Lamar Alexander

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Illinois for his remarks. I was thinking, as he was talking about Senator Kennedy, whom we all loved, I think the mistake was that he was on a Republican no-fly list. That was the mistake. But he loved telling that story and enjoyed it very much. It is nice to be reminded of him today because he was chairman of this committee that is producing the fix for No Child Left Behind. He would make, in my view, the most outrageous liberal speeches from the back of the Senate, and then he would come to the front of the Senate and would work out a good bipartisan agreement and get a good piece of legislation. He set a wonderful example for us, and it is nice to be reminded of him. Mr. President, Senator Murray and I have conferred, and I ask unanimous consent that the time until 4:30 p.m. today be equally divided between the two managers or their designees and that it be in order to call up the following amendments: Hirono amendment No. 2109, Tester amendment No. 2107, Alexander amendment No. 2139, Murray amendment No. 2124, Bennet amendment No. 2115; further, that at 4:30 p.m. today, the Senate vote on the above amendments in the order listed, with no second-degree amendments in order to any of the amendments prior to the votes and that the Alexander amendment No. 2139 be subject to a 60-affirmative-vote threshold for adoption; and that there be 2 minutes of debate equally divided between the votes.

Mr. ALEXANDER. For the information of all Senators, we expect a rollcall vote on three of these amendments and that the rest will be adopted by voice vote. PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nevada.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask to set aside the pending amendment in order to call up amendment No. 2139.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I oppose the amendment. Instead of lessening the national school board, this would make it more intrusive. This amendment would say that instead of schools reporting the academic results of five major racial groups, they would do it by country of origin. There are 196 countries of origin. So if we apply the same thinking to White, Hispanic, Black, Native American, we would have an amazing mandate from Washington to States about this amount of data. The Senator's argument should be made to a local school board, which may do this if it wishes, or to a State board, which may make these aggregations if it wishes, but this should not be a Washington mandate to increase from 5 to 16 the number of countries mandated under Asian American and Pacific Islander and to set a precedent for country-of- origin reports for 196 countries. I urge a ``no'' vote.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I urge a ``no'' vote. These programs have not been funded for 20 years for a good reason. It is because the money for these programs can come through other programs, such as the Workforce Innovation Act. This bipartisan bill consolidates 49 programs that were authorized or funded through No Child Left Behind. This would take us in the direction of more Federal programs, not fewer. I urge a ``no'' vote so that we can reduce the amount of Federal programs from Washington to the States, and let's use the existing dollars that we have to help Indians, Native Americans, and Alaska's native education programs. That is the most effective way to do it. I urge a ``no'' vote. I ask unanimous consent that the votes following the first vote in this series--that means this vote and the next vote--be 10 minutes in length.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, this has been a very good day. I appreciate Senators coming to the floor. It has been interesting to hear Senators' differing opinions on some issues, but there is a consensus that runs through this debate, and it runs through the Democratic side as well as the Republican side, which is that we have a consensus about the need to fix No Child Left Behind and we have a consensus about how to do it. I thank the senior Democrat on the education committee, Senator Murray, for her excellent work, and I thank the majority leader and the Democratic leader, who have created an environment here where we can get quite a bit done. We have continued during the day to agree to a large number of amendments. We have pretty well worked through some of the more contentious amendments we have had to deal with. We expect to have more amendments tomorrow morning before lunch, although it probably will be later tonight, even in the morning, before we have an agreement on how to do that. So we will continue to work toward that. Let me see if the Senator from Washington has any comments she would like to make.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Democratic leader. Senator Murray and I will make our opening statements, but I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, we begin debate today on a bill to fix the problems with No Child Left Behind, the Federal law that has been causing confusion and anxiety in 100,000 public schools in our country. This week, Newsweek magazine called this the ``law that everyone wants to fix.'' There is a broad consensus about that, and, remarkably, there is a broad consensus about how to fix it. This is the consensus: that we should continue the law's important measurements of students' academic progress but restore to States, school districts, classroom teachers, and parents the responsibility for deciding what to do about the results of those tests. In my view, this change should produce fewer tests and more appropriate ways to measure student achievement. We believe this is the most effective path toward higher standards, better teaching, and real accountability. Our Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee--the Senate's education committee--obviously believes that too. The committee reported the bill unanimously. Senator McConnell, the majority leader, noted earlier that committee has on it some of the Senate's most liberal Democrats and several of the Senate's most conservative Republicans. It was a surprise to