Patty Murray: “Our colleagues keep referring to local control. How can one define a bill against an amendment that it should be local…”

“Our colleagues keep referring to local control. How can one define a bill against an amendment that it should be local control when this underlying bill itself requires Federally mandated testing, requires funding streams for reading, for technology, for 20 other programs? That is fundamentally a flawed argument against this. Our argument is about local control. Local schools decide whether they want to reduce class size knowing they have a Federal partner if they want to make that happen. Second, I keep hearing the Hanushek study referred to. Let me remind my colleagues that the Hanushek study is based on study of pupil-teacher ratio which includes all of the certified people in the building which is today almost everybody. Hanushek is fundamentally flawed because he does not look at class size. All of the studies that we have shown from Wisconsin, Tennessee, the RAND study, and the California study dramatically show that reducing class size increases student performance. How tragic it will be if this Senate does not approve this amendment and keep the commitment to reducing class size that we began 3 years ago.”