NEA Urges Congress: Slow Down, Get It Right

As Congress considers the House Education Committee's drafts of proposed changes for a reauthorized version of the No Child Left Behind Act, NEA is warning legislators that the "train is on the wrong track" and that they need to slow down and get it right.

NEA has formally expressed to the committee its major concerns about the drafts and NEA leaders and staff are aggressively lobbying for substantial revisions to the drafts that would both strengthen the law and make it more effective.

A September 18 letter to House Education Committee leaders and members regarding Titles II-XI emphasizes NEA's opposition to the proposed performance pay provisions.

"We remain adamantly opposed to the federal intrusion on local collective bargaining found in the discussion draft of Title II..." the letter says. "Our members across the country have made it very clear to us that they will not tolerate these assaults on labor."

Please  visit our Legislative Action Center   to learn how you can support NEA's efforts to keep performance pay provisions out of the federal law.

NEA has strong concerns about other provisions in the House draft as well, including the fact that it completely ignores class size reduction, access to quality early childhood education, and adequate resources. In addition, it eliminates the High Objective Uniform State Standard of Evaluation (HOUSSE) which helps veteran teachers meet the "highly qualified" requirements, and it imposes many new mandates without guarantee of additional funding.

NEA also believes the committee's efforts to address the need for "multiple measures" to assess students and schools are inadequate. In an earlier letter responding to the draft of Title I, NEA told the lawmakers:

While we appreciate that the bill recognizes that a child is more than a test score through its provision of multiple measures in the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) system and are pleased that it includes several NEA priority concepts, we are concerned that in many cases it is still overly restrictive and prescriptive in the authority provided to states and school districts in designing their accountability plans and procedures, and still overly focused on measuring schools based on two test scores.  We do not believe that an accountability system based primarily on two test scores is either an accurate or fair reflection of student learning or school quality, particularly when so many of the tests being utilized do not test knowledge or skills, but rather rote memorization.

To this point, NEA has responded to the House draft language with the following:

• Letter on Title I Draft (September 5)
• Detailed comments on Title I Draft (September 14)
• Letter on Titles II-XI Draft (September 18)
• Detailed comments on Titles II-XI Draft (October 2)

Summaries and the full text of the House Education Committee's drafts are available at this commitee Web site.