many people that the committee reported it unanimously. But the committee understood that this was a problem we needed to solve and that we had a fair and open process, everyone had a chance to participate, and that the bill was good enough to come to the floor, where we could continue to work on it. Not only is there a consensus about how to fix it within the U.S. Senate committee on education, there is outside of the Senate. This bipartisan bill, which has come to the Senate floor, has been supported by teachers, by school boards, by school superintendents, by chief State school officers, and by Governors. The Presiding Officer is a former Governor, as am I. Both of us would have to go back a long time to remember something that was supported as enthusiastically by both the National Governors Association and the major teachers unions, but this bipartisan proposal is. Earlier I thanked the majority leader, Senator McConnell, for putting the bill on the floor. That may seem like a small matter for those not involved in the Senate, but it is a big matter. He has a pretty big list of bipartisan legislation that is important to this country's future, and he could have chosen any of those to bring to the floor. But he saw the importance of education to our country and that we not only need a strong national defense, but we need to be strong at home. So we are going to be dealing with legislation that affects 100,000 public schools, 50 million children, 3\1/2\ million teachers. It may not be big news every day in Washington, DC, but it sure is in Nashville, TN, in Maryville, TN, in Washington State, and in North Dakota. If you go home, you hear quite a bit about Common Core. You hear quite a bit about the national school board. You hear quite a bit about whether the standards we have for our children are enough to help them get a job and to help them succeed in the world we have. So I thank the majority leader for putting it on the floor. As I said before, I thank the Democratic leader, Senator Reid. He has allowed the bill to come to the floor as rapidly as it could. There have been no delaying tactics whatsoever. We didn't have to have a motion to proceed and a cloture vote. I am grateful for that because that means we can work with other Senators and put this bill into shape and give more people a chance to have their say on behalf of their constituents at home. I want to give my special thanks at the outset--and I probably will again during this debate more than once--to the Senator from Washington State, Mrs. Patty Murray. She is a good partner to have in this, and I am glad I took her advice in dealing with this bill. I knew we had a problem because we tried in the last two Congresses to solve this problem, and we absolutely failed. We are 7 years overdue. But Senator Murray made the suggestion that she and I try to work together to create a bipartisan product that we could present to the committee and then work from that. I took that advice, and it turned out to be excellent advice. Her ability to be a forceful advocate for her positions but at the same time command respect within her caucus and among people around the country who know her and to make this work is a principal reason, if not the main reason, we had a unanimous report from the education committee. So I am grateful to her for that. If you are a busy parent of one of the 50 million children attending public school today, you may not know your child has been going to school for the last 7 years under a broken and expired Federal education law. You may not know that the U.S. Department of Education is practically running your child's school, if you live in one of 42 States operating under waivers. You may have heard your child's teacher complain about how little flexibility he or she has to help your child and to innovate in the classroom, and you have probably seen your child's frustration at the number of tests he or she is taking. You have no doubt heard of the frustration of other parents and teachers about Common Core, the academic standard most States have adopted. In 2009, the Department of Education created a $4.4 billion pot of money that States competed for. This was called Race to the Top. States got extra points for adopting Common Core. Race to the Top caused 30 States plus Washington, DC, to adopt Common Core so they could include that in their application. Then along came the phenomenon of waivers, because we in Congress had failed to act since 2007. The original No Child Left Behind bill passed in 2001 became unworkable. It established a goal that by 2014 all of our children in 100,000 public schools would be proficient in math and science. We got to 2014--or were getting there--and the children weren't proficient. So all the schools--almost all our public schools-- were labeled as failing. So to avoid that bizarre result the Secretary issued waivers. But at the same time he issued some requirements about what you had to do to get a waiver if you were the State of North Dakota or Tennessee or some other State. So you are likely to have heard from teachers and school board members frustrated about the narrow definitions from Washington about exactly how to evaluate teachers and what to do about low performing schools. Those requirements came with the waivers. You may be frustrated that your child doesn't have more options for school than the nearest public school. I believe this bill will end many of those frustrations. It will restore responsibility to States for deciding what academic standards to use and will restore responsibility to teachers to do what they do best, and that is to help your child learn what they need to know and be able to do. It will stop the trend of taking too many tests by restoring to States the responsibility for deciding how to use Federal test scores in measuring school achievement. It will help States expand and replicate their best charter schools so more parents will have a choice of schools. The Senate education committee adopted 29 amendments during its debate on the bill. Already Senator Murray and I are working with Democratic and Republican