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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 8, 2003

News Release

New Education Law Needs Resources
and Modifications to Improve
Student Achievement

Washington, D.C. ? Like a good teacher who alters her teaching methods to accommodate learning styles, Congress should modify the one-year-old reauthorized Elementary Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to better meet the needs of America's public school students, said the National Education Association (NEA) today on the one-year anniversary of the legislation's signing.

"While we have always supported the intent of this law, on its one-year anniversary it only makes sense to step back and see how this legislation can be improved," said NEA President Reg Weaver. He added that fully funding the law so schools can meet the new requirements is the number one issue with school districts and states facing budget shortfalls. "The NEA, in its efforts to support America's public schools, will be working with Congress to fully fund the law at its authorized levels."

Weaver said the NEA is focused on two other areas of the new law: unrealistically defining a school making "Adequate Yearly Progress" (AYP) by using a single test; and recruiting and keeping the best educators in the classroom.

Several states have projected that a majority of their public schools, even those with high standardized test scores, fail AYP and are subject to sanctions because of unrealistic and inflexible federal requirements.

"The law, as it stands now, judges students and schools by a single number," Weaver said. "We need to invest in reforms that will improve student achievement instead of spending valuable resources on punishing the neediest schools.

"We know that the quality of a child's teacher is the single most important aspect of his or her education. We need to do everything possible to get ? and keep ? high-quality educators in our classrooms if we want every child to succeed."

Some of the things the NEA will be working with the Administration and the 108th Congress are inclusive of, but not limited to:

• Ensuring that Title I education funds, which target poor students, are appropriated at the full $18.5 billion level for Fiscal Year 2004. Also, making sure the Teacher Quality program receives a $1 billion boost to help States recruit, train, and retain highly qualified teachers and paraprofessionals while also reducing class size.

• Amending the definition of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) to include other factors as meaningful elements of measuring a school's performance (such as attendance, graduation rate, percent of students taking advanced courses, in-grade retention rates, for example), and allow State's flexibility in measuring schools' progress (such as monitoring longitudinal growth in student achievement).

• Requiring that federally-funded supplemental service providers to use "highly qualified" teachers in their programs.

• Making sure supplemental service providers and other recipients of ESEA funds comply with all federal civil rights laws, including those prohibiting religious-based employment discrimination.

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The National Education Association is the nation’s largest professional employee organization, representing 2.7 million elementary and secondary teachers, higher education faculty, education support professionals, school administrators, retired educators, and students preparing to become teachers.