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Senate Letter on ESEA Reauthorization

The Honorable Lamar Alexander
Chairman, Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
455 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, DC  20510
 
The Honorable Patty Murray
Ranking Member, Senate
Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
154 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC  20510
 
Dear Chairman Alexander and Ranking Member Murray:
 
On behalf of Business Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. companies, I am writing to offer our views on S. 1177, The Every Child Achieves Act of 2015, which would reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).
 
Our CEO members are committed to ensuring all students graduate from high school with the tools necessary to succeed in college and careers. To accomplish this, we have long stressed that efforts to update ESEA must focus on the following key principles: setting clear expectations; defining the goals for success; measuring progress; and ensuring that reliable data is available for parents, teachers and state and local policymakers. 
 
We are pleased that The Every Child Achieves Act, as passed by the Senate, makes important progress in each of these areas. We also appreciate the hard work that has gone into bringing this bipartisan legislation to the floor, and we look forward to closely working with you to ensure that ESEA is reauthorized as soon as possible. 
 
However, as the House and Senate move forward on reconciling the differences of the respective bills, there is more work that must be done for Business Roundtable to fully support the bill presented to the President, particularly with respect to ensuring true accountability for meeting the academic needs of all students.
 
In our view, accountability does not mean retaining all of the provisions of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). For CEOs, this means expanding upon the accountability provisions currently included in S. 1177. 
 
First, the state-developed system of identifying and meaningfully differentiating between all public schools in the state should be driven by academic indicators, such as state-developed assessments and graduation rates. Non-academic factors, such as the S. 1177 proposed use of results from student and teacher surveys, should be used only to identify additional schools – not to mask low-student academic achievement.
 
In addition, this legislation should require any school where the overall student population or students from subgroups, such as economically disadvantaged students and/or students from major racial and ethnic groups, are not meeting state-defined goals to implement evidence-based interventions, or to support strategies designed by the state or local school district. Students in these schools, many of which have failed to provide a quality education for many years, need to know that help is on the way. This is the right thing to do for students, and we urge you to add this provision to ESEA. 
 
The business community is arguably the single largest stakeholder in our nation’s public education system. Today’s students are tomorrow’s leaders, technical experts and valuable employees. We are committed to working with you to get this right, and we look forward to working closely with you and your staff to put together an ESEA reauthorization that we can all support as this process moves forward.
 
Sincerely,
 
 
John Engler
 
JE/dl
 

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