John Thune: “Some people think we do not have enough standardized national testing. They think we need to spend more than $90 million…”

“Some people think we do not have enough standardized national testing. They think we need to spend more than $90 million on telling us how our kids are doing. Right now in my home State of South Dakota and other States around this country, we already give students two standardized tests at a cost of about $30 million. Both of those tests are given in the month of March, and both take about a week to administer. Now we are talking about yet another nationalized test, which would take about another week to administer and would be administered in the month of March. That means that people back home, students back home in my State of South Dakota, would spend virtually the entire month of March not learning, but testing. Think about it. Would you like to spend the better part of 3 weeks doing nothing but filling in the oval next to the correct answer with a number 2 pencil? I cannot think of anything I would dislike more, unless it is spending $90 million to do it. I have a novel idea. If we want to find out how our kids are doing and how they are doing in their local schools, we should call our child's teacher.…”