Heidi Alexander: “The Senator from Utah has given an excellent speech about why it would be a good idea to have a Republican President of…”

“The Senator from Utah has given an excellent speech about why it would be a good idea to have a Republican President of the United States, but we don't have one. The reason we are voting today is because we need a U.S. Education Secretary confirmed by and accountable to the U.S. Senate so that the law to fix No Child Left Behind will be implemented the way Congress wrote it. In December, at the ceremony where President Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act, the new law to fix No Child Left Behind, I urged the President to send a nominee to the Senate to be the Education Secretary to replace Arne Duncan. Without that, we would have gone a whole year without a leader of that Department confirmed by and accountable to the U.S. Senate. I made that recommendation to the President because this is such an important year for our 100,000 public schools and the 50 million students who are in those schools. We need an Education Secretary who is confirmed and accountable to Congress while we are implementing a law that may govern elementary and secondary education for some time. I want to be sure we are working together to implement the law the way Congress wrote it. That law was passed with broad bipartisan support. It passed the U.S. Senate by a vote of 85 to 12. It passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 359 to 64. We achieved that result because, as Newsweek said, No Child Left Behind was a law everybody wanted fixed and fixing it was long overdue.…”