Senators on adopting a large number of other amendments. In fact, I will have a substitute amendment for our bill to offer a little later this afternoon that will include a number of those amendments, and we expect there to be a robust discussion and debate and votes on the Senate floor. Now, just for some context about the debate we are having, when we talk about fixing No Child Left Behind, here is what we are talking about. We are talking about reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. We are talking about the spending in that act of about $23 billion, which the Federal Government distributes to States through the law's nine titles. The biggest title is what we call title I. It spends about $14.5 billion specifically to help low-income students. Now, the $23 billion that is spent through this bill we are debating is a lot of money, but it is only about 4 percent of the total amount this Nation spends each year on kindergarten through 12th grade public education. The Federal Government contributes another 4 or 5 percent to K-through-12 education through various programs. But the rest of the money, about 90 percent, comes from State and local governments. Why No Child Left Behind must be fixed: The problems have been created by a combination of Presidential action--but let us not forget our own responsibility and our own fault for this problem. That is called congressional inaction. So it is the combination of Presidential action and congressional inaction that has led us to a situation where we have a bill described by a major news magazine as ``the education law that everybody wants to fix.'' It started in 2001, when President George W. Bush and Congress enacted a bill called No Child Left Behind, which requires a total of 17 tests between reading and math and science during a child's elementary and secondary education. The results of these tests must be disaggregated and reported according to race, ethnicity, gender, disability, and other measures so parents, teachers, and the community can see which children are being left behind. In other words, a typical third grader would have two tests, one in reading and one in math. Each test should last about 2 hours. Then that test for that school would be reported to the public, and you would break it down according to the groups I just mentioned, and we could see if any group of children in any community is being left behind. That wasn't all the law did. The law also created Federal standards-- created here in Washington--for whether a school is succeeding or failing, what a State or school district must do about that failure, and whether a teacher was highly qualified to teach in a classroom. Those are Washington, DC, definitions. If fixing No Child Left Behind were a standardized test, Congress would have earned a failing grade for each of the last 7 years because No Child Left Behind expired in 2007. We have been unable to agree on how to reauthorize it. As a result, the law's original requirements stayed in place and gradually became unworkable. As I mentioned earlier, this would have caused all of America's public schools--almost all of them--to be classified as failing schools under the terms of the law. The reason for that was the law set up as a goal that by 2014 all children would be proficient in reading and mathematics. That sounded like a fair enough goal to have when you are looking at it from 2001. But the closer we got to 2014--even by some of the lowest and easiest definitions of proficiencies established by States--it was clear that most children and most schools wouldn't reach that goal. So President Obama's Education Secretary offered waivers from the terms of the law, and today 42 States operate their public schools under the terms of those waivers from the original provisions of No Child Left Behind. But instead of just saying yes or no, here is a waiver, each of those waivers contains some requirements. The Secretary really had the State over a barrel. He said: If you want a waiver from these unworkable provisions, you are going to have to do a few things. One is to adopt certain academic standards. That turned out to be, in most cases, Common Core. One was to take prescribed steps to help failing schools. Another was to evaluate teachers in a defined way. There was so much new Federal control of local schools over the last several years that this has produced a backlash against Common Core academic standards, a backlash against teacher evaluation, and against tests in general. Governors and chief State school officers complain about Federal overreach. Infuriated teachers say the U.S. Department of Education has become a national human resources department or, in effect, a national school board. This doesn't just come from Republicans. This comes from Democratic chief State school officers who have come to my office and who have come to Senator Murray's office and have said: Please give us more flexibility. We are with the children. We are in our States. We think we know what to do. They say it in different ways maybe if they are Republicans or Democrats, but they all basically have said the same thing, which is why we have this consensus, at least so far on how to fix this legislation, this law that everybody wants to fix. So what is this remarkable consensus on how to fix the law? Here are nine things the bill does. No. 1, it strengthens State and local control. The bill gives responsibility for creating what we call accountability systems to States. Now, ``accountability systems'' simply means who is in charge of making sure the job gets done. Well, that goes to States, working with school districts, with teachers and with others to make sure all students are learning and preparing for success. The accountability systems will be State designed. They will meet minimum Federal parameters, including ensuring that all students and subgroups of students are included in the accountability system. Disaggregating student achievement data--those are the tests I talked about earlier. In establishing challenging academic standards for all students, the Federal Government is prohibited