Making Further Continuing Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2011

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I thank Senator Alexander for his leadership over so many years on education issues confronting this country and making sure every child in America has the opportunity to fulfill their full potential. I thank him also for his work on this bipartisan effort to do something very unusual for government and also for public education, which is actually to begin an inquiry about not what the next rule or regulation should be but whether there are rules and regulations that are now obsolete or whether our State regulations and Federal regulations are actually not accounting for each other in any way other than to overburden the people who are actually teaching our kids and our kids themselves.

I used to spend a lot of time when I was superintendent of Denver public schools wondering why everybody in Washington was so mean to our teachers and to our kids. Now that I have been here for a couple years, I know the people here are not mean. But this Senate floor is a very long way from the classrooms of this country--the classrooms in Tennessee and the classrooms in Colorado. We have to remember what the effects of everything we do are on that moment when a teacher is in her classroom with 20, 30 kids and trying to do her best to make sure they move forward.

This is an opportunity to not show up with the answers but to ask questions of our teachers and principals and moms and dads and see what we can take away. I have learned something since I have been here, which is that an awful lot of the burden we are placing on people in schools and classrooms and the way in which State and Federal regulations interact with each other--if we can reduce that burden while at the same time elevating our accountability system, improve our accountability system, make sure we are holding everybody accountable for delivering the outcomes from our kids, that not only will we get better results but we are going to find that there is a lot more time in the schoolday and the school year for kids to have well-rounded education all across America.

I thank our former Education Secretary for his work, and I thank our current Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, for working with us on this initiative. I am so looking forward to having a conversation with people, where we are saying: What can we take away, rather than: What are we going to impose on you now?

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I will add one more example to this from my experience in Denver. We complied with No Child Left Behind in the Denver public schools. But there was something that didn't make sense to me and to our teachers and our families, which is that we thought we were asking and answering a completely irrelevant question when it came to accountability, which was: How did this year's fourth graders do compared to last year's fourth graders?

The accountability system in the United States is based upon that. What our teachers told me is: Michael, it is irrelevant because they are not the same kids.

They are right. So we moved to a system that asked the question: How did this group of fifth graders do compared to when they were fourth graders and third graders, compared to what every other child in Colorado with a statistically similar test history did as well. All of a sudden, we began to see places that were driving growth for kids but that were completely unrecognized by the Federal law. We saw other places where kids were achieving at high levels but were falling behind during the course of the year.

There is a lot of wisdom in this country about how to move our kids forward. What we have to do is tear down some of the barriers that are in the way of those good ideas. It took me a long time to get that performance system signed off on both at the State and Federal levels. The State of Colorado has a growth model, and we are talking about growth models all over the country as a result of the work we did in Colorado and the good work that has been done in other States as well.

Sometimes people ask: Why is it so hard to scale quality in public education? If we can, in some small way, tear down some of the unintended barriers to that scaling of quality education, I think our kids will be better for it.

Again, I thank the Senator from Tennessee for signing up on this initiative. I look forward to learning what is working well and what is not working so well in our respective States and watching this spread across the United States. I thank the Chair.

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