June 28, 2004

The Honorable Rod Paige
Secretary of Education
400 Maryland Ave., SW
Washington, D.C.  20202

As a father and a legislator, I am committed to advocating for public education in Idaho and throughout the nation.  I am proud to have supported and contributed to the passage of President Bush’s sweeping education reforms included in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).  However, given time to observe the implementation of the law, it is now appropriate to review opportunities for needed improvements to the underlying program.

To ensure NCLB is best serving our teachers and students, it is essential that states and local school boards be given flexibility in order to carry out the law in a manner best suited to local conditions.   Unfortunately, although it contains important consolidations of overlapping programs and significant expansion of the federal financial commitment to public education, the NCLB does not fully recognize state and local autonomy.  The accountability provisions in NCLB place the federal government in a position to dominate policy and curriculum management in our public schools.  The federal government should not gravitate toward the role of being a national school board supervising our local schools.   As always, I remain opposed to one-size-fits-all national solutions to local issues, including education.

I know there are serious concerns in the education community about NCLB, and I support efforts to make meaningful, effective changes to it.   My preference would be to eliminate the national testing regime contained in the Act and rely on state and local leadership to determine the appropriate manner to ensure accountability.  However, short of this, I am committed to working both legislatively and administratively to significantly increase the flexibility for states and local school districts under NCLB. 

One such example is the recent resolution enacted by the Idaho State Legislature, Senate Joint Memorial No. 108. I support the four reforms identified in this legislation. The first would allow determinations of “adequate yearly progress” to be made based on individual student growth from one year to the next. This is a commonsense approach to ensuring each child is learning, while acknowledging that, while every child can learn, not every child learns at the same pace or in the same way. The second would limit options for choice and supplementary services to targeted subgroups of students who fail to achieve adequate yearly progress rather than to all children in a school. Next, states must be permitted latitude to identify failing schools for two consecutive years in the same subgroup and for the same subject, rather than simply comparing one class of students to the class of the preceding year.                               

Finally, greater flexibility must be allowed in the calculation of scores from students who are still learning English in the context of the larger calculation of a school’s proficiency measurement. While I understand modifications in policy have recently been made with respect to students with limited English proficiency, further steps must be taken to ensure these students and their schools are not penalized unnecessarily. These reforms, based on collaborative efforts by stakeholders in public education, have the potential to make NCLB more responsive to the needs of local schools, and more reflective of the real status of those schools with regard to the level of education they are providing to our nation’s children.                               

We all have a responsibility to promote successful, meaningful public education for America's’s children. Taken together, our shared efforts can create a coordinated response to the challenges we face in education today. A society of educated citizens creates a foundation for a value-based, long-lasting government, and a better United States of America. I appreciate your attention to this important matter and welcome the opportunity to work with you on this and other education initiatives for this nation.

Sincerely,

Mike Crapo
United States Senator