from determining or approving State standards. So if you are in Alaska, Tennessee or Washington, the Federal Government says if you want the Federal money, you have to have challenging standards and you have to have a test of those standards. But those are your standards, and those are your tests. You need to publicize them so the world can know how kids in schools are doing, but the Secretary in Washington is specifically prohibited by this proposal of ours from determining or approving those standards. No. 2, our legislation would end the Common Core mandate. The bill affirms that States may decide for themselves what academic standards they will adopt without interference from Washington, DC. I mentioned a little earlier how the $4.4 billion pot of money caused as many as 30 States to immediately say: Yes, we will adopt Common Core. Now, maybe they were going to do it anyway, and we can talk about that more in just a minute, but that is what it did. The Federal Government may not, under our proposal, mandate or incentivize States to adopt or maintain any particular set of standards, including Common Core. States will be free to decide what academic standards they will maintain in their States. If they want Common Core, they can have Common Core. If they want half of Common Core, they can have half of it. If they want uncommon core, States can have that. They simply have to have standards, and the Secretary is prohibited from telling them what those standards are. No. 3, the bill would end the Secretary's waivers. The waiver provision was a small part of the original bill in 2001. I doubt if those who passed it ever expected it would be used the way it has been used by the current Secretary. The bill prohibits the Secretary, though, from mandating additional requirements for States or school districts seeking waivers from Federal law. In other words, if I come as Governor of Tennessee to the Secretary of Education and say: I would like to have a waiver. He can say yes or he can say no, but he can't say: Well, you can get a waiver if you will evaluate teachers this way, adopt these standards, and fix these performing schools in that way. That is up to the State. The bill limits the Secretary's authority to disapprove a waiver request as well. No. 4, the bill maintains important information for parents, teachers, and communities. No issue has stirred as much controversy in our discussion as testing. No Child Left Behind required students to take 17 standardized tests over the course of their kindergarten through 12th grade education, and it attached high stakes for schools, school districts, and States to the results. As we studied the problem, as we listened to teachers and Governors and people of both political parties, it became obvious to us that it wasn't so much those 17 federally required tests but the stakes attached to them. A third grader, for example, is required to take only one test in math and one test in reading. The testimony of the Denver school superintendent was that each of those tests takes about 2 hours. If you take two tests in the third grade and two in the fourth grade--and those are the tests that are publicized so people can tell whether the school is succeeding or the child is succeeding or children are being left behind--that is not very much time out of the school year. But the accountability system for what to do about the test results contributed to the exploding number of State and local tests. Many of them were given to prepare students for the high-stakes Federal tests. Our proposal maintains the federally required two annual tests in reading and math in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school, as well as science tests given three times between grades 3 and 12. These important measures of student achievement need to be reported publicly so parents can know how their child is performing. It is important the results be disaggregated so we know if any particular group of students is being ignored or left behind. It can also help teachers support students who are struggling to meet State standards. We have included in our proposal before the Senate an amendment from Senator Collins and Senator Sanders for a pilot program which would allow States additional flexibility to experiment with innovative assessment systems--meaning tests--that might replace the kind of standardize tests used today. It is important to point out that the Federal requirement isn't for a particular test. It simply says the State has to have one and the State has to publicize it in a special way. No. 5, our proposal ends Federal test-based accountability. We discovered that the problem is the Federal Government's accountability system for what to do about the results of these tests, which has contributed to the exploding number of State and local tests. Said another way, it is the ``made in Washington'' decision about what a qualified teacher is, how to evaluate a teacher, and what is adequate yearly progress in a school. All of that is what seems to have caused the exploding number of tests we have heard about so much. To give an example, in testimony it was said to us that Fort Myers, FL, had 183 tests for children in the kindergarten through 12th grade career of a child. We know only 17 of those are Federal tests under No Child Left Behind. So where are the rest of the tests coming from? They are State and local tests. Once the spotlight was shown on Fort Myers, FL, and their 183 tests, it became clear it wasn't No Child Left Behind causing that--or at least it wasn't Federal tests but State and local tests that were causing this. Then the number of tests quickly went down. Because of this, our proposal ends the high-stakes Federal test-based accountability system of No Child Left Behind and restores the accountability system to State and local responsibility to hold schools and teachers accountable. Teachers are in the assessment business. They said to us: Look, there are many different types of tests and assessments. We do this all the time. We have pop quizzes, we have end-of-the-year tests, we have standardized tests, we have multiple