[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 11 (Thursday, January 22, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S417-S418]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 IT'S TIME TO FIX NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a copy of 
my remarks at yesterday's Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions 
Committee hearing be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                 It's Time To Fix No Child Left Behind

       Since this is the first hearing of the committee in this 
     114th Congress, I have some preliminary remarks.
       This committee touches almost every American.
       No committee is more ideologically diverse and none is more 
     productive. In the last Congress, 25 bills passed out of this 
     committee became laws.
       That's because we worked with Chairman Harkin on areas of 
     agreement.
       I look forward to working in the same way with Ranking 
     Member Murray in this Congress. She is direct, well-
     respected, she cares about people and is results-oriented.
       We are going to have an open process, which means we're 
     going to have a full opportunity for discussion and for 
     amendments. Not just in the committee, but on the floor. In 
     the last two congresses, we reported a bill, but it didn't 
     make it to the floor.
       This congress, we hope to have a bipartisan bill coming out 
     of committee--but even if we don't, the bill will go to the 
     floor and it will have to get 60 votes on the floor, 60 votes 
     to go to conference, 60 votes to get out of conference, and 
     then the president will have his say. We hope to get his 
     signature and get a result.
       Next, the schedule:
       Let me start with some unfinished business:
       Fixing NCLB: This is way overdue, it expired more than 7 
     years ago. We posted a working draft on the website last 
     week, already feedback is coming in--not just from Congress 
     but from around the country. We have several more weeks of 
     hearings and meetings. We hope to have a bill ready for floor 
     by end of February. The House expects to have its bill on the 
     floor by the end of February.
       Reauthorizing the Higher Education Act: This is, for me, 
     about deregulating higher education making rules simpler and 
     more effective. Also, finishing the work we did on student 
     loans in the last congress. Our first hearing on the 
     deregulation task force formed by Senators Mikulski, Burr, 
     and Bennet and me is on Tuesday, February 24.
       As rapidly and responsibly as we can, we want to repair the 
     damage of Obamacare and provide more Americans with health 
     insurance that fits their budgets. Our first hearing is 
     tomorrow on the 30 to 40 hour workweek--the bill introduced 
     by Senators Collins, Donnelly, Murkowski and Manchin. We will 
     report our opinions to the Finance committee.
       Then, some new business:
       Let's call it 21st Century Cures--that's what the House 
     calls it, as it finishes its work this spring. The president 
     is also interested. What we're talking about is getting to 
     market more rapidly, while still safe, medicines, treatments 
     and medical devices. There is a lot of interest in this and 
     we'll start staff working groups soon.
       There will be more in labor, pensions, education, health 
     but those are major priorities and that is how we start.
       The president has also made major proposals on early 
     childhood education and community college. These are 
     certainly relevant to K-12, but we've always dealt with them 
     separately. It's difficult for me to see how we make these 
     issues part of this reauthorization.
       Now to today's hearing: Last week Secretary Duncan called 
     for law to be fixed. Almost everyone seems to agree with 
     that--it's more than 7 years overdue.
       We've been working on it for more than 6 years. When we 
     started, former Rep. George Miller said, Pass a lean bill to 
     fix No Child Left Behind, and we identified a small number of 
     problems.
       Since then, we've had 24 hearings, and in each of the last 
     two Congresses we've reported bills out of committee.
       Senators should know issues by now, 20 of 22 were here in 
     the last congress, 16 of 22 were here in the previous 
     congress.
       One reason it needs to be fixed is that NCLB has become 
     unworkable.
       Under its original provisions, almost all of America's 
     100,000 public schools would be labeled a ``failing school.''
       To avoid this unintended result, the U. S. Secretary of 
     Education has granted waivers from the law's provisions to 43 
     states--including Washington, which has since had its waiver 
     revoked--as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.
       This has created a second unintended result, at least 
     unintended by Congress, which stated in law that no federal 
     official should ``exercise any direction, supervision or 
     control over curriculum, program or instruction or 
     administration of any educational institution.''
       Nevertheless, in exchange for the waivers, the Secretary 
     has told states what their academic standards should be, how 
     states should measure the progress of students toward those 
     standards, what constitutes failure for schools and what the 
     consequences of failure are, how to fix low-performing 
     schools, and how to evaluate teachers. The Department has 
     become, in effect, a national school board. Or, as one 
     teacher told me, it has become a national Human Resources 
     Department for 100,000 public schools.
       At the center of the debate about how to fix No Child Left 
     Behind is what to do about the federal requirement that 
     states annually administer 17 standardized tests with high-
     stakes consequences. Educators call this an accountability 
     system.
       Are there too many tests? Are they the right tests? Are the 
     stakes for failing them too high? What should Washington, 
     D.C. have to do with all this?
       Many states and school districts require schools to 
     administer additional tests.
       This is called a hearing for a reason. I have come to 
     listen.
       The Chairman's staff discussion draft I have circulated 
     includes two options on testing:
       Option 1 gives flexibility to the states to decide what to 
     do on testing.
       Option 2 maintains current law testing requirements.
       Both options would continue to require annual reporting of 
     student achievement, disaggregated by subgroups of children.
       Washington sometimes forgets--but governors never do--that 
     the federal government has limited involvement in elementary 
     and secondary education, contributing only 10 percent of the 
     money that public schools receive.
       For 30 years the real action has been in the states.
       I have seen this first hand.

