President Obama, Secretary Duncan, Congressional and State Educational Leaders:
On behalf of millions of students and families, and civil rights
organizations, communities of color, and organizations that reflect the
new, diverse majority in public education, we write urging
implementation of a set of strong recommendations for advancing
opportunity and supporting school integration, equity, and improved
accountability within our nation’s systems of public education.
Background
We believe that improved accountability systems at the local, state, and
federal levels are central to advancing and broadening equal
educational opportunity for each and every child in America. The current
educational accountability system has become overly focused on narrow
measures of success and, in some cases, has discouraged schools from
providing a rich curriculum for all students focused on the 21st century
skills they need to acquire. This particularly impacts under-resourced
schools that disproportionately serve low-income students and students
of color. In our highly inequitable system of education, accountability
is not currently designed to ensure students will experience diverse and
integrated classrooms with the necessary resources for learning and
support for excellent teaching in all schools. It is time to end the
advancement of policies and ideas that largely omit the critical
supports and services necessary for children and families to access
equal educational opportunity in diverse settings and to promote
positive educational outcomes.
The demand for our schools to meet new college-and-career-ready
standards is happening in the wake of a record number of children living
in poverty and an increasingly diverse student population. Students of
color represent more than 50 percent of youth and are more than twice as
likely to attend segregated schools. Second language learners whose
first language is not English now represent 10 percent of all public
school students nationwide, and students living in poverty represent
virtually half of all US public school students.[
1] [
2]
Recognizing the challenging backdrop in which our students, schools,
and communities are expected to thrive, we are committed to adhering to
the civil rights laws of this country that require that all children be
educated equitably and effectively based on their needs. This reality
must be matched with the learning opportunities, preparation, knowledge,
services, supports, and skills that will enable them to lead healthy
and successful lives in the world and workforce. From early education to
the postsecondary years, we believe that the federal government
continues to play a critical role in helping states, districts, and
tribes to achieve educational excellence through equity.
While the need for accountability is almost universally agreed upon,
there have been concerns raised about overly punitive accountability
systems that do not take into account the resources, geography, student
population, and needs of specific schools. In particular, the No Child
Left Behind law has not accomplished its intended goals of substantially
expanding educational equity or significantly improving educational
outcomes. Racial achievement and opportunity gaps remain large, and many
struggling school systems have made little progress under rules that
emphasize testing without investing.[
3]
We must shift towards accountability strategies that promote equity and
strengthen, rather than weaken, schools in our communities, so that
they can better serve students and accelerate student success.
Recommendations
We call on local, state, and federal policymakers to use the following
set of principles in rethinking sound public education accountability
systems. Comprehensive systems of shared responsibility with educational
professionals and key stakeholders should evaluate the extent to which
productive learning conditions are in effect for all students in each
school – with attention to disparities by race, class, gender, language,
and disability status – and ensure that appropriate corrective action
is taken to improve learning conditions where problems are identified.
Development and monitoring of well-designed and comprehensive measures
of educational inputs and outcomes must demonstrate the equity that is
emblematic of systems that are serious about universally advancing
opportunities to learn and succeed. These features are critical to an
effective accountability system:
1. Appropriate and equitable resources that ensure
opportunities to learn, respond to students’ needs, prioritize racial
diversity and integration of schools, strengthen school system capacity,
and meaningfully support improvement. These include:
- Funding and instructional materials, including access to technology
and adequate facilities, allocated based on student needs (poverty,
culture/language learning, and other needs)
- Equitable access, within and across schools, to high-quality curricula, tools for learning, and enrichment programs
- Tailored individualized services that build upon the cultural and linguistic assets children bring to schools
- Qualified, certified, competent, racially and culturally diverse and
committed teachers, principals, counselors, nurses, librarians, and
other school support staff, with appropriate professional development
opportunities, including cultural competency training, and support and
incentives to work with students of greatest need; and
- Social, emotional, nutritional, and health services
2. Multiple measures: The system should acknowledge
that both inputs and relevant outcomes matter, and thus should monitor
both appropriate inputs that support academic, social, emotional,
physical health, and cultural well-being, along with student and school
outcomes (knowledge, skills, and dispositions) that demonstrate
college-and career-readiness and civic literacy. These include school
resources; school discipline and positive school climate information;
children’s in- and out-of-school learning opportunities over time;
student improvement; and student achievement, progress, and graduation
rates.
