Political Quotes

“we are continuing our discussion of legislation to fix No Child Left Behind. We are still hopeful that we may have an agreement that we will have one or two votes before lunch. I remind Senators that because of their cooperation we have done pretty well. We have adopted 29 amendments in committee, 22 already on the floor. Senator Murray and I have a large number of other amendments that we are prepared to recommend to the full Senate be adopted by consent. We have about two dozen amendments which we would like to have a vote on today and tomorrow. So the sooner we can move to those, the better, which will take some cooperation from all Senators. Senator Tester, the Senator from Montana, was here earlier. I thank him for his comments. He is a former school board member. He recognizes that the idea that we want to restore responsibility for student achievement to local school boards, to classroom teachers, to States, to chief State school officers is not just a Republican idea, it is a bipartisan consensus. We agree. We want to know whether the children are learning, but we want to restore to the States the decisions about what to do about the results of the tests the students take. As the New York Principal of the Year wrote to us, wrote to our committee: We cherish our children, too.…”