Every Child Achieves Act of 2015

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. President, in the 1960s the Johnson administration led Congress to start allotting a small amount of money--of Federal funding from the Federal taxpayers to target schools and reach out to the poorest of the poor in America and try to help beat back poverty. Five decades later, we have an education policy in America that reaches out to every single school district in America--millions of kids--that continues to fail them, to fail their parents, and that still has not solved the poverty issue.

What we have is an ever-increasing Federal bureaucracy that has reached well beyond what it was designed for in the 1960s and, I would assure you, reaches well beyond what it was originally designed for--something that would help the poorest of the poor or take care of kids on military bases and those on Indian tribal lands.

No Child Left Behind passed in 2001, authorizing education policy that was even more expansive. The goal was good--make sure that every child in America has the opportunity for success, that every teacher has teaching qualifications, and that every school has accountability. It was approved through 2008, and it still continues today.

Math, reading, and science are now measured in adequate yearly progress for each school, and it has become the slow-rolling disaster. The problem was the source and the goal. Parents, local districts, and States should set education policy--I would think that is something we should agree on--not a massive, centralized, controlled bureaucracy--the bureaucracy that is here, made up of a lot of nice folks who do care about kids; it is just that most of the folks who are here in this bureaucracy dealing with education have never been to Oklahoma, and the folks in Oklahoma don't know their names and don't know why they are managing their district.

The goal should be progress for each student, not each school, but the annual yearly progress demanded by No Child Left Behind really managed the progress of the school, not the child. I can assure you that the parents at home are not trying to figure out if the school is better; they are trying to figure out if their child is better in a particular subject.

Annual yearly progress and the Federal mandates have put my State in the untenable position of playing ``Mother, may I'' with the Federal Government and asking for a waiver every single year and having the national education board determine what our schools in Oklahoma can and cannot do. That has to change.

We want our students in Oklahoma to be college- and career-ready. We want accountability to the parents and the community. We want less burden on the educators who give their lives and their time to the task of helping parents and their children. We want that. As surprising as it may be to some in Washington, DC, we actually do care about our kids. We want the best for them. So we ask a simple thing. Allow Oklahomans to manage education for Oklahomans and just take this assumption: We do love our kids. We are going to work hard to make sure they are taken well care of.

My mom was an educator for decades. She started teaching elementary school and then went into a library and was an elementary school librarian and then a high school librarian and then moved into the black hole of education that is the administration building downtown, where she worked in a burnt-out position in school administration for a district for years. She is passionate about kids. She passed that on to me.

I started out my first year in college as a business major. I thoroughly enjoyed it for probably a week and then shifted the next year to secondary education--the thing that I fought against because my mom was in education, so surely I should not do the same thing, but I loved being with students. I spent 22 years of my life serving students after college. It is a passion in my family. There are multiple educators in my family, both at the college level and in the schools. We believe in education.

I will never forget the student teaching time that I had in college, interacting with those kids for the first time, stepping out of a college setting of being the student to now suddenly being the student teacher and having a classroom and understanding for the first time that it is my responsibility to help those parents educate their children; that I am not now the parent for this child--this child has a parent, and that parent has the responsibility to be able to raise their child well, but I have a responsibility to come alongside that parent and help. Allow us to have that.

This is what I want. I want greater flexibility for States. I want greater authority and responsibility to be placed on parents in education. The people in Oklahoma want the freedom to be able to make decisions about their own children, their own families. That is why I voted for the A PLUS Act. I tried to add that as an amendment to this bill. Steve Daines from Montana and I and multiple others supported the ability for States to have even more control if they choose to, to have both the responsibility and the authority for all areas of all parts of education. We did not win that amendment, but it was a blanket ``We want everything to go back to the States if they choose to have it.'' We will continue to have that fight in the days ahead.

Lamar Alexander brought out an amendment that would have been great to have. It allowed parents to choose their school regardless of whether it is public or private.

