It might be helpful for all of society if we could better evaluate the circumstances before labeling someone as a sex offender.
I agree. There are state laws already on the books where people who aren't sex offenders get labeled as such, anyway. Unintended consequences. Each state and local community already has laws, practices and policies governing the hiring of teachers and other education personnel, so as Pilgrim noted, the federal government shouldn't be legislating this stuff as it is.
Knowing how the federal government works, without even reading the bill, I know that it's overreaching and encompasses far more than just sexual offenders. All you have to do is look at the legislation of which this House Bill is an amendment, to know that it's going to be a classic government Charlie Foxtrot.
The House Bill is an amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, an act which gets renewed every five years, always with amendments, usually of the feel-goody-goody type, and all of which cause more problems than they solve.
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) was passed as part of President Johnson's "War on Poverty," which should tell you something right there, because as we know, the more money you throw at poverty the less poverty you have.
It was found (and it's true) that that there is an inverse relationship between student achievement and school poverty, where student achievement decreases as school poverty increases. Students from low-income households are three times as likely to be low academic and society achievers if they attend high-poverty schools as compared to low-poverty schools. So, Title I of the ESEA (the funding and distribution part of the Act) was conceived in order to compensate for the considerable educational deprivations associated with child poverty.
So, the idea was, the federal government gives money to the various state education agencies, who then distributes the money to poor school systems and to school systems with more than 40 percent of the students living in poverty. Well, it didn't take long to redefine what poverty meant. Everybody wants their piece of the free federal pie. And the Act gets renewed every 5 years (for the first 15 years, it was renewed every 3 years), so every 5 years we've had new and improved amendments that not only provided more money, but also more and far reaching regulations that have nothing to do with poverty.
The first 15 years saw more regulations governing exactly how funds should be distributed, taking more authority away from the states and putting those decisions into the hands of the federal government. Emphasis was placed on allocating money not just solely for low income students and schools, but also in terms of academic improvement. The whole premise for the Act in the first place was more money would increase academic achievement. When that didn't happen, it became a situation where if your students didn't improve, you didn't get your piece of the pie. It was such that in 1980 President Carter had to create the Department of Education just to handle all the money and the regulations. Yearly standardized tests were mandated. Schools had to produce annual reports showing how well their students have improved. Bilingual education was declared a basic human right. No Child Left Behind. The list goes on.
From WWI up through the 1960s the US was considered at the very top of the list of world countries in academic achievement, particularly in the areas of reading skills, science and mathematics. We have fallen steadily in those rankings ever since the enactment of the ESEA in 1965.
In 1960 there were 20 countries who signed the Convention on the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The goals of that convention is to promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world, with education as one of the primary concepts. Since 1960 there have been 14 other countries that have signed on.
The first OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests were given, which compares the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in 70 countries around the world, and of the 20 countries that were OECD members, the United States ranked first in reading skills, science, and mathematics.
President Johnson sought to improve on that.
The most recent PISA tests reveal that of the 34 current countries in the OECD, the United States has rocketed to 14th in reading skills, 17th for science, and 25th for mathematics. Clearly, we need more money.
"This is an absolute wake-up call for America," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in an interview with The Associated Press. "The results are extraordinarily challenging to us and we have to deal with the brutal truth. We have to get much more serious about investing in education. Clearly, the current funding for education is woefully inadequate."
So now we're back to the current re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and this most recent amendment that the talking heads are all a twitter over because the teacher's union is against it. One of the reasons the teacher's union is against it is not because it prevents sexual predators from being school teachers (the teacher's union doesn't want that, either), but because the amendment covers a lot more than that. Shocking.
The bill on the surface seems like a no-brainer, and was overwhelmingly passed by a voice vote in the House. They "yeas" won handily over the "nays."
It requires schools (that receive federal funds, of course) to (A) a search of the State criminal registry or repository of the State in which the school employee resides; (B) a search of State-based child abuse and neglect registries and databases of the State in which the school employee resides; (C) a Federal Bureau of Investigation fingerprint check using the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System; and (D) a search of the National Sex Offender Registry established under section 19 of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 (42 U.S.C. 16919).
OK, you can't be employed at a school (which receives federal funds, of course) if you refuse to submit to the background check, or make a false statement in connection with such a background check, or are convicted of any of the following felonies:
homicide
child abuse or neglect
a crime against children, including child pornography
spousal abuse
a crime involving rape or sexual assault
kidnapping
arson
physical assault, battery, or a drug-related offense occurring within 5 years prior to the criminal background check.
So, there's nothing that, at least on the surface, seems objectionable, and it's why the bill easily passed with a voice vote. However, child abuse and child neglect covers a whole lot of territory that is neither abuse nor neglect. Get convicted of spanking your child in a grocery store for acting out over not getting that Snickers bar and you can't teach. You can't work in a school in any capacity, not even as a janitor or as a contractor.
The real problems with the above is the spouse abuse, and the physical assault, battery or drug offense, which covers a whole lot of stuff that's not related to children at all. The unions are correct in objecting to this, because minorities are more quickly and more often charged with these felonies.
This amendment stems from a GAO report showing that different states have varying laws dealing with child predators, as to whether the background checks must look at national criminal registries or just state records. So, instead of addressing that issue, and correcting it, they decided to make a good idea a bad one by overreaching. And there will be unintended consequences. There always are. There will be a 50 year old teacher somewhere who loses his job because when he was 19 he slept with a 15 year old who said she was 17, despite the fact that he has an exemplary record since then. Situations like that, situations which are forgivable, are negotiated into union contracts. This amendment voids all that, tying the hands of school boards who would prefer to deal with things like this on an individual basis.
