Michael Bennet: “I thank Senator Alexander for his leadership over so many years on education issues confronting this country and making…”

“I thank Senator Alexander for his leadership over so many years on education issues confronting this country and making sure every child in America has the opportunity to fulfill their full potential. I thank him also for his work on this bipartisan effort to do something very unusual for government and also for public education, which is actually to begin an inquiry about not what the next rule or regulation should be but whether there are rules and regulations that are now obsolete or whether our State regulations and Federal regulations are actually not accounting for each other in any way other than to overburden the people who are actually teaching our kids and our kids themselves. I used to spend a lot of time when I was superintendent of Denver public schools wondering why everybody in Washington was so mean to our teachers and to our kids. Now that I have been here for a couple years, I know the people here are not mean. But this Senate floor is a very long way from the classrooms of this country--the classrooms in Tennessee and the classrooms in Colorado. We have to remember what the effects of everything we do are on that moment when a teacher is in her classroom with 20, 30 kids and trying to do her best to make sure they move forward. This is an opportunity to not show up with the answers but to ask questions of our teachers and principals and moms and dads and see what we can take away.…”