Education union leaders had kittens about that, saying: The public schools are getting better, and so we don't want to take funds away from those public schools; we want to keep all of the funds in the public schools.

The parents are saying: I understand that school is going to get better someday, but my child is there right now.

Certain leaders in schools will say: We cannot have Federal funds moved to follow the child.

I would say: Would you allow the parent to help that child have the one shot they are going to get to get an education and allow them to choose where they want to go?

That is why I am also a supporter of things such as the DC opportunity scholarships that will allow children in Washington, DC, to be able to choose the school they attend. The President has fought adamantly against that. So have the education unions. Quite frankly, the parents here in DC want to have the option to send their child anywhere they choose to send them.

I would like to see more reductions in duplication of education programs. There is real reduction in that in this particular bill, but I would like to see even more. We have education programs in the Departments of Defense and Ag and Health and Human Services and multiple other places scattered around the bureaucracy. We need to be able to shrink all of those different programs and to be able to make sure that we are not feeding the bureaucracy but that we are actually helping kids.

I would actually like to see more in this bill dealing with options for those who are homeless. This bill helps us get a better count and better insight on the educational quality and the graduation rate for homeless and foster children. But I would like to have greater flexibility built into this bill, which I did not get. I would like the parents and the people in the local district to be able to have better decisionmaking capability.

What did I get? There are some things we won in this bill. There are no common core mandates. I can assure you, in my State of Oklahoma, most every person in my State stands and cheers when they find out one thing: that there are no common core mandates in this. There are no Federal tests at all. States--my State in particular--will have absolute control over standardized testing and the results of those tests and how they apply the information gained from those tests. The leaders in my State will manage that, control that, and make sure that is accurate for us.

There are no Federal education standards. There is no Federal curriculum. There are reductions in some of the education programs. I am glad to see that, although, as I have already mentioned, I would like to see more of that.

It breaks down some of the funding silos. Do you realize right now that if there is money available in one silo dealing with kitchens, for instance, and nutrition for school, they may allot Federal dollars and say, ``You can have those Federal dollars if you want to buy a new oven.'' But if a district says, ``We don't need more money for ovens; we need money for special education,'' the Federal Government currently says, ``No, you can't do that. You have to buy a new oven.'' That is dumb. Why don't we allow the districts to make that decision? This bill begins to break down some of those funding silos, and it gives them the opportunity to be able to make decisions on that.

What I would like to see and what I did get was more local control of education, dramatically increased local control, in fact, local authority and additional local responsibility. That is the way it should be. Inhofe and I even had a bill on local school board flexibility. We got good downpayment on that bill. There is more to go on that. We need to get a chance to see additional things, but those are things we were able to win.

Can I tell you the one big thing we really won? It is that my State, after this bill passes--if we can get this bill done, my State will no longer have to crawl back to Washington, DC, every year and beg for a waiver in education to maintain the education funding--which, by the way, came out of our State. Literally, the Federal taxpayers pay in with their tax dollars, and the State of Oklahoma has to come crawling to Washington, DC, saying: Can I please have those dollars back to our State? Right now, we have to do that every year.

My State actually lost Federal control because we chose not to do common core. The Department of Education said: If you don't do this, then you are going to lose your funding. For months we lost control of that funding, but that was our choice because we were setting our own standards. We have now won that waiver back. In fact, just a few weeks ago, that waiver was renewed again.

I am already sick to death of our State having to come beg for the Federal dollars that we put into the system and to get permission from someone in DC. This bill finally fixes that. Does it go as far as I want to go? No. I have been pretty clear about that. But it is the first step taking in our long journey towards taking us back in the direction where we need to be--our schools, our parents making decisions for our kids.

Again, I remind you, Oklahoma parents do love their kids, and Oklahoma legislators are doing a great job of trying to turn some things around in a very hard situation. Let's give them the ability to be able to do that. I encourage this body to pass this education bill, and let's get going again towards educating our students and doing the right thing.

I yield the floor.

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