Heidi Alexander: “I thank the managers of the bill for allowing me a few minutes to report on a very interesting hearing we had this…”

“I thank the managers of the bill for allowing me a few minutes to report on a very interesting hearing we had this morning before our Senate education committee. It is a different subject than the one on the floor right now, but it is one that both Senator Reed and Senator McCain have been interested in over time. It has to do with whether 22 million undergraduate students in America can afford to go to college and whether millions more high school students can look forward to going to college, and then we have millions more in graduate school who are continuing their education. This affects our country as vitally as any subject, and I thought I would report to the full Senate and to the American people on the excellent, bipartisan hearing we had. This was the fourth hearing we have had in Congress on the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Our committee has already come to an agreement on a bill to fix No Child Left Behind that includes continuing important measurements of how we measure the progress of students in schools in America and then restore to States the responsibility for figuring out what to do about that. We have 22 members on our committee, and we represent as much diversity of opinion in the Senate as exists, which is a lot of diversity of opinion. Yet, our work on fixing No Child Left Behind was unanimous. Our next step will be to reauthorize the Higher Education Act that affects more than 6,000 colleges and universities in America.…”