choice tests, and we have open- ended questions. We need to be deciding what those assessments should be, and we need to be deciding what weight each of those has in deciding how this child is doing or how this school is doing or how this group of children are doing. So they don't really object to having a standardized test as one of the measurements. What they object to is having a single standardized test--set in Washington, DC--count for so much and to pretend that here we can make a decision about what may be going on in native schools in Alaska or the mountains of Tennessee or schools in Harlem. States must include these standardized tests in their accountability system, but States will determine the weight of these tests. States will also be required to include graduation rates, another measure of academic success for elementary schools, English proficiency for English learners, and one other State-determined measure of school success or student support. States may also include other measures of student and school performance in their accountability systems in order to provide teachers, parents, and other stakeholders with a more accurate determination of school performance. State accountability systems must meet limited Federal guidelines, including challenging academic standards for all students, but the Federal Government is prohibited in this proposal from determining or approving State standards. So whether a State adopts common core or any other academic standard is entirely the State's decision. This transfer of responsibility for determining what to do about the results of tests is why we believe our proposal will result in fewer and more appropriate testing for children. There are three more things that our proposal does. No. 6, it strengthens the charter school program. The bill provides grants to State entities and charter management organizations to start new charter schools and to replicate or expand high-quality charter schools, including by developing facilities, preparing and hiring teachers, and providing transportation. It also provides incentives for States to adopt stronger charter school authorizing practices, increases charter school transparency so we can know what is going on, and improves community engagement in the operation of charter schools. Charter schools are public schools. I remember in 1992, when I was Education Secretary, the last thing I did was that I wrote a letter to all the school superintendents in the country in all the different school districts--I guess there are 14,000 or 15,000--and asked them to consider creating in their school district one of the new start-from- scratch schools that had been created in the State of Minnesota by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor government. There were 10 of them, and they called them charter schools. Those were the first 10 charter schools. There are 6,700 charter schools today. About 6 percent of all public school students go to charter schools. Charter schools, in my view, are nothing more than public schools in which teachers have the freedom to give children what those children need, and parents have the freedom to choose the school that their child attends. I think any teacher would much prefer to have that sort of arrangement and that sort of freedom-- freedom from State regulations, freedom from Federal regulations, freedom from some union rules--so they can provide for the children who come to that school and who choose to go to that school the kind of education those children deserve. No. 7, our proposal would help States fix the lowest performing schools. The bill includes Federal grants to States and school districts to help improve low-performing schools identified by State accountability systems. School districts will be responsible for designing evidence-based interventions for low-performing schools with technical assistance from the States. The Federal Government is prohibited from mandating, prescribing or defining the specific steps school districts and States must take to improve these schools. Why would one do that? Let me give an example of what goes on today. Under the waiver requirements, if you have a low-performing school, you have to identify a certain number. That is prescribed by Washington. Then you have six ways you can fix the school. I insisted a couple of years ago that we add a seventh. Showing my old Governor biases, I said: Let's allow a State to come up with a seventh way of improving a low-performing school, and that would be whatever the Governor thinks would be the best way to do it. That was adopted by the Congress. About 12 months later, out came a regulation from the U.S. Department of Education defining, limiting, and explaining what a Governor could do about it. The whole purpose of the exercise was to get rid of that sort of instruction from here and to recognize that Governors themselves might feel like their principal responsibility might be to improve a low- performing schools. I always did when I was there. And I, with all respect, didn't really need advice from Washington, DC, about how to do it. No. 8, it helps States support teachers. The bill provides resources to States and school districts to implement activities to support teachers, principals, and other educators, including through high- quality induction programs for new teachers and ongoing rigorous professional development opportunities. The bill allows--but doesn't require--States to develop and implement teacher evaluation systems. I know I am using some of my own experiences here, but that is how I have learned. I believe that teacher evaluation is the holy grail of public education. Parents are more important than teachers, but I have yet to figure out how to pass a better parents law. Most of the evidence we know about shows that the single most important way to help a child succeed is to put that child in the presence of a really exceptional teacher. So in 1984, Tennessee became the first State to pay teachers more for teaching well. That included a 1\1/2\-year brawl with the National Education Association, which objected to it. President