3. Shared Responsibility:Each level of the system –
from federal, state, and local governments to districts and schools
should be held accountable for the investments it must make and for the
oversight, accountability, data collection, monitoring, and actions it
must undertake to produce high-quality learning opportunities for each
and every child and to ultimately achieve equity in student outcomes.
This includes ensuring civil rights protections, equitable resources,
meaningful student and parental engagement and inclusion in
decision-making, active coordination between systems serving students,
and productive learning opportunities.
4. Professional competence: Systems of preparation
and ongoing development should ensure that educators have the time,
investments, and supports necessary to acquire the knowledge about
curriculum, teaching, assessment, linguistic and cultural competence,
implicit bias, and student support needed to teach students effectively.
This should include additional supports for education professionals who
serve children and families in historically under-resourced and
disadvantaged classrooms and schools. School systems should recognize
educators’ abilities, particularly in working with diverse learners and
students of color. They should not only create incentives for education
professionals to develop or acquire additional skills, but also require
professional learning to ensure their effectiveness in the classroom.
5. Informative assessments for meaningful 21st Century learning: A
system of assessments should document both student and school system
progress using tools that evaluate deeper learning skills (e.g. critical
thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, communication, and
creativity) that are necessary and valuable for today’s and tomorrow’s
world and that represent authentic applications of knowledge.
Assessments should be valid for the students and purposes for which they
are used, comparable in quality, and able to be reliably scored. These
measures would be used to help identify the most appropriate
interventions, supports and instructional strategies to accelerate
learning. They should also be used as diagnostic tools for determining
student acquisition and application of knowledge, should identify
students’ strengths as well as their learning and cultural needs, and
should be used to support individual students and
educators. Measures should also be used to assess whether individual and
collective education systems are moving toward meeting objectives related to greater equity in educational opportunities and achievement.
6. Transparency: The system should provide useful,
publicly accessible, and actionable school system information and data
for parents and community members, as well as students and educators. It
should also support new ways for changing practices, exploring
additional investments, or expanding opportunities. School system
progress should be evaluated in part in terms of equitable inputs and
outcomes, as well as access to learning resources, services, and
opportunities for different student groups (e.g., English learners,
students by race and ethnicity, Native students, low-income students,
and students with disabilities).
7. Meaningful and culturally and linguistically responsive parental and family engagement: The
expertise and meaningful engagement of all parents and families should
be included in both the teaching and learning process and in decisions
associated in the planning and implementation of P-12 system
investments. Adequate steps must be taken to ensure participation of
low-income parents and parents facing linguistic or other obstacles.
Such planning should also incorporate the resources of community
partners (e.g., tribes and Native communities, afterschool providers,
businesses, faith-based institutions, medical providers, higher
education institutions, and community and civil rights advocacy
organizations) that can contribute to a shared vision of accountability
in an education system in which all students can excel.
8. Capacity building: Accountability,
including the consequences that accompany evidence of poor performance,
should be a mechanism for strengthening schools, education
professionals, and their communities. Consequences that accompany
evidence of poor performance should be timely, narrowly tailored,
targeted to the populations and parts of the school systems most in
need, and likely to maximize student learning for all students. This
system accountability would serve to elevate all children to achieve to
their highest potential by enforcing and expanding students’ equitable
opportunities to learn; guiding strategic investments so that schools
are healthy, productive places for learning; and ensuring meaningful
progress toward equity in student achievement.
We appreciate your attention to our concerns and urge you to use the
principles articulated in this letter in deciding how to best serve and
nurture our nation’s greatest resource, our young people, and the
backbone of our democracy, the public school system. We believe the
right to a quality education is a civil right and that the civil rights
of all our children must be vigorously protected. We look forward to
hearing from your respective offices to discuss the issues raised in
this letter further. We can be reached as a coalition through Dr. Joseph
Bishop of the National Opportunity to Learn Campaign at (626) 319-0496,
or via email at jb@schottfoundation.org.
Respectfully,
Signatories:
Advancement Project
Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)
Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF)
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
National Opportunity to Learn (OTL) Campaign
National Urban League (NUL)
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF)
National Council on Educating Black Children (NCEBC)
National Indian Education Association (NIEA)
Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC)
