that into Title I funds as one large block grant). See a summary of Kline’s bill here, and watch the committee markup of the bill on June 19 at 10 am here.

Among members of the Senate HELP committee, it was clear throughout the two-day markup that Democrats and Republicans have a vastly different view on what role the federal government should play, reflecting the current ideologies of the parties and the difficulty for Congress to reach consensus on other issues such as immigration reform or gun control.

Chairman Harkin requires in his bill that states set performance targets for student achievement and produce an equity score card in addition to a more comprehensive accountability framework as noted above.  By his reasoning, these provision will ensure that all students receive an equitable and robust education and that the rights of the most vulnerable students are protected to reflect the original intent of ESEA when it passed in 1965.

Ranking Member Alexander, however, sees these new requirements as a federal overreach to make the federal government in effect a “national school board” that is imposing mandates that if anything should be left to states or districts to decide. Alexander is also upset that Harkin’s bill would uphold the Administration’s waivers that come with many requirements that states must implement, including teacher and principal evaluations that factor in student achievement.

The most contentious argument highlighting the two parties’ difference in opinion occurred when Senators Bennet (D-CO) and Alexander were debating the best way to distribute Title I funds to ensure they go to the kids who most need them. Sen. Alexander offered an amendment that would strike provisions to uphold comparability, which requires that school districts provide services to higher-poverty, Title I schools, from state and local funds, that are at least comparable to services in lower-poverty, non-Title I schools. Instead, Alexander proposed to allow Title I funds to go directly to eligible students in the form of a check that these students could then take with them to any public school they choose. Sen. Bennet decried this strategy as abandoning the law’s original intent to protect the educational rights of these students, remarking that if this amendment were adopted the bill should be renamed Title I, “Increasing the Achievement Gap” to be honest about what it does. Though Alexander’s amendment failed on a party-line vote, nearly all Republicans supported him, once again revealing stark differences in the two parties’ ideologies.

Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), siding with Alexander in his desire to see a significantly scaled-back federal role, repeatedly asked a question that revealed his frustration with federal accountability: “Do we care more about advancing student achievement or about who’s in charge?” This question also revealed how both parties feel that their respective stance on the federal role is the best way to advance student achievement, highlighting fundamental disagreement that will require more robust debate and compromise than a committee markup allows.

The Top 5 Reasons To Advocate for Community Schools on Education Day

By Sabina Simon, Intern at the Institute for Educational Leadership 

While advocating can be immediately rewarding if your Representative or Senator takes your thoughts into account and immediately applies them to a bill or signs off on your legislation, it is more likely that you won’t see the immediate effects of your advocacy.

But don’t get discouraged! It is still important to meet with your member of Congress. That meeting can leave him or her with a lasting impression which you can build on with time.

To continue to inspire you to come out on Education Day, we have put together a list of 5 major reasons to advocate for the Community Schools Movement!

1. Build Awareness!

One of the many reasons to advocate is to spread the word about what community schools are capable of and to give others information that can help them begin to consider them as a viable option.  Many Representatives and Senators are so busy on Capitol Hill or in your state capitol that they don’t often get the chance to go out in the field and see the great things you’re all doing in community schools. On Education Day, you have the opportunity to bring your insights as a community schools practitioner to them so they can learn first-hand the wonderful things you’re doing, and see the positive results your work has on outcomes for kids. Your bill might not get passed and your member of Congress might not support your cause immediately, but the idea has been brought to the table, ready to be expanded and built upon so that eventually it can be implemented.

2. Community Schools Are Effective

Remember, you are advocating because you believe in what the community school movement is capable of! For example:

- Hartford Community Schools (HCS) brought their Connecticut Mastery Test scores (CMT) in reading up from far below average to better than the citywide average within 2 years of implementation!

- City Connects in Boston, Massachusetts found that the community school strategy not only brought up the average reading scores for ELL students and others in reading and math, but also that it helped students build strong and lasting work habits and academic effort in elementary grades.

-  After two years of being a community school, Bailey Elementary School in Providence, Rhode Island met AYP in math and reading for the first time in four years. Between 2007 and 2009, third graders in reading went from 27% to 41%; Fourth graders went from 28% to 59%; and, fifth graders went from 12% to 39%!

Remember your primary objective: BELIEVE IN YOUR CAUSE! Even if members of Congress do not support you immediately, these facts and figures will be difficult to ignore over the next few years.   

3. Personalize Your Message So That You Can Get What You ACTUALLY Want

Advocating in person is a great way to make your voice heard over the din of education policymakers who have other agendas. When you come to the Hill or visit your state capitol representing a school of real students, you have the opportunity to tell your personal story with your own language that cannot be misinterpreted or skewed. Members of Congress identify strongly with personal contact, and they understand the importance of their constituency, especially when you go and meet with them personally.

4. Begin Learning the Dynamics of Policy and Rubbing Elbows

Advocacy is great for networking of all kinds, whether it be with state legislators, Representatives, Senators, staff members or even other members of the Community Schools movement! Going to the Hill or your state capitol and advocating is a great way to see and begin to understand firsthand the dynamics of the Hill, legislation, and our Congress. Networking and building this knowledge base is essential for working in education policy, and if you want your voice to be heard, there is no better time to start than now!  

5. Education Day: A Chance to Show Our Solidarity!

The great thing about advocating with us on Education Day is that you WON’T BE ALONE! We will give you preparation, training, and all of the information you need to be able to get an appointment, make your message clear and compelling, and follow up with your member of Congress or state representative after the meeting. Being able to see everyone who is involved all together at one time will help solidify that you are doing the right thing.

So, what are you waiting for? Sign up and advocate with us today! Here is the link for more information on Education day: http://www.communityschools.org/aboutschools/educationday2013.aspx and Advocating: http://www.communityschools.org/aboutschools/advocacy_2013.aspx