Reagan was President then. He came to Tennessee not to tell us to do it and not with any Federal dollars but just to say this is important to do and this is good to do. That helped me greatly in passing it in the legislature, which was Democratic at the time, and this kind of leadership began the process across the country that has spread--the evaluation of teachers--to identify the better teachers, to encourage them, to reward them, and to try to keep them in the teaching profession. It was assumed when I came here that because I was so involved in teacher evaluation, I would want to come to Washington and say: OK, now everybody has to do what Tennessee did. But I have done just the reverse. The last thing we needed in Tennessee when we were trying to do teacher evaluation in a fair way was Washington looking over our shoulder, making it more difficult and complicated. Evaluating good teachers, particularly rewarding outstanding teaching, is not easy to do. It sounds simple, but it is hard. It needs something teachers can buy into that may be different in Alaska and Tennessee and Washington, and it needs to respect what the circumstances are in each place. The goal is to reward outstanding teachers and make teaching more professional and to recognize that excellent teachers of math have great opportunities at IBM or some other company. I want to encourage that. This does that, but it doesn't mandate it from Washington. No. 9, finally, this helps States improve the fragmentation of early childhood programs. I suspect we will hear a lot about this from Senator Murray because we heard a great deal about it in the committee from her. She is a preschool teacher. Her mother was as well. I think one of the things Senator Murray learned as a preschool teacher was how to work well with others, which is what 5- year-olds learn. She is a passionate advocate for early childhood education--more than we have in this bill. But we have an important step forward in this bill, in my opinion, that Senator Murray and Senator Isakson offered as an amendment. It was approved by the committee. It will provide competitive planning grants to help States expand quality early childhood education by addressing the fragmentation of spending of Federal dollars currently through early childhood education programs. We spend about $8 billion on Head Start. We spend about another $6 billion or $7 billion on child development block grants. That total amount of money is as much money as we spend in the entire title I program for kindergarten through the 12th grade. We spend another $8 billion or $10 billion throughout different parts of the Federal Government for early childhood education. Then there is State funding for early childhood education. Then there is local funding. Then there is private funding. For example, the testimony from the superintendent of education from Louisiana was that, as much as more money, what would help create more educational opportunities for children ages 2, 3, and 4, is for States and local governments to be able to spend the money we are already spending more effectively. He said: There are too many silos. You can't use the Head Start money in conjunction with this money or that money or in conjunction with this money. This proposal in our bill would be a step toward helping States use Federal dollars more effectively in early childhood education. Finally, I said earlier that if fixing No Child Left Behind was a standardized test, Congress would have earned a failing grade for the last 7 years. In each of the last two Congresses, the Senate committee that Senator Murray and I head produced bills to fix No Child Left Behind. But these bills divided our committee along party lines. Even so, two Congresses ago, Senator Enzi, Senator Kirk, and I voted with the Democratic majority to report a bill out of committee so that the full Senate could act. In the last Congress, the committee majority passed a partisan bill without any Republican votes, but I committed to support Chairman Harkin in taking the bill to the floor if there would be an open amendment process. Unfortunately, these bills never reached the floor. We needed, obviously, to do something different, which is where Senator Murray's leadership became so important. She suggested the way that we proceeded, which allowed us to create a bridge across the partisan divide so that we could recommend to the full committee a bipartisan solution upon which they could build and upon which the full Senate could build. I accepted her suggestion, and I have repeatedly thanked her for it. She and I have listened carefully to our Senate colleagues, to teachers, principals, Governors, chief State school officers, students and parents, and to the business and civil rights communities, and we have listened to each other. I am grateful that the majority leader has put the bill on the floor and that the Democratic leader has allowed it to come to the floor expeditiously. Senators with amendments will have a chance to have a vote on those amendments. Already in our Senate education committee, we considered 58 amendments, and we have adopted 29. We have had a fair and open process, which I believe is the main reason the committee vote was unanimous. I would like to say this: Senator Murray and I have exercised restraint. Neither of us has insisted on forcing into the bill every proposal about which we feel strongly. We know that to get a result we have to achieve consensus. We know that in the Senate, ``consensus'' means at least 60 votes. We know that if we succeed here, we will have to deal with our friends in the House of Representatives. After that, if we want a result, which we do, we want the President's signature. We want to fix No Child Left Behind--not just make a political statement. The only major objection to this bill that I have heard is one from some groups that believe the path to higher standards, the path to better teaching, and the path to real accountability is through Washington, DC, instead of State by State. I would like to offer three reasons why I think this is wrong and why I believe our consensus