Page 2 The Skanner April 26, 2017
Challenging People to Shape
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Opinion
We Still Must Get the Every Student Succeeds Act Right
I
n late March, President
Trump signed a resolution
to invalidate a regulation
designed to help implement
the Every Student Succeeds
Act (ESSA). This move will
create tremendous confusion
among states that are current-
ly in the middle of putting the
new law in place in time for
the 2017-2018 school year.
Even more egregious is that
congressional Republicans at-
tempted to rewrite or ignore
the intention, history and
plain text of the law to elimi-
nate the rule.
The 2015 passage of ESSA
was a rare recent example of
successful bipartisan policy-
making. The legislation both
reauthorized the 1965 Ele-
mentary and Secondary Ed-
ucation Act (ESEA) and rein-
forced ESEA’s core principles
to ensure schools have the
resources they need to teach
all children well, particularly
Black children and other chil-
dren who’ve been neglected
for too long, and give them
the opportunity to succeed.
Now that the rule is gone, it’s
essential that the civil rights
legacy and legislative intent
behind ESSA and the original
ESEA not be obscured and
that states recognize in de-
veloping their state account-
ability plans that they are
still bound by the provisions
of the law designed to ensure
Wade
Henderson
NNPA Guest
Columnist
all children have equal educa-
tional opportunity.
ESEA is—and always has
been—a civil rights law. It was
a central plank in the John-
son Administration’s “War
on Poverty” and one of a long
string of legislative success-
es emanating from the civil
“
that the federal government
has an essential and irre-
placeable role in enforcing
civil rights laws and holding
states and districts account-
able if schools are not educat-
ing all children well.
One only has to reflect on
the long history of state and
local decisions shortchanging
vulnerable students to under-
stand why the federal role is
essential for historically mar-
ginalized students, including
the children of color who now
comprise a majority of K-12
students in America’s public
school classrooms.
claiming that states would
have carte blanche to ignore
the students who’ve been de-
prived for far too long and
sweep problems in schools
under the rug now that the
rule is gone. And that has led
to more confusion and uncer-
tainty for states who are in
the middle of drafting their
accountability plans, attempt-
ing to comply with the law,
and deciding how best to sup-
port their students.
But make no mistake, ESSA
— and its requirements for
states — are still on the books
and it’s important for our
children’s future that
states understand their
responsibilities
under
the law.
Given our nation’s
history, asking states to
faithfully implement the
law and meet their legal
obligations to historically
marginalized groups of chil-
dren, while refusing to pro-
vide sufficient federal guid-
ance and oversight, is a recipe
for failure. No matter what
Republicans say, Congress
knew this and that’s why pro-
visions that were in the law
since 1965 remained, which
is ultimately why the civil
rights community supported
the final law.
Children facing the greatest barriers
to their success like Black children
and children from low-income com-
munities need and deserve schools
that educate ‘all’ children well
rights movement in the mid-
1960s. The legislation provid-
ed federal funds to help edu-
cate low-income children and
recognized that the federal
government has an important
role in the educational suc-
cess of every American child,
no matter where they lived,
how much money their par-
ents had, or what they looked
like.
Honoring this civil rights
legacy, legislators ensured in
2015 that the ESSA reaffirmed
Children facing the greatest
barriers to their success like
Black children and children
from low-income communi-
ties need and deserve schools
that educate “all” children
well. They also deserve to
know that the federal govern-
ment will still hold states and
school districts responsible if
schools are not doing well or
need help to improve.
And yet Republicans, in
their zeal to rewrite ESSA’s
legislative history, have been
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Only a few
remaining seats
available for
The Wake of
Vanport
TheSkanner.com
CBC Report Calls for Economic Justice
T
his year has brought a
number of significant
developments. A new
Congress, the 115th in
our nation’s history and sim-
ilarly the 45th president have
together begun a new era of
government. From all indi-
cations, this new leadership
seeks to create public policies
and priorities that signifi-
cantly alter what will remain
as a governmental function.
From education to environ-
mental stewardship, health
care and more, the governing
toolbox of executive orders,
regulation and legislation are
all in use.
Despite these changing
times, much of what has
plagued Black America re-
mains the same: a lack of
wealth and ample access to
opportunities that can vir-
tually and permanently im-
prove our lives.
No one needs another study
that finds how Black Amer-
ica’s net worth is a fraction
of that held by White Amer-
icans. We already know that
Black families who send their
children to college incur a
larger family debt that in-
cludes multiple generations –
the student, parents and even
grandparents. And in that
quest for education, each gen-
eration’s ability to maximize
financial stability is at risk.
Or that Black businesses and
Charlene
Crowell
NNPA
Columnist
entrepreneurs often face pre-
dictable denials for loans that
could bring jobs to their own
communities.
It seems that in 2017, Black
America’s number one need
is to finally know and enjoy
“
Thankfully, the 49-member
Congressional Black Caucus
recently released a report
with a title that was also a
clear statement, We Have a
Lot to Lose: Solutions to Ad-
vance Black Families in the
21st Century. Its 125 pages
contain chapters that speak to
our unique American expe-
rience while also proposing
solutions to deliver us to the
full bounty of what it means
to be an American to people
of all colors. While space will
not allow me to explore the
This year the Black community
needs to finally know and enjoy
economic justice in all of its forms
economic justice in all of its
forms. We have already felt
the brunt of predatory lend-
ing’s high costs that steal our
hard-earned wages with tri-
ple-digit interest rates. Far
too many of us are still de-
nied access to mortgages even
when credit profiles tell us
that we should qualify for the
most affordable and sustain-
able home loans. And then
there are the car payments
that have been packed by
dealers who frequently mark-
up interest rates and cram ad-
ditional ‘services’ into loans
that could have been pur-
chased far more cheaply on
their own.
entire report, key elements
of the chapter on economic
justice deserve to be broadly
shared and read.
In all, this chapter’s multi-
ple proposals represent an
alternative to that reflected
in President Trump’s Budget
Blueprint on how best to for-
give education debts, ways
to combat food deserts that
rob entire neighborhoods of
full-service grocery stores,
strengthening financial regu-
lation rules and more.
“The government should be
investing in jobs programs,
reasonable bank regulation,
education, and health care to
ensure economic vitality into
the next century, not more tax
cuts for the rich and less regu-
lation of Wall Street. We tried
those options in the 2000’s
and all we got was a financial
crash as thanks for it,” states
the report.
A particularly innovative
proposal is the CBC’s 10-20-30
Formula for all federal agen-
cies. It would require each
agency to commit 10 percent
of their budgets to the 485
counties where 20 percent or
more of the population has
been living below the poverty
line for the last 30 years. This
proposal also calls for the
Trump Administration to es-
tablish a federal interagency
task force to coordinate pov-
erty alleviation efforts.
Preservation of the Com-
munity Development Block
Grant, which was proposed
for elimination by the White
House Budget Blueprint, and
increased attention to truth
in lending, credit access and
the Community Reinvestment
Act (CRA) are also included.
In the aftermath of the fore-
closure crisis, the Center for
Responsible Lending (CRL)
released research on the state
of consumer lending that
spanned a range of loan and
credit products.
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