Sam Farr: “I am surprised to see this amendment before us and strongly rise to oppose it. This is a country that prides itself on…”

“I am surprised to see this amendment before us and strongly rise to oppose it. This is a country that prides itself on testing. Every child that is going to go to a university has to go out and take an SAT exam. If he or she is going to go to medical school, it is a national exam to take; to go to law school one has to take an exam. We test water and we test air, we test milk, yet now we do not want to test the minds of the kids in this country. We do not want to test their ability in the fourth grade to read or their ability in the seventh grade to do math. I think what the real fear of this national testing is that the people we are going to find that are flunking the tests is Congress itself, in not appropriating enough money for education. You hear minority groups in this Congress rising against this testing because they do not want kids to be tracked, they do not want kids to be stigmatized, and I agree with that, because I think we are going to find we are not spending enough money on the remedial title I programs to remedy those problems.”