Political Quotes

“There is no doubt about it. It is a wonderful, feel good math test. My colleague on the other side [Senator Ashcroft] who is fighting this fight against national testing, points out that it is really the rain forest test, because they ask children more questions about rain forests than they do about their ability to do math. This, in fact, is the national test in both reading and math as proposed by the national test panel proposed and established by President Clinton. The test is already written and, by the way, my colleague said being talked about by the Clinton administration, the sad truth is, it is not just being talked about, it is about to be implemented. They are ready to go. But the wonderful thing about this test is that you discover, when you examine it, that in the eighth grade test for math, there is not, I want to say this carefully and slowly so people follow it, there is not one single question which requires eighth graders to do a math computation with a pen and pencil. At no point in the eighth grade math test already written is there a single question where they are to do a multiplication problem with a pen and pencil or a division problem with a pen and pencil. There is not one single question. Why is that? It appears that one of the people on this committee, a Mr. Steven Leinwand, a consultant to the Connecticut Education Department, has written a paper and his school of thought has been adopted by the National Association of Mathematics Teachers.…”