National teachers unions are split over a major K-12 education reform bill about to make its way through the Senate education committee. The split was revealed Saturday when the president of the National Education Association, Lily Eskelsen Garcia, told the Washington Post the bill would not give students something better in the classroom.
“We keep asking ourselves, ‘Does this move the needle for kids? Will a child see something better in his or her classroom?’,” Garcia said. “And this bill in the Senate doesn’t do it. We’re not at ‘better’ yet.”
The National Education Association is the largest individual labor union in the country, with almost 3 million members in 2014. The American Federation of Teachers is roughly half the size of the NEA, with almost 1.6 million members.
Randi Weingarten, the president of AFT, expressed modest support for the education reform bill when committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Ranking Member Patty Murray, D-Wash., released their bipartisan draft bill. “Their framework restores [The Elementary and Secondary Education Act]’s original intent of mitigating poverty and addressing education equity,” Weingarten gave as a reason for AFT’s support, among other reasons. But she added that “We will continue to push for amendments and changes that improve the system for our members and the students they serve in every step of the process.”
Part of the NEA’s opposition to the reform bill stemmed from inequities in funding between poor and affluent school districts, which the NEA said the bill does not do enough to solve. However, data show funding inequities are already highly reduced through federal funding.
In only 5 states do affluent school districts receive more combined local, state, and federal funding than high-poverty school districts, according to a Washington Post analysis of government data. Without federal funding, 24 states would spend more educational funding on affluent districts than on high-poverty districts.
Nationwide, the poorest school districts get only slightly less funding than affluent ones, a gap of under 2 percent. That difference may be attributed to a higher cost of living in affluent areas. Without federal funding, the nationwide gap between affluent districts and high-poverty districts is 15.6 percent.
The education reform bill is also opposed by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. The LCCHR supports many provisions of the draft bill but hopes to see other improvements made. “Otherwise, we may be unable to support the bill,” the LCCHR wrote in a letter for Alexander and Murray. The LCCHR is a coalition of national organizations, including Democrats for Education Reform, the NAACP, the National PTA, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Teach for America, among others.
On the other end of the ideological spectrum, the reform bill drew criticism from the conservative Heritage Foundation. Lindsey Burke, an education fellow for Heritage, said the bill does not go far enough to limit federal education powers, according to the Washington Post.
Despite these notable groups in opposition, many others have expressed support for the draft bill, including Third Way, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and the Council of Chief State School Offices, among others. Education scholars with the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute also told the Washington Examiner the bill was not ideal, but was an improvement on the status quo.
