Heidi Alexander: “according to the Washington Post this morning, the President and his Education Secretary will announce tomorrow that the…”

“according to the Washington Post this morning, the President and his Education Secretary will announce tomorrow that the Department of Education will begin a process to grant waivers to States from the provisions of No Child Left Behind. No Child Left Behind, of course, is a law that was passed with bipartisan support in 2001 and 2002 by Congress. We are in its ninth year of its implementation. It needs to be fixed, and Congress needs to act to fix it. Republican Senators and Members of the House have already offered legislation that will begin to do that, which I will talk about in a minute. But my purpose in coming to the floor is to talk about the waiver requests the Secretary of Education may begin to approve. My request of the Secretary and of the President is that as they establish a waiver process and as they begin to approve waivers, they show restraint and not take unto themselves responsibilities that are the responsibilities of Congress. The truth is, the Secretary has the States over a barrel. We have about 100,000 public schools in America, and as he has correctly said, about 80 percent of them, under the current law, are going to be deemed as failing schools soon. The President and the Secretary and we Republicans would like to take the responsibility for determining which schools are succeeding or failing and put that back in the hands of the States.…”