Political Quotes

“I wish to join Chairman Murkowski in expressing my satisfaction and pleasure with this bill we are on and join her in commending the leadership of Ranking Member Patty Murray and Chairman Lamar Alexander. As a result of their work, we have a significant piece of legislation before us. It received bipartisan support in the committee, and I think the secret of their success was that they knew how to let Senators be Senators and work on a bill, really on the merits of it, without a lot of partisan gunslinging. As a result, the legislation before us creates a tremendous improvement in K-2 education over the failed No Child Left Behind Act. The process that led to this was bipartisan, substantive, and thorough. They really listened to a wide array of viewpoints. The result is this strong bipartisan proposal. As one of my senior colleagues on the committee said, this is what happens when you have committee leaders who really know what they are doing. By now, most Americans--certainly my constituents--are familiar with the failures of No Child Left Behind. It overemphasized a peculiar form of testing, a form of testing in which the student took the test but wasn't graded on it. The subject of the test really was the performance of the school itself. Schools became frantic to heap up student performance to protect themselves. As a result, there was a lot of drama in the schools around these tests.…”