Political Quotes

“I want to raise a couple of comments. First of all, my colleague from Colorado is exactly right. It is not that we oppose the ability of people in Arizona or Colorado to compare how our schools are doing with other schools in Michigan or California. And there are tests to do that right now. Two of the best that we all have heard of are the Iowa test of basic skills, which I know I took and my children take, and the Stanford test. Those are independent, privately written national tests which enable us to compare how schools in our neighborhoods are doing or our States are doing with schools halfway across the country. There are tests to do that and there should be. We support that. But as my colleague has pointed out, the Clinton proposal is not that we just have the ability to compare. It is that we have the one Federal, correct, written-in-Washington, D.C., written-inside-the- Department-of-Education test and that is where it gets quite scary.”