Every Child Achieves Act

Floor Speech

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Mrs. CAPITO. Madam President, I rise to express my strong support for the Every Child Achieves Act that is pending before the Senate. I want to commend Chairman Alexander and Ranking Member Murray for working in such a great bipartisan fashion that brought this bill to the floor that will improve the quality of education for children across our country.

The Every Child Achieves Act puts States and local officials back in control of our local schools. As we heard from the Senator from Kansas, Mr. Roberts, his hard work on this bill also stops the Department of Education from conditioning Federal funding on the adoption of national standards like Common Core.

Importantly, this bill also makes sure parents and taxpayers continue to have access to important information about how the schools in their communities are performing. The Every Child Achieves Act deserves the Senate's support this week. Last week, the Senate unanimously adopted an amendment that will allow community school programs the flexibility to use Federal funds to pay for a site resource coordinator at their school or local education agency. This is important to the State of West Virginia. We have community schools. Community school programs provide important health, nutrition, and other key services for many of our West Virginia students who are, unfortunately, living in poverty.

The amendment passed last week will allow those programs to better coordinate with community partners to provide resources and support for our children in need. I was happy to work with Senator Brown and my fellow Senator from West Virginia, Mr. Manchin, to see that that amendment passed.

I also want to talk briefly about a bipartisan amendment I introduced with Senator Durbin--he spoke about it a few minutes ago on the floor--that takes important steps to create transparency for students and families. It does so by allowing students and parents to know the quality and progress of their schools as it relates to college readiness.

This amendment will require States and local educational agencies to include postsecondary enrollment data on the existing report card measures that are included in the Every Child Achieves Act. It also encourages the inclusion of data on postsecondary remediation.

It is supported by dozens of organizations, including the College Summit, the Business Roundtable, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, because this amendment seeks to improve the education outcomes of our students.

Parents and students alike deserve to know they are being adequately prepared to enter and succeed in postsecondary education. Including these simple, easy-to-understand measures on State and local report cards will provide them with the information they need to make informed choices about their future education. Additionally, the data will help States and school districts target limited resources to the schools that need it most. This amendment was carefully crafted to avoid putting onerous and additional burdens on our schools and States. Nearly all States already have made the investments necessary to collect, link, and report this data. In fact, the majority of States are already reporting it. Currently, 40 States produce high school feedback reports that include postsecondary enrollment data. More than 30 States already include some measure of postsecondary success, such as remediation rates.

Adding postsecondary enrollment and remediation rates to existing report card measures included in Every Child Achieves Act would make sure students, parents, educators, and policymakers have access to critical information about how well our high schools are preparing students to enter and succeed in postsecondary education. The end result will be successfully restoring decisionmaking to those who know best--the students and their parents.

I urge everyone to support this amendment and also to support the bill.

I yield the floor.

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