AFT Submits More Than 5,000 Comments to Department of Education on Draft ‘Supplement-Not-Supplant’ Education Regulations

WASHINGTON—Today, the American Federation of Teachers submitted comments from President Randi Weingarten, accompanied by signatures from more than 5,100 individual AFT members, to the Department of Education regarding the proposed “supplement-not-supplant” regulations guiding state implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act.

In a letter to Education Secretary John King that accompanied the AFT’s comments on the proposed regulations, Weingarten said, “There is no doubt that getting additional resources into disadvantaged schools—what we call “leveling up”—will help the students we work with every day. That is why, like the Obama administration, we believe we have a moral obligation to equitably fund our nation’s public schools.”

The signatures from AFT members nationwide, collected via online petition, reflect the real concerns of teachers, paraprofessionals and other school staff about the potential impact of the supplement-not-supplant regulations as originally written.

“Unfortunately, as those who work in schools—as AFT members do—can attest, there is no quick and easy accounting mechanism that can provide a real solution to funding inequities,” Weingarten continued in her letter to King. “Robbing Peter to pay Paul will not work. The only real way to achieve funding equity without taking money away from schools that are meeting their students’ needs is for states and districts to level up funding at under-resourced schools so that their funding levels match or exceed funding at well-resourced schools.”