Blog

Your Education Road Map

Politics K-12®

ESSA. Congress. State chiefs. School spending. Elections. Education Week reporters keep watch on education policy and politics in the nation’s capital and in the states. Read more from this blog.

Federal

Patty Murray Set to Lead Senate Education Committee After Democratic Wins in Georgia

By Andrew Ujifusa — January 07, 2021 3 min read
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., speaks about the coronavirus during a media availability on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, March 3, 2020 in Washington.
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who helped write the Every Student Succeeds Act, is set to become the chairwoman of the Senate education committee following Democrats’ victory in two U.S. Senate runoff elections in Georgia on Tuesday.

Murray, a former preschool teacher, has served as the ranking Democrat on the committee since 2015. She will replace Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who retired at the end of the last Congress and worked with Murray on writing ESSA as the committee chair.

As the leader of the committee, Murray will have oversight over a variety of education issues, although her top priority will be addressing policy issues related to the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on schools.

In an interview with Education Week last month in which she said she planned on becoming the committee chairwoman if Democrats took control of the Senate, Murray stressed the need for schools to administer assessments to help determine students’ academic needs as a result of school closures and other disruptions.

“I just think we have a moral responsibility to understand how all of our students are doing, where we are falling short, and we have to use data to make sure that we are doing the right thing and sending the dollars to where they are needed the most,” Murray said in that December interview. “That’s called education equity.”

She also said she wants Congress to pass a new COVID-19 relief package that would include more money for K-12 schools once President-elect Joe Biden takes office on Jan. 20.

See Also

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., gives an opening statement during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing to discuss vaccines and protecting public health during the coronavirus pandemic on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2020, in Washington.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., gives an opening statement during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing to discuss vaccines and protecting public health during the coronavirus pandemic on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2020, in Washington.
Greg Nash/Pool via AP

Murray is an advocate for robust assessment and accountability measures for schools, and has said this approach is necessary to ensure that disadvantaged students and struggling schools get additional support and resources.

“We put in guardrails to make sure that students didn’t fall through the cracks,” Murray said in a 2019 interview four years after ESSA became law. “We didn’t want to be five or 10 years out from passing that bill and be back in the same place as before we passed the No Child Left Behind bill.”

She is also an advocate for early-childhood education, and helped create federal Preschool Development Grants when President Barack Obama signed ESSA into law in 2015.

One of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ primary antagonists on Capitol Hill during the Trump administration, Murray is a vocal opponent of using federal dollars to support private school choice. She’s also criticized DeVos’ approach to federal spending on education and the Title IX regulations adopted by the U.S. Department of Education last year.

“We’ve seen her repeatedly turn her back on students and educators and families because she was focused on privatizing our education system, which would drain the resources from our public schools even in a pandemic,” Murray said of DeVos.

Although Murray often enjoyed a productive working relationship with Alexander, with ESSA being the most prominent example in K-12 education policy, the relationship between the two senators frayed during the Trump administration.

Murray will be the second woman to lead the Senate committee that oversees education policy. Former Kansas senator Nancy Kassebaum, a Republican, led the committee from 1995 to 1997, when it went by a different name; its full name now is the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

Murray was first elected to the Senate in 1992. She has also been a member of Democratic leadership in the Senate. Assuming Murray continues to serve on the powerful Senate appropriations committee that determines funding for the Education Department among other federal agencies, she will also exert more influence over K-12 spending as well as policy in the new Congress.

With the victories by Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in the Georgia Senate runoff races Tuesday, Senate control would be split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, but Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would act as a tie-breaking vote and effectively give Democrats control of the chamber once she and Biden take office. (Like many other news outlets, Education Week relies on the Associated Press to call election results.)

Related Tags:

Events

Ed-Tech Policy Webinar Artificial Intelligence in Practice: Building a Roadmap for AI Use in Schools
AI in education: game-changer or classroom chaos? Join our webinar & learn how to navigate this evolving tech responsibly.
Education Webinar Developing and Executing Impactful Research Campaigns to Fuel Your Ed Marketing Strategy 
Develop impactful research campaigns to fuel your marketing. Join the EdWeek Research Center for a webinar with actionable take-aways for companies who sell to K-12 districts.
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Privacy & Security Webinar
Navigating Cybersecurity: Securing District Documents and Data
Learn how K-12 districts are addressing the challenges of maintaining a secure tech environment, managing documents and data, automating critical processes, and doing it all with limited resources.
Content provided by Softdocs

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

Federal Opinion Student Literacy Rates Are Concerning. How Can We Turn This Around?
The ranking Republican senator on the education committee wants to hear from educators and families about making improvements.
6 min read
Image shows a multi-tailed arrow hitting the bullseye of a target.
DigitalVision Vectors/Getty
Federal Biden Calls for Teacher Pay Raises, Expanded Pre-K in State of the Union
President Joe Biden highlighted a number of his education priorities in a high-stakes speech as he seeks a second term.
5 min read
President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress at the Capitol on March 7, 2024, in Washington.
President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress at the Capitol on March 7, 2024, in Washington.
Shawn Thew/Pool via AP
Federal Low-Performing Schools Are Left to Languish by Districts and States, Watchdog Finds
Fewer than half of district plans for improving struggling schools meet bare minimum requirements.
11 min read
A group of silhouettes looks across a grid with a public school on the other side.
Vanessa Solis/Education Week via Canva
Federal Biden Admin. Says New K-12 Agenda Tackles Absenteeism, Tutoring, Extended Learning
The White House unveiled a set of K-12 priorities at the start of an election year.
4 min read
U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona participates in a roundtable discussion with students from Dartmouth College on Jan. 10, 2024, on the school's campus, in Hanover, N.H.
U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona participates in a roundtable discussion with students from Dartmouth College on Jan. 10, 2024, on the school's campus, in Hanover, N.H.
Steven Senne/AP