Mark Souder: “national testing is opposed by the far right. It is opposed by the far right but not just the far right. That is quite…”

“national testing is opposed by the far right. It is opposed by the far right but not just the far right. That is quite the definition. Apparently, the conspiracy is America has now gotten to be now 350 Members of Congress. Two-thirds of America and two-thirds of the Representatives in Congress voted against this. I hope that this resolution puts to rest this whole idea of national testing. The President seemed to have gotten confused in his State of the Union address. He said, ``Thanks to the actions of this Congress last year, we will soon have, for the first time, a voluntary national test based on national standards in 4th grade reading and 8th grade math.'' Did I miss something? The truth is we proactively opposed these testing standards; 300 Members of Congress. We allowed very limited development as part of the compromise but, in fact, this has been taken that they are going to go ahead when that is the opposite message that we sent, which is why we are here this morning. The idea that we had a compromise that somehow is going to move national tests means anybody did not read the details of the language. The fact is the specifics in that language are self-contradictory. It is dead as a doornail. We cannot satisfy both the minority concerns and those who want to measure. We have restrictions in there that the tests cannot be biased. Quite frankly, that has been lodged against every test, and if that is the criteria these tests cannot go ahead.”