Every Child Achieves Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, we are all in agreement that Congress absolutely needs to work together to finally fix the broken No Child Left Behind law for our students, our teachers, our parents, and the communities in my home State of Washington and across the country. Today we will have the chance to take another step forward toward that goal.

As the Presiding Officer heard from our chairman, Senator Alexander, since February of this year, he and I have worked together on a bipartisan education bill that would remove the harmful one-size-fits-all mandates of No Child Left Behind, while also including Federal guardrails to make sure all of our students have access to a quality education.

We improved on our bipartisan bill in the HELP Committee with the help of our colleagues and a number of amendments that were agreed to, and in July the Senate voted to pass that bipartisan bill with a vote of 81 to 17. The House also passed their bill in July.

Since then, Chairman Alexander and I--as he just mentioned--have been working with House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman Kline and Ranking Member Scott. The four of us have had very good conversations about making sure the conference is successful, and I hope we will be able to continue our bipartisan work in the conference, continue to bring in the priorities and ideas of our fellow Senators and Members of the House, and make sure that the final product we will bring forward is something that can pass both Chambers and that President Obama can sign into law. But first we need to take the next step in the legislative process by approving this compound motion to name conferees and allow the Senate to proceed to conference with the House.

In the Senate, we want to appoint every member of the HELP Committee. Our committee members have worked very hard to craft the Senate bill, and we want to make sure their voices are heard in the conference meeting.

I urge our Members to support this compound motion in a few minutes so we can continue this incredibly important work to finally fix No Child Left Behind.

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