Michael Bennet: “as we wait for colleagues to arrive to the floor, I thought I would take a few minutes to speak a little bit about…”

“as we wait for colleagues to arrive to the floor, I thought I would take a few minutes to speak a little bit about accountability in this bill. As we know, the No Child Left Behind legislation and now this new version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act require annual tests. They are not popular. I believe we are overtesting kids in this country. It is not the Federal requirement that is causing that; it is the relationship of the Federal requirement to State and local tests that are administered, so that by the time we get to the classroom inhabited by one of my three daughters who go to Denver's public schools, for example, kids end up spending too much time being tested. Part of that is because we haven't done a good job, I don't think, of distinguishing between tests that are used for accountability purposes--how is the school doing growing kids--and tests that are used for teaching and learning purposes, which are assessments that have to happen all the time during the school year. When I was in school, we called those quizzes, and we dreaded them, just as people dread them today. That was the way teachers were able to keep an eye on how students were doing in their classroom throughout the year so they could course correct, so they could make changes based on the individual needs of the kids in their classroom. Teaching and learning and accountability aren't the same things, and I think we put too much freight on some of these assessments.…”