Political Quotes

“I come to the floor today on behalf of students, parents, teachers, and communities around the country to urge my colleagues to support our bipartisan Every Student Succeeds Act and to oppose this resolution today. This resolution will roll back a rule issued by the Department of Education that is critical to the effective and intended implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA. I am urging my fellow Senators to vote against this resolution for the following reasons, and I will go through each one of them: First of all, this legislation will throw our States and school districts into chaos just as they are beginning to implement our new law. Secondly, it will give Secretary DeVos a blank check to promote her anti-public school agenda. Third, passing this resolution would be a retreat from the bipartisan law President Obama called a Christmas miracle, one that takes us down a strong partisan path instead, which could undermine ESSA's civil rights protections and guardrails. But before I go into that, I want to remind my colleagues of what we are working on here and what this resolution would unwind. As many of my colleagues remember well, in 2015, the senior Senator from Tennessee and I came together, with so many others in this body, to fix No Child Left Behind. We both agreed--in fact, nearly everyone in the country agreed--the law was badly broken. No Child Left Behind relied too much on high stakes standardized testing.…”