HOUSE RESOLUTION NO. 6
(By Delegates Beach, Hartman, Kuhn, Fragale, Tabb, Renner,
Shaver, Crosier, Perry, Williams, Swartzmiller, Paxton, Long
and Stemple)
(Originating in the Committee on Education)
Urging the President and Congress of the United States to amend
the No Child Left Behind Act immediately to include a
mechanism for a waiver from its provisions for school
accountability that shall automatically be granted to states
such as West Virginia that have successfully increased
student achievement through their own standards and
accountability reforms.
Whereas, West Virginia began standards based accountability
as early as 1988 with the adoption of a performance-based
accreditation system, has continually improved and refined its
system to the present Process for Improving Education that
incorporates high quality standards, assessment, accountability
and capacity building and has held schools and school systems
accountable for student performance on test scores, attendance
and graduation rates for at least fifteen years; and
Whereas, Performance-based accountability in West Virginia
has led the state to take control of four of its lowest performing school systems, make the improvements necessary to
improve student, school and school system performance and return
the first two of these take-over systems to independent and fully
accredited status with the remaining two recent take-over systems
steadily improving under state control; and
Whereas, West Virginia has improved and strengthened its
content standards for the curriculum in the public schools and
has developed a new criterion-referenced West Virginia
Educational Standards Test (WESTEST) aligned with the content
standards that will provide the basis for assessing student,
school and school system performance and progress, including an
informal assessment of students in grades kindergarten through
grade two, annual testing of students in grades three through
eight in mathematics, English language arts, science and social
studies, end of course exams in English language arts and
mathematics in high school and a comprehensive 10th grade math
exam covering subject matter through algebra; and
Whereas, West Virginia has participated in the National
Assessment of Educational Progress tests since their inception
and has shown steady improvement in the scores of its students on
these tests notwithstanding a high incidence of economically
disadvantaged students and students with disabilities; and
Whereas, In 2001 Congress enacted and the President signed
into law the No Child Left Behind Act which has as its announced purpose bringing to the public schools the high academic
standards in reading and mathematics, the test-based
accountability for the achievement of these standards and the
high quality teaching needed for all students to perform at
proficient levels, a purpose which may be appropriate to prompt
some states to implement standards based accountability reform,
but which was already well established in West Virginia; and
Whereas, The No Child Left Behind Act further has the
laudable purpose of bringing more attention and accountability in
the public schools for ensuring that all students graduate with
the requisite proficiency in the basic skills, the appropriations
for achieving this purpose are well below the levels that were
anticipated to be needed and authorized by the Act for schools
eligible to receive Title I funds, a shortfall compounded by the
Act's requirement for a single accountability system that imposes
the same mandates on all other public schools without any
additional funding; and
Whereas, The imposition of a uniform mandate on all public
schools with funding restricted to only an eligible subset of
schools will result in an inequity of educational opportunity for
students at schools not in the eligible subset, thus compounding
the fiscal burden on the states and exposing their entire public
school finance systems to challenges in the Courts; and
Whereas, The imposition of any mandate upon the public schools for which there is insufficient capacity or additional
resources to meet its requirements, particularly a mandate which
includes serious penalties for failure, will divert resources
away from other laudable objectives of the public schools such as
the advanced electives, vocational offerings and enrichment
courses that enable the most academically capable students to
excel; and
Whereas, Even though the educational improvements occurring
in West Virginia over the past decade are proving successful with
steady improvements in student, school and school system
performance, the mandates of the No Child Left behind Act will
cost West Virginia literally millions of dollars that it does not
have and threaten to undermine its progress toward achieving the
education goals of the state; and
Whereas, It is clear that the No Child Left Behind Act
represents the most sweeping federal intrusion into state and
local control of education in the history of the United States,
which egregiously violates the time-honored American principles
of balanced federalism and respect for state and local
prerogatives, especially in the crucial area of education;
therefore, be it
Resolved by the House of Delegates:
That the Congress of the United States be urged to amend the
No Child Left Behind Act immediately to include a mechanism for a waiver from its provisions for school accountability that shall
automatically be granted to states such as West Virginia that
have successfully increased student achievement through their own
standards and accountability reforms; and, be it
Further Resolved, That such waiver be available to these
states so long as they maintain their proven standards and
accountability programs and do not retreat from or weaken them;
and, be it
Further Resolved, That the Clerk is hereby directed to
transmit copies of this resolution to the President of the United
States, the President of the United States Senate, the Speaker of
the United States House of Representatives, and the members of
the West Virginia Congressional Delegation so that they may be
apprized of the sense of the West Virginia House of Delegates in
this matter.
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