to restore decisions to those closest to the children is right. No. 1, States are better prepared today to set higher standards, to evaluate teachers, to develop good assessments, and to develop good accountability systems than they were when No Child Left Behind passed in 2001. President Bush and President Obama can take some credit for that and should. No. 2, the national school board--as I call it--which has been created over the last 10 years as we move more and more responsibility from States to Washington, DC, has created a backlash. It has made it harder to have higher standards. It has made it harder to evaluate teachers. It has showed conclusively that the better path to higher standards, better teaching, and accountability is through the States and not through Washington. No. 3, most Americans understand that you don't get wiser and more caring simply by getting on a plane and flying to Washington. In fact, the people closer to the children are usually better equipped to make decisions about their well-being. I have, principally because of age, a long view of this whole process. States are better prepared today than they used to be. I was Governor when Terrel Bell, President Reagan's Education Secretary in 1983, issued ``A Nation at Risk,'' saying that our schools were in such a shape that if a foreign country had done that to our country, we would have considered it an act of war. I worked together with other Governors--the Governors who were elected adjacent to me, especially Governor Clinton, Governor Riley, and Governor Graham--and the National Governors Association. In 1985 and 1986, Governor Clinton and I caused all of the Governors to work on something we called ``Time for Results'' to begin to move State by State toward more achievement for our students. Then in 1989, President George H. W. Bush called the Governors together to a summit and set national education goals. That never happened before in our country. It may sound like an easy thing to do, to say let's have goals of all children being proficient in math, science, English, history, and geography. But just to pick those subjects was a controversial topic. Just to spend that time on it was a great step forward. Then ``America 2000'' in 1991 and 1992, when I was Education Secretary, was the way to reach the goals. That is where we began to see this debate again. Is the best way to do it State by State, community by community or is the best way to do it through Washington, DC? President George H. W. Bush believed the best way to do it was State by State, community by community. He advocated voluntary national standards, but they were voluntary. He advocated voluntary national tests, but they were voluntary. He advocated accountability systems, but they were voluntary as well. He advocated more choices for parents of low-income children and an expansion of charter schools. What the Governors have done since that time is worked together State by State to create our standards, better tests, and better accountability systems. The Governors have also agreed that States would take the so-called NAEP test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is a sample test. Not all students take it. But it keeps the Governor of Tennessee from setting a low standard, which we once did so we looked good when we achieved that standard. Now we can know whether Alaska and Tennessee are really comparable because that test is public and we take it. The second point I made about this was about the backlash. It may seem counterintuitive to say that it is harder to create higher standards because of the Common Core debate, but you would understand it pretty well if you ran for the Senate in a Republican primary or even in a general election, which I did last year. Common Core was an issue both in the primary and in the general election. What I said was this: Wait a minute; I think Washington should stay entirely out of it. But people were so upset with Common Core, not really so much because of what is in it but because Washington was requiring it or at least it seemed to them that it was Washington taking over local schools. The truth of the matter was that Common Core began with Bill Bennett, a former Education Secretary and a leading conservative, when he was head of the National Endowment for the Humanities here in Washington, DC. He sponsored research by E.D. Hirsch in Virginia, who wanted to put more rigor in academic curriculum. When the first President Bush called the Governors together and said we want to set these high goals and Governors begin to talk about what the standards for the proposed goals are, Governors began to work together on something called Achieve. There were some who said: Let's have Washington do it. But the Governor said: No, you stay out of it; we will do it together. It was out of this that the Common Core academic standards came together. It was basically a bunch of conservative Governors working together to add rigor to the system. But what spoiled it was that Washington's involvement in it in the 1990s created this enormous backlash and now Governors are backpedaling. At a time when, for example, in our State we have advanced manufacturing coming in and workers need to know a lot in order to get a job, we are arguing about whether to have high standards because of the backlash against Common Core. We need to get Washington out of the Common Core debate and let Tennessee and every other State make their own decisions about what their academic standards should be. Then, if you don't like what your child is learning, you can go talk to your Governor or your legislature and they have 100 percent of the authority to decide whether that is good or whether that is bad. Then there is teacher evaluation. As I said, I spent a lot of time on that in the 1980s and since. It is hard to do. It is hard enough to do without adding a new element, and the new element is the highly prescriptive method that is defined from Washington about how to do a teacher evaluation. That produced a backlash. Teachers unions are up in arms. When they are up in arms, that makes it harder to put in a