Al Franken: “Certainly. And obviously I believe in the markup we will have a healthy discussion of every part of this bill and of…”

“Certainly. And obviously I believe in the markup we will have a healthy discussion of every part of this bill and of every amendment. I think the Senator from North Carolina is going to be so thrilled with my amendments, that at the end of the day he is going to not just cast an aye vote on the bill but an enthusiastic one. I accept your apology. I don't think you said exactly what you said you said. What you said was if the Senator spent--it is not worth going into. The point is that your work on a bill doesn't start when a piece of legislation is written. Most of the work comes before. And I want everyone to understand that who is listening. This bill has been a tremendous passion of mine. You mentioned passion for success. I want the growth model. Senator Bennet was superintendent of the Denver schools, and very successful. When I did my principal bill, I went to a school in St. Paul, MN, Dayton's Bluff, which had been a failed school and was turned around by a successful principal. So I had a roundtable there. This was very early in my tenure here. One of the principals said, You know those No Child Left Behind tests, we call them autopsies. What he meant was you take them at the end of the year, you take them in late April, and you don't get the results until the kids are out of school, and then the results are abrogated. We have something in Minnesota that the teachers, superintendents, and principals agree on, something called the NWEEA tests. What are those?…”