Heidi Alexander: “I do agree with the Senator on our goal. We had a good week last week. We had a large number of amendments that were…”

“I do agree with the Senator on our goal. We had a good week last week. We had a large number of amendments that were agreed to, a number were adopted in addition to ones we had in committee. We need to finish this week. We need Senators to do what members of the committee did, which is to pursue a result exercising some restraint. If we all insist on everything we have a right to insist on, nothing would ever happen. As Senator Murray said, teachers, Governors, school boards, and parents are expecting us to get this job done. We can do it. The House did its part last week. We can finish our work this week. Put it together and then she is correct, we want a result, not just a political speech, which means we need to have the President's signature in the end. So we have a bipartisan process. We are 7 years overdue. This is a bill everybody in the country who cares about education wants us to act on. We have had a remarkable consensus on what we need to do. Basically, what we are saying is that we want to keep the important measurements of student achievement so parents and teachers and communities can know how children are doing, how schools are doing, whether anyone is being left behind, but we want to restore to States and local school boards and communities and classroom teachers the responsibility for deciding what to do about the results of those tests and make sure they are appropriate and make sure there are not too many tests.…”