Executive Director's Report: When school board members talk, Congress listens

By Anne L. Bryant

02/03/04 -- All year long, school board members e-mail, write, and visit their members of Congress on a variety of public education issues. And members of Congress listen. They care about your opinions. After all, most of you are elected officials just as they are.

They also listen because you make sense. They might not always agree with you, but they know you speak from real experience.

For example, when you talk to them about appropriations, you tell them how inadequate federal funding hurts your schools, especially now that state and local budgets have forced many districts to cut important programs.

And when you talk about No Child Left Behind (NCLB), you tell members of Congress how this law is affecting your school district.

I recently heard a school board member talk about how the standards and accountability changes in NCLB -- and reinforced by the disaggregated data -- helped the district focus on the right issue: raising student achievement for the poorest children.

Others have complained that good schools were unfairly labeled as needing improvement because of an erroneous breakdown of special education data.

Once a year, more than 700 of the most advocacy-oriented school board members come together in Washington, D.C., for the annual meeting of the Federal Relations Network (FRN). While they are here, they will visit their members of Congress and tell them about NSBA's top legislative priorities. The FRN consists of 1,533 school board members with a special interest in federal policy issues.

At every FRN Conference I've participated in, I marvel as I talk to these energetic, smart, knowledgeable board members. As I address the group, along with NSBA President Carol Brown and Mike Resnick, NSBA's associate executive director of advocacy and issues management, I will look out on a cross-section of America.

These FRN members are selected by their state school boards associations because they are articulate, experienced, and know children's issues. They often know their members of Congress personally and have labored in the same vineyards.

What consistently amazes me is how political party affiliation really does not seem to make a huge difference with this group. You don't hear a lot of political rhetoric. In fact, you hear very little rhetoric at all. You hear about real down-to-earth examples of how federal policies affect local schools.

At this year's FRN Conference, Feb. 1-3, school board members will address four key issues: the federal investment in education, the unintended consequences of NCLB, the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and the reauthorization of the school lunch program.

NSBA's positions on each of these issues are based on extensive research with input from our state associations, which in turn have gotten their data from you -- school board members and superintendents.

This includes our position on NCLB, a law that has a far-ranging impact on school districts across the country. NSBA fully supports the goals of the law to ensure that every student achieves the academic proficiency standards established by states. We've issued several publications in the past several months which advise boards on how to use the goals of NCLB to advance student achievement and to assist boards in their governance role.

The alignment of NCLB to NSBA's Key Work of School Boards is clear. Using data, disaggregated by student population to drive resources and decisions, is smart and strategic.

But we've also heard loud and clear messages from you regarding the impact of NCLB on students with a wide range of disabilities and students learning English. And we've heard from many of you about the methods used to measure adequate yearly progress.

You've asked NSBA to help draft language for more flexibility for states and school districts on the accountability provisions and for more flexibility on the criteria and timelines for paraprofessionals and highly qualified teachers.

You've asked us for help in making the provisions on public school choice and supplemental services more clear and more flexible and to revise the provisions on participation in assessments and graduation rate calculations.

All of these issues are correctable, and we believe they can be corrected without harming the end goal -- bringing all students up to proficient levels in reading, math, and science.

This end goal is crucial, because we also know there is one very important criteria by which we are all assessed: Are we, as the governors of our nation's public schools with responsibility for 47 million students, providing the best education possible to ensure that every child will succeed in a rapidly changing global society?

We recognize that not all schools are providing this outcome. But many are.

School board members know better than almost any other group what the tensions and the balances are within a community and a school district for achieving this goal.

You know how important good teachers are for achieving this goal. You know how vital it is to any district to have strong music, art, and physical education programs.

You recognize that the school principal must be an instructional leader, must have the respect of the teaching staff, and must be tough and fair all at the same time.