Mark Souder: “how could you have a national test? Every teacher with a right mind and every principal would say teach to the test.…”

“how could you have a national test? Every teacher with a right mind and every principal would say teach to the test. That means, to teach to the test, they have to have courses that have the subject matter that is in the test. It is not even logical. I mean, anybody with basically about a first grade or a Head Start or preschool education ought to be able to figure that is curriculum. But I wanted to give a couple reasons this afternoon why the President should actually oppose national testing to see if we can move him in the direction. Because this is the report card for President Clinton the first semester. If the subject is math, he clearly would get a D minus because he misses basic arithmetic. For example, he sent over ag. appropriations that were less than what he vetoed the other day. I mean, wait a second here. Let us look at the math. This is like blaming us for school lunches when his bill was actually less than we funded in school lunches but then said we tried to cut it. His math does not work. He can't be for a balanced budget and say our tax cuts are taking away from the surplus. But he can propose surplus. His math is D minus, is a little generous. In history, we have an incomplete, because, clearly, he is following the Nixon parallel well. He has read up on Nixon. He has got all the things, yell at the special prosecutor, stonewall them, all that down. But he does not understand other parts of history too well. So we gave him an incomplete there.”