The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

Table of Contents

• Introduction

Executive Branch

• Looking Forward to New Blood in Washington
• Interview with Bob Edgar

On the Hill

• The Americans With Disabilities Act, Act Two
• As Home Foreclosures Climb, Efforts to Help Troubled Homeowners Continue
• The Year in Judicial and Executive Nominations
• Advocating for Federal Leadership on Education
• Facing New Challenges with the 2010 Census
• Modernizing the Federal Poverty Measure
• Piecemeal Legislation, Raids Take Place of Immigration Overhaul
• Below the Surface
• Interview with Kathryn Kolbert

In the Courts

• Wrapping up the Supreme Court’s 2007-2008 Term

In the States

• Colorado: Battleground for More Than Just the Presidency.
• Interview with Lilly Ledbetter

Leadership Conference Activities

• Preventing a Digital TV Divide
• Examining the State of Fair Housing in the 21st Century
• Bringing Diverse Communities Together
• 32nd Annual Hubert H. Humphrey Civil Rights Award Dinner
• Interview with John Payton

Advocating for Federal Leadership on Education

Opinion by David Goldberg

Access to a high quality education is a fundamental civil right for all children and an economic necessity for the nation, yet policymakers at all levels of government have continued to tolerate educational systems that are failing half of our nation’s children.  Federal government leadership is crucial in reforming schools, yet with few exceptions U.S. policymakers have failed to live up to this responsibility.

Reauthorizing and strengthening the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), more commonly known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), should have been one of the 110th Congress’ top priorities.  Despite the focus and commitment of a few legislators, such as the House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D. Calif., Congress’ lack of commitment to education reform as a national priority doomed the complicated reauthorization to infighting and political rancor, albeit over important and highly consequential details.

The civil rights community has repeatedly called NCLB a civil rights law and urged Congress to reauthorize and strengthen it, while maintaining accountability for all students and doing more to help improve schools and support teachers.  Civil rights advocates believe that several core principles should govern any federal education policy:

• Federal policy must be designed to raise academic standards;
• Those high academic standards must apply equally to all students, of all backgrounds;
• Schools should be held accountable for meeting academic standards;
• Accountability should be implemented through good quality assessments that are linked to academic standards; and
• Federal and state governments must ensure that schools, particularly those in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, have the resources they need to give all children the chance to meet those standards.

Despite some evidence from NCLB testing data that shows that proficiency test score gaps between White students and minority students may be narrowing slightly, the chasm is still wide and the opportunity gaps that create them have gone unabated.  Minority students are twice as likely to be taught by teachers with less than three years experience.  White students are more than three times more likely to be in Gifted/Talented programs than Black and Latino students and more than four times as likely to be in AP Math classes.

The civil rights community has also urged Congress to address the dropout crisis afflicting low-income and minority communities.  Currently the nation graduates 71 percent of its high school students on time, but Black (58 percent), Latino (55 percent) and Native American (51 percent) children graduate at a far smaller rate, according to the most recent figures from Education Week’s Diplomas Count.

However, the U.S. Department of Education picked up some of the slack in April with its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM).  These new proposed regulations act on some of the recommendations LCCR has made to Congress over the past two years, most critically, providing a uniform definition for graduation rates.

LCCR filed detailed comments on the proposal, which will likely become final in October of 2008, including recommendations for:

• Simplification of the rule by speeding the transition to the final graduation rate standard, rather than using transitional measures;
• Clarifying in the final rule that all children must be accounted for;
• Requiring a public process for setting graduation rate goals and growth rates that should include parents, educators and the public;
• Providing supplemental educational services, particularly for children with disabilities and English language learners, in schools if states cannot provide them; and
• Better data reporting and disaggregation of data by subgroups.

Congress must still reauthorize the ESEA, but the Department of Education’s regulation will lay the foundation for high school accountability by shining a brighter light on both the problem and on schools that have found solutions to the dropout solution.

David Goldberg is senior counsel and senior policy analyst for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and specializes in education and equal opportunity issues.