A Letter To Senator Edward Kennedy
Sample letter written by Peter H. Wells.
The Honorable Edward Kennedy
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Senator Kennedy,
We write to congratulate you on your role as chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Today as members of the staff of the largest Mainline Protestant denomination in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, we write you about public education, specifically the upcoming reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
As one of the original sponsors of NCLB, you have expressed your disillusionment that the President and Congress have not fully funded the law’s mandates. We hope the reauthorization will ensure that the federal government pays not only for the administrative and compliance costs of NCLB, but also the cost of effective programming and staff support in school districts where state and local school funding is inadequate. We recognize that because across our Commonwealth, school funding is unequal, the burden of improving student achievement falls most heavily on the poorest school districts. Federal funding is merely a thin overlay on this inequitable system. The fact that NCLB directs Title I funds away from educational services in public schools to pay for school transfers, privatized remediation services, and in the final years of sanctions, charter schools and state takeover is of deep concern to us, because we believe a national public education law should invest in improving the public schools themselves. We are deeply concerned about the privatization that seems to be woven through the sanctions.
We agree with the goal of NCLB: to close achievement gaps for African American, Latino-Latina, poor, and disabled children and for English language learners. The United Church of Christ has long advocated for improving public educational opportunities for the most vulnerable groups of children. We do not, however, accept NCLB’s assumption that schools can be improved by threatening and punishing the professionals on whom we depend to nurture our children. NCLB seems to assume that these people lack dedication or that they are lazy. We emphatically disagree. Our pastors are finding themselves called to work with exhausted and despairing school teachers, especially in schools where families move frequently and family poverty is concentrated. The federal education law should instead provide resources to help principals be better leaders, to help teachers learn new skills and develop support networks amongst their peers, and to increase the capacity of our state department of education.
As people of faith who believe that the purpose of public education is to help all children fully develop their God-given gifts, we are concerned about this law that emphasizes basic reading and math skills to the exclusion of other important and exciting content in the humanities, the social studies and the arts. Because so many of our poorest schools are run-down places, we worry that limited, rote content makes these schools resemble warehouses or prisons. Society owes even the poorest children the opportunity to develop interests and special talents. We recognize and reject the production metaphor in NCLB that seems to view children as products to be tested and managed. Instead we believe education must be understood as a human endeavor of caring.
In the reauthorization, we ask you to lead your committee to fix NCLB by making the law:
- more oriented to building the capacity of the most vulnerable schools serving poor children in big cities and less directed at punishments for these schools;
- less dependent on standardized tests and more oriented to student growth;
- less focused on blame and sanctions for those who work in schools and more focused on addressing the mass of realities of poverty, racism and racial segregation;
- well funded; less focused on privatization and charterization in its consequences and more focused on supporting excellence in public schools; and
- more oriented to nurturing the human beings engaged in the educational enterprise, so that they may be more nurturing of children.
Thank you for your courage to speak for raising the minimum wage and so many other important social justice issues. Many times in recent years yours has been the leading voice in the minority party, sometimes a lone voice. We honor your witness. We ask you prayerfully to use your leadership as the chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions to keep the lofty goal of eliminating the racial and economic achievement gaps at the same time you lead the effort to fix the injustices in the implementation of NCLB.
Sincerely,
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