DFER joins broad coalitions in calling for strong standards that will continue to help close achievement gaps and ensure that struggling schools get the investments they need
Today, Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) signed onto two letters to the leadership and members of the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) in which they commended Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander and Ranking Democrat Patty Murray for their work on a bipartisan agreement and called on the committee to ensure that states continue to set strong benchmarks to measure student achievement as they mark up the Every Child Achieves Act and move forward to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).
In the first letter, spearheaded by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and signed by DFER and 40 other organizations, the authors wrote:
“We believe that the bill must be improved by: strengthening accountability for student outcomes; providing additional data on student groups; addressing disparities in resources; and providing a more meaningful federal role…
“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.”
In the other letter, DFER and its partners laid out specific changes that can be made during tomorrow’s markup that will ensure continued progress for America’s students:
“To ensure action, we ask that you:
- Strengthen the accountability sections by including a clear requirement that states identify for intervention and support both chronically low-performing schools and schools where any group of students consistently fails to meet state-established goals;
- Limit the relative weight of additional indicators that are not direct measures of student learning in accountability ratings;
- and Ensure that the Secretary of Education has authority to enforce the law when states and districts have not met their legal obligations.”
You can find the full letters here and here.
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Contact: press@dfer.org