Political Quotes

“I want to be clear: while this amendment helps empower social entrepreneurs and charter school founders and charter school management organizations to serve more kids, it in no way addresses the major underlying flaws of this piece of legislation. The piece of legislation and the underlying bill as a whole are an enormous step backward for accountability and transparency and, as amended on the floor, have taken an even further step back. For instance, with the Scalise amendment, which takes away all reporting requirements with regard to teacher quality, not only removing a Highly Qualified Teacher concept, not only abolishing any intervening accountability measures, but actually gets rid of the ultimate accountability of performance-based measures which are included in the initial Kline bill after 3 years, but have now been stripped out entirely. I have a bill, along with Susan Davis, the STELLAR Act, that would implement a similar concept of providing accountability for teachers. In addition, the watering down of standards--I believe a better name for this underlying bill, in fact, would be A Race to the Bottom, because that's exactly what it risks producing in terms of districts not accounting for kids with disabilities, in terms of districts adopting standards that are not college and career ready.…”