Daniel Schaefer: “They will reject it, certainly, because it stands in the way of the local efforts that we have made to establish quality…”

“They will reject it, certainly, because it stands in the way of the local efforts that we have made to establish quality on local terms. If I can, let me jump for a moment to the bureaucrats who write these tests that we are talking about, the national tests. What they understand is that conflict and controversy within their ranks does not compel public cash. It does not secure the taxpayers' cash for their efforts. If they can come to the White House, to the President, with a package they have all agreed on in their closed rooms and secret little settings, and come to the White House and say, you know, all of us bureaucrats agree on this particular test, they get the Clinton Administration and the U.S. Department of Education to back them and to move boldly ahead in trying to secure the public money necessary to move these ideas forward. That is what you see here. That is why a singular idea with this goofy notion on math, for example, that you should not challenge children to do simple computations, that is how a goofy idea like that is able to move forward in the Clinton Administration, because bureaucrats understand if you challenge another bureaucrat, if you embarrass a bureaucratic colleague, that the money goes away, that the American taxpayers lose confidence, they will not spend their cash on those kind of experiments with our children.…”