RRCNA Action Alert & Advocacy Update - November, 2007

Dear RRCNA Members:

As Congress prepares for an autumn district work period (November 16 – December 3), education funding heats up and the ESEA reauthorization takes a back seat. Highlights include:

1. Congratulations and thank you, advocates! The U.S. Senate passed the Labor-HHS-Education funding bill in October – your emails and advocacy made a difference! Since then, a conference committee reconciled the House and Senate versions of the bill, which now must be approved by both Houses and then go to the President for either signature or veto. RRCNA is working in coalition with more than 1000 other organizations to urge passage of the conferenced bill. There’s lots more action yet to come, so stay tuned.
    
2. November 6th elections in five states and several big cites impact local, state, federal levels.
    
3. USDE sponsors RTI Summit December 5 - 6, 2007. State education agencies may select up to ten people to attend.
    
4. Reading First Advisory Committee (RFAC) conducts second meeting – finds fault with available data on Reading First.
    
5. National Board for Education Sciences (NBES) recommends new definition of scientifically based research in ESEA.
    
6. Trivia Question: There are five U.S. Senators who also are Presidential candidates, and they all voted the same way on the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill in October. How did they vote? The answer is below.
   

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1. Labor-HHS-Education funding – Click here to see the list of more than 1000 organizations supporting the appropriations bill.
    
2. 2007 Election results - Kentucky and Louisiana will have new Governors in January, Mississippi re-elects current governor, Ohio primary decides candidates for the congressional seat formerly held by Paul Gillmor, who passed away in September. Houston, San Francisco and Pittsburgh re-elected their mayors.
    
3. USDE/RTI Summit – Each state may send a team of up to 10 representatives to the summit, which is intended to help states develop action plans for implementing RTI. State teams must include a Reading First representative, a parent representative and a Title I representative. Who’s on your state team?
    
4. RFAC – At the second RFAC meeting in October, the committee discussed at length deficiencies in the available data on Reading First. In short, the committee stated that no causal inference can be made from the available data, and created several subcommittees to develop current and future options for disaggregating data, collecting and reporting more and better data, managing state variability inherent in the data and other changes. The next meeting is tentatively planned for March 2008. Information about the RFAC is on the USDE website.
    
5. NBES – At the quarterly NBES meeting last week, a representative from the USDE congressional affairs office concluded that “No [ESEA] reauthorization is better than a bad reauthorization” because then the NCLB definition of scientifically based research remains the same. Several recommendations for changing the definition have been offered (including the NBES’s own version), by RRCNA, Success For All, the Knowledge Alliance and others.
   
   

Trivia Answer: This is sort-of a trick question…Senators Joe Biden (DE), Hillary Clinton (NY), Christopher Dodd (CT), John McCain (AZ) and Barack Obama (IL) all were absent for the vote on the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill. Click here to see how your Senators voted on HR 3043.