On the recordJuly 8, 2015
I first want to thank Chairman Kline and Representative Rokita of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce for working with me on this important amendment, which is to ensure that parents have more authority and power over their children's educations. My amendment is very, very simple. It would allow any parent to opt his child out of high-stakes testing, and it would protect schools from being punished by the Federal Department of Education if parents opted to take their children out of these tests. Since the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, called No Child Left Behind, the Federal Government has placed increasing importance on academic assessments in K-12 education. Assessments are important and even necessary to understand and measure a child's academic progress. However, academic assessments have become an overutilized metric to evaluate everything from the quality of a teacher to the strength of a particular program. Because of this frenzied obsession with high-stakes testing, more and more time is being usurped from actual classroom learning. It was reported that the testing for a student in the 11th grade could take up to 27 days, a total of 15 percent of the entire school year, and a lot of the teachers complain about having to teach to the test. In fact, I think that is why the NEA has come out in support of this amendment.…
