Political Quotes

“I come to the floor to speak about a Colorado common-sense approach to solving a national problem facing schools because of the current No Child Left Behind, NCLB law. Today, I am introducing the Growth to Excellence Act, along with my friend and colleague Senator Bennet. In my travels across the great state of Colorado, educators from Pueblo to Grand Junction have shared with me the difficulties and cumbersome burdens placed on them by NCLB. Although well-intentioned, NCLB has continued to suffer from under-funding and poor implementation, which have in turn hurt our nation's students. A major component of the current law is the measurement of Annual Yearly Progress, or AYP for short, for a group of students. Current law requires States to compare one year's class of students to the next year's class, and it fails to measure the progress of individual students over time. This is problematic for schools because it doesn't adequately represent true educational progress, focusing instead on anonymous students' test scores. Likewise, the information is meaningless to parents and students because it does not properly measure individual students' growth over time. Unfortunately, under current law, schools are punished when such groups of students do not meet the required level of AYP, even if individual students actually displayed substantial growth over that time. Our bill would fix that.…”