One of the nation’s top civil rights organizations is fighting efforts by the nation’s top teachers unions to prevent any significant accountability measures from being included in a major federal education funding bill.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition group, sent a letter to the Senate last week saying it could not support the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act because the current version lacks any significant testing system for teachers and schools.
“We do not support the bill in its current form because, without addressing these issues, it will not fulfill its function as a civil rights law,” the conference said in a letter dated June 18. The first item on its list was “accountability.”
“States must be required to identify schools where all students or groups of students are not meeting goals and to intervene in ways that raise achievement for students not meeting state standards,” it said.
The main groups fighting the accountability are the nation’s two leading teachers unions, the three million-member National Education Association and the 1.6 million-member American Federation of Teachers. Both unions are members of the conference.
The dispute reflects a low-key but determined fight between the two camps. Wade Henderson, president of the conference, says the version of the legislation authorized in 2002, called No Child Left Behind, has made measurable improvements in the lives of minority students. He has tied that to its accountability provisions.
The White House agrees. “We need to stand strong for accountability that ensures that students are making progress, and that taxpayer dollars are producing real results for children,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a January speech.
The teachers unions strongly dislike No Child Left Behind because those provisions have been a threat to their members, who can face repercussions if their students are not measuring up.
“This is a fissure that has been happening for a while, but it has gotten more public recently,” said RiShawn Biddle, a conservative education analyst who blogs for the website Dropout Nation.
No Child Left Behind’s authorization has lapsed and is up for re-authorization. A bipartisan replacement co-sponsored by Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., passed the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in April and is awaiting action by the full Senate. It would make all testing a state responsibility, not federal.
In an April press release after it passed the committee, NEA President Lily Eskelsen García thanked Murray and Alexander for “listening to educators and leading [on] the improvements made to the bill.”
She added that the union would be watching to ensure that the final version “fix[es] the broken test, label, and punish regime instituted under No Child Left Behind.”
That month, AFT President Randi Weingarten similarly applauded the Senate bill because it “moves away from the increasingly counterproductive focus on sanctions, high-stakes tests, federalized teacher evaluations and school closings.”
The teachers unions are eager to see the legislation pass in the current Congress, Biddle said. Alexander’s bill is the best hope they have for getting enough Republican support for a reauthorization bill they can support, he argued. But civil rights groups are worried about losing the progress that minority students have achieved.
The fight is awkward for both sides. Not only are the unions members of the conference, but both Garcia and Weingarten are on its board of directors. Neither union responded to a request for comment. A conference spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
The awkwardness was on display during a February forum featuring Henderson and Weingarten hosted by the Albert Shanker Institute, an education-based nonprofit organization. The institute is named after a former AFT president and has Weingarten on its board.
During the forum, Henderson scolded critics of No Child Left Behind, saying the law, while it had its flaws, had been made a scapegoat for educational problems that were caused by institutional racism.
“The fact that there is fundamental inequality in resource allocation for schools is not something you can blame on No Child Left Behind,” he said.
Henderson pointed to several improvements under the law between 2000 and 2013, such as a quadrupling in the number of fourth-grade minority students reaching proficiency or higher in math while the number without basic math skills fell by one-half.
“Those are states that have come as a result of the accountability system in the current law,” he said, adding, “I am not prepared to turn my back on a system that has shown some improvement.”
He summed up his comments on the need for accountability and standards by telling the audience, “Don’t [kid] yourselves.”
A visibly chagrined Weingarten responded that No Child Left Behind had shifted “all of the responsibility” to individual teachers and that was unfair.
“What I think is wrong with this whole discussion is, think about it, everybody is talking about tests and accountability as opposed to how do we create the teaching and learning conditions so kids can thrive,” she said.
She added that the data could be collected on teacher and student performance but that it must be the “start of the conversation, not the end of the conversation.”
