Education reform, with focus on accountability

By Chris Coons and Cory Booker

'What do you want to be when you grow up?" is one of the most basic questions we ask our kids - perhaps a question they get more than any other.

Equally important is a question we should be asking ourselves as parents and as Americans: Are we doing everything we can to make sure all of our kids have the chance to achieve their dreams?

The Senate is debating major updates to our nation's public school system for the first time in more than a decade. The legislation, which reforms 2001's No Child Left Behind Act, makes important strides to improve American education, but it could still leave far too many of our children behind.

So we ask our colleagues in the Senate: Are we really doing everything we can to make sure all of our kids have the same opportunities to succeed?

Right now, the answer is no.

No Child Left Behind has shined a light on inequities in our schools and has empowered policymakers with important data that has never before been available; still, the law has undeniably failed our students and our country. The law is overly prescriptive and went way too far in creating an atmosphere of high-stakes testing and federal micromanagement of schools across the country.

The bill before the Senate to fix these issues, the Every Child Achieves Act, takes important steps to correct much of what is wrong with current law by increasing schools' and states' ability to innovate and seek solutions that fit their needs. However, Congress' legislative efforts have yet to strike the appropriate balance between accountability and flexibility - particularly for children who are falling the furthest behind.

In fixing the very serious problems created by No Child Left Behind, we cannot send the pendulum too far in the opposite direction. As it stands, the Every Child Achieves Act risks abdicating the federal government's responsibility to ensure that all our kids have access to the highest-quality public schools, and that even in our poorest neighborhoods, kids are able to open the doors of opportunity through education. Our kids and our country cannot afford to return to a time when local control too often also meant national indifference to racial and economic inequality in our schools.

So Congress must strengthen federal accountability provisions in the bill that focus on the small fraction of our schools that habitually fail disadvantaged children. We strongly believe that accountability can be achieved while abiding by the spirit of larger efforts to put more power in the hands of schools, families, and local communities.

Now, accountability doesn't mean unfunded mandates, and it doesn't mean more tests. It means paying proper attention to children who are falling behind and addressing those problems head on, not covering them up.

Some have criticized any accountability proposal as being overly prescriptive. We disagree. It's not too much to ask schools that are consistently failing to graduate large segments of their students to change and to stop expecting different results from the same failed strategies.

It is not overly prescriptive to ask schools - particularly the 6 percent of schools that fail to graduate one-third of their students - to make locally determined changes to honor the potential of these children.

Finally, it is not overly prescriptive to make sure all students are being served by our public school system. This means setting high expectations for each and every student, no matter their background or learning style.

When we fail disadvantaged children, we fail the idea that America is a nation of equal opportunity for all. It is constructive to ask that focused attention be paid to such challenges and local strategies designed to address them.

We cannot surrender to the self-defeating and self-destructive toxin of low expectations for our children. We must take on the responsibility to act, and we know we can educate all of our nation's kids. There are too many examples of public schools that successfully educate a diverse population of low-income children for us to accept excuses for those schools that are failing to do the same.

Instituting accountability measures has produced real results for our kids. Over the past decade, all students, but particularly disadvantaged students, have made considerable progress in graduation rates and performance in reading and math. The national high school graduation rate is currently 81 percent, the highest level on record. Since 2003, the reading gap between black and white fourth graders has closed by 16 percentage points, and over the same period, Hispanic eighth graders closed the gap in math by 24 points.

This progress was made possible by the hard work of dedicated teachers, students, and parents, along with specific accountability strategies that helped states and school districts identify schools in need of support and respond to those needs effectively.

Accountability applies to policymakers, too. At every level, officials cannot repeat the mistakes of the past by asking more of our teachers - who often work in communities whose challenges lie far outside the classroom - while refusing to give them the resources, support, and training they need.

We can make significant progress on improving educational outcomes with a real commitment to raising the bar for every one of America's children. We cannot allow ourselves to settle for anything less.

Cory Booker (D.) is a U.S. senator from New Jersey. press@booker.senate.gov