| Saying schools cannot be held responsible for student performance without adequate funding, House Democrats yesterday unveiled a comprehensive reform package that would increase accountability but also boost federal education spending by $110 billion over the next five years.
The Excellence and Accountability in Education Act is the fourth major bill introduced this session for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), following recent proposals from President Bush, Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., and Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, S.D. (ED, Jan. 24).
The various proposals differ on block grants and vouchers, among other things, but the chief sponsor of yesterday's bill, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., played up their similarities, estimating that about 75 percent of his legislation can be found in the Bush and Lieberman packages.
"There are more than enough common areas of agreement where we can come to terms and pass a bill that would hold forth the promise that all children, regardless of background, will have the opportunity to learn in school," Miller said.
Empowering Parents
Specifically, all three bills would punish chronically failing schools-that is, schools that show no improvement in student achievement on state-defined standards for three years in a row.
Under each proposal, those schools would lose a portion of their federal administrative funds, a small yet significant portion of the overall federal pot. Schools also would be obliged to issue to parents "report cards" that provide certain school statistics, such as the number of unqualified teachers.
"The most powerful thing is when parents see what is really happening in their schools," Miller said. "That empowers parents, and that's what accountability is all about."
The Miller bill would further mandate that state education agencies take at least one of the following actions with regard to districts in charge of schools identified as failing:
- Withhold funds;
- Reassign personnel;
- Remove failing schools from district jurisdiction;
- Appoint a receiver or trustee to administer the district in place of the superintendent and/or school board;
- Abolish or restructure the district; and/or
- Authorize an intradistrict or intrastate public school choice program.
The Bush bill, on the other hand, would allow parents of students attending failing schools to redirect an average of $1,500 of the schools' Title I funds toward private school tuition or tutoring.
Bush has often defended his controversial proposal by saying that any accountability re-forms will be ineffective without such a consequence. But supporters of both the Lieberman and Miller bills have attacked such a provision as an inexcusable drain on public education.
"Vouchers are non-negotiable," said Rep. Major Owens, D-N.Y., one of the 32 co-sponsors of the Miller bill.
No Block Grants
For all the talk of an emerging education consensus on Capitol Hill (ED, Jan. 23), however, differences among the bills may prove more significant than their similarities.
For one thing, Miller's bill would expand many of the policies and programs of the Clinton administration-including after-school learning centers, the e-rate program and the new school renovation initiative-instead of consolidating them into block grants, as Bush's and Lieberman's bills would.
"The more you do block grants, the less you are assured of serving [disadvantaged] populations," explained Rep. Dale Kildee, D-Mich., the bill's other major sponsor.
Unlike Bush's package, which Miller dubbed an "outline without a price tag at the mo-ment," the House bill was released with specific funding level proposals for several pro-grams:
- Doubling Title I funding to $17.2 billion by 2006;
- Boosting school renovation funding to $1.7 billion;
- Funding a program for the construction of 20,000 public schools, at $23 billion;
- Completing former President Clinton's class-size reduction program's goal of hiring 100,000 new teachers, but stipulating the funds be used only to hired qualified teachers, at a cost of $14 billion;
- Hiring 100,000 new school counselors, at a cost of $13 billion; and
- Doubling the federal investment in educational technology, at $1.7 billion.
"We can mesh with some of the proposals [from Bush and Lieberman, but] we need a real commitment for funding," Kildee said.
Further details will be available online at www.house.gov/georgemiller.
-Michael Cardman
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