[[Page S418]]

       I was Governor in 1983 when President Reagan's Education 
     Secretary, Terrell Bell, issued a report called: ``A Nation 
     at Risk,'' which said that: ``If an unfriendly foreign power 
     had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational 
     performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it 
     as an act of war.''
       The next year Tennessee became the first state to pay 
     teachers more for teaching well.
       In 1985 and 1986, every Governor spent an entire year 
     focused on improving schools the first time in the history of 
     the National Governors Association that it happened. I was 
     chairman of the association that year and the Governor of 
     Arkansas, Bill Clinton, was the vice chairman.
       In 1989, the first President Bush held a national meeting 
     of Governors in Charlottesville, Virginia, and established 
     national education goals.
       Then in 1991-1992, President Bush announced America 2000 to 
     help move the nation voluntarily toward those goals, state by 
     state, community by community. I was the Education Secretary 
     at that time.
       Since then states have worked together voluntarily to 
     develop academic standards, develop tests, to create their 
     own accountability systems, find fair ways to evaluate 
     teacher performance--and then adopted those that fit their 
     states.
       I know members of this committee must be tired of hearing 
     me talk until I am blue in the face about a ``national school 
     board.'' I know it is tempting to try to fix classrooms from 
     Washington. I also hear from governors and school 
     superintendents who say that if ``Washington doesn't make us 
     do it, the teachers unions and opponents from the right will 
     make it impossible to have higher standards and better 
     teachers.''
       And I understand that there can be short term gains from 
     Washington's orders--but my experience is that long term 
     success can't come that way. In fact, today Washington's 
     involvement, in effect mandating Common Core and teacher 
     evaluation, is creating a backlash, making it harder for 
     states to set higher standards and evaluate teaching.
       As one former Democratic governor told me recently, ``We 
     were doing pretty well until Washington got involved. If they 
     will get out of the way we can get back on track.''
       So rather than turn blue in the face one more time about 
     the national school board let me conclude with the remarks of 
     Carol Burris, New York's High School principal of the Year. 
     She responded last week to our committee working draft this 
     way:
       . . . I ask that your committee remember that the American 
     public school system was built on the belief that local 
     communities cherish their children and have the right and 
     responsibility, within sensible limits, to determine how they 
     are schooled.
       While the federal government has a very special role in 
     ensuring that our students do not experience discrimination 
     based on who they are or what their disability might be, 
     Congress is not a National School Board.
       Although our locally elected school boards may not be 
     perfect, they represent one of the purest forms of democracy 
     that we have. Bad ideas in the small do damage in the small 
     and are easily corrected. Bad ideas at the federal level 
     result in massive failure and are harder to fix.
       Please understand that I do not dismiss the need to hold 
     schools accountable. The use and disaggregation of data has 
     been an important tool that I use regularly as a principal to 
     improve my own school. However, the unintended, negative 
     consequences that have arisen from mandated, annual testing 
     and its high stakes uses have proven testing not only to be 
     an ineffective tool, but a destructive one as well.

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