Rob Andrews: “11 years after Brown v. Board of Education presented an unfulfilled promise, in 1965 the Congress passed a law that said…”

“11 years after Brown v. Board of Education presented an unfulfilled promise, in 1965 the Congress passed a law that said that we should have Federal resources for the children that were achieving the least in America's most difficult schools, many of whom were children of color. For 35 years after that, the essential strategy of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was to send Federal money to these schools and hope that they tried their best. It didn't work. In 2001, in a truly bipartisan effort led by Chairman Miller at the time; Speaker Boehner, who was chairman of the committee at the time; the late Senator Kennedy; President George W. Bush and others got together and said, We're going to keep the resources flowing, but we're going to expect results. We're going to measure whether children can read and calculate, and we're going to see what happens. In the first 5 years after that law passed, there were more gains than had been made in the previous 15 years for African American and Latino children. We hit a wall in about 2005. Rather than think about why that wall was hit and how we could work together to fix it, this bill goes in a whole different direction backwards to 1965. This bill essentially says: no strings attached, here's billions of dollars to local schools. We trust and hope that you will do your best. I think most of them will. But history shows that some of them won't.…”