teacher evaluation system. If you believe, as I do, that high standards and teacher evaluation are the underpinnings of a great education system and are the way that you help children learn what they need to know and are able to do, you do not want to create a backlash to those efforts by insisting on prescriptive definitions from Washington, DC. Finally, it is a strange idea, as I mentioned earlier as well, to suggest that those of us who fly from Knoxville to Washington--or Senator Murray flies a long way each week and goes all the way to the West Coast and back, but almost all of us go home almost every weekend--get that much smarter and that much wiser on the plane flying here. I may get a little less smart and a little less wise on the plane flight here. It doesn't help me to know any more about what is going on in the Tennessee mountains or the native areas of Alaska or in eastern Washington State by being here in Washington, DC. We spend 4 percent of the Nation's education dollars through this bill we are debating today. I think we have a right to ask: How are these children doing? Take a test, report the results, and let us see if children are being left behind. But we shouldn't presume then to say: Here then is what you ought to do about it. We are going to decide who is succeeding, who is failing, what the right way to fix that is. We can't do that with 50 million children, 100,000 schools, and 3.5 million teachers. All those are better done by men and women who are closer to the children. One of the most eloquent statements of what I just said came from Carol Burris, New York's 2013 High School Principal of the Year. She wrote us after we began work on our proposal and put it online and this is what she said: 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. That is the principal of the year in New York State saying that. She went on to say: 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 far harder to fix. That is advice from the New York Principal of the Year. In other words, our well-intentioned guidance from Washington is usually not as effective as a decision made in the home, classroom, and community by those closest to the children. What we heard over and over from Democrats as well as Republicans was that while continuing measurements of academic progress are important in holding schools and teachers accountable, we should respect the judgments of those closest to the children and leave to them most decisions about how to help 3.4 million teachers help 50 million children in 100,000 public schools. A little humility on our part is an important part of the recipe for a successful fix of No Child Left Behind. I look forward to this debate. I particularly look forward to fixing this law that everybody seems to agree has to be fixed, and that most people seem to agree on how to fix it. If Senators were in a classroom, none of us would expect to receive a passing grade for unfinished work. Seven years is long enough to continue fixing No Child Left Behind. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I call up the Alexander-Murray substitute amendment No. 2089.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I thank the Senator from Utah for his remarks and his contribution to the committee's legislation. He is a former chairman of the Senate's education committee--we call it the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee--and his contributions in this legislation on early childhood education and other matters are awfully important, and I thank him for his work.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I simply wish to acknowledge the contributions of the Senator from Rhode Island. He may not officially be on the committee, but he stays actively interested in all of the education issues. He has made important contributions to the pending legislation in support of libraries, and we are working with him on a number of matters, including risk sharing and higher education. So I thank the Senator from Rhode Island for his leadership and his continued interest in better schools and better colleges and universities.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Will the Senator yield----

Mr. ALEXANDER. For the purpose of allowing me consent to take up several amendments, including Senator Toomey's amendment, which he has worked on so hard for a long period of time and he and I have discussed? This will take about 60 seconds, if he permits this. Senator Murray is here. I thank the Senator for his indulgence. I ask unanimous consent that the following amendments be offered by the two bill managers or their designees in the following order: Fischer, No. 2079; Peters, No. 2095; Rounds, No. 2078; Reed, No. 2085; and Warner, No. 2086.

Mr. ALEXANDER. On behalf of Senator Fischer, I call up amendment No. 2079 and ask unanimous consent that it be reported by number.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on July 7, 2015, at 3 p.m., in room SR-328A of the Russell Senate Office Building, to conduct a hearing entitled ``Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza: The Impact on the U.S. Poultry Sector and Protecting U.S. Poultry Flocks.''

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Armed Services be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on July 7, 2015, at 9:30 a.m.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on July 7, 2015, at 1:30 p.m., in room SR-253 of the Russell Senate Office Building to conduct a hearing entitled ``Technologies Transforming Transportation: Is the Government Keeping Up?''

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on July 7, 2015, at 10 a.m., in room SD-366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on July 7, 2015, at 2 p.m., in room SD-430 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to conduct a hearing entitled ``Small Business Health Care Challenges and Opportunities.''

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on July 7, 2015, at 10 a.m. to conduct a hearing entitled ``The 2014 Humanitarian Crisis at Our Border: A Review of the Government's Response to Unaccompanied Minors One Year Later.''