Timothy Roemer: “I want to take us back to yesterday's key vote on maintaining the testing provisions in this bill that really are the…”

“I want to take us back to yesterday's key vote on maintaining the testing provisions in this bill that really are the guts, the soul of this bill, in terms of accountability, in terms of trying to fairly and objectively measure these children's performances, find out the weaknesses, and then remediate those weaknesses. We had a strong bipartisan vote yesterday to maintain these tests. But I think many of us, as the author of this amendment must have, many of us have reservations about these tests. I want to continue to say as we go forward that one, these tests need to be diagnostic in nature. They should not be high stakes tests, they should not drive teachers to necessarily always teach to a test; they need to be motivated and aligned with standards so that we find and remediate problems that children have and try to help them solve those problems so that they can be promoted to the next grade level. Diagnostic is key in all of this, and I hope we work on this in conference.”