Elementary and Secondary Education Act Reauthorization

BIPARTISAN STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLES

Every child — regardless of race, income, ethnicity, or disability — deserves a quality public education. The nation’s states are charged with the constitutional responsibility for providing public schools that help all children achieve their full potential. States also have a strong history of innovation, leading education reforms and responding to the unique needs of their schools and communities.

States have long supported the worthy goals of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act — to close the achievement gap, provide quality teachers, and increase accountability at all levels. NCLB, however, has failed — not in its noble promise, but in its inability to fulfill the promise. The current law focuses too much on measuring schools and not enough on improving them. NCLB produces unintended consequences that jeopardize successful state and local reforms already underway and creates new obstacles that undermine schools and students.

The President and Congress have the opportunity to reach the goals of NCLB by committing in the law's reauthorization to a new state-federal partnership that recognizes that student progress and school reform start with states and local communities. The best way for the federal government to make education a national priority is to support states in their on-going school improvement efforts by investing in the core building blocks of school improvement:

• A quality classroom environment that provides quality teachers, smaller classes, and modern schools with technology and up-to-date books and materials.
• Accurate measures of student achievement that provide schools with a better gauge of student performance by relying on broader measures, including graduation, attendance and dropout rates; classroom grades; and student progress, in addition to test scores.
• Opportunities for increased parent and community involvement that recognize parents' crucial role in student success and help parents participate in their children's education.
• Improved accountability that focuses on results rather than the process, provides support and incentives instead of mandates and punishments; and targets sufficient resources to the students and schools in most need.
• Standards that support — not undermine — state and local reform efforts to set high expectations, demonstrate clear results, establish comprehensive, rigorous curricula; and increase opportunity.

If you are a state legislator, and you support the bipartisan statement of principles, we invite you to show your support by filling out the form below and clicking "submit" to add your signature to the statement.

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