Lamar Alexander

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I wish to congratulate Senator Enzi and Senator Durbin and say how pleased I am to join as a cosponsor of their legislation. Here is what I want to congratulate them for. Senator Enzi said he came to this as a former mayor, as a former shoe shop owner, and as a former legislator. I come as a former Governor. In our constitutional framework, I have always thought it was our business in Tennessee to decide what services we wanted to provide and what taxes we wanted to levy to pay for them. For example, we have a high sales tax, but we have no income tax. That is different from most States. We have a low overall tax burden. For me, this is, as Senator Durbin and I have discussed, a matter of States rights. I think the most important thing I could say today is that they have solved the problem with this legislation. This problem has been there for a long time. It has had the opposition of conservatives worried about taxes. It has had the opposition of Amazon and other online sellers. Twenty years ago, when technology for businesses to compute and collect taxes was not nearly as innovative as it is today, the Supreme Court said that without congressional approval, states could not require out-of-state businesses to collect sales taxes because this created too much of a burden on interstate commerce. Senator Enzi and Senator Durbin, with this legislation, in my opinion, have solved the problem, and this is going to happen. I am not presumptuous enough to predict what the Congress will do and what the President will sign, but I think I have been around long enough and I have watched Congress enough to say this is going to happen. And if I were Governor, if I were an online retailer, or if I were a catalog retailer, I would make my plans to conduct my business in this way. Why do I say that? Well, for one thing, times have changed. This morning, I got up and looked up the weather in my hometown. So I went online and put in weather, 37886--that is my ZIP Code--and back came the information. Under the bill Senator Durbin and Senator Enzi have proposed, the State would create a system for Amazon, let's say as an example, an online seller. All they would have to do, if I buy a $300 or $400 television set, is they put my name in, they put in my ZIP code, and the software the State has provided will tell them what the tax is and will even electronically transfer the tax money back to the State. In other words, Amazon will do the same thing the appliance store in Maryville, TN, will do, and that is what we intended to happen. I mean, when we passed a sales tax in Tennessee--I wasn't around then, but I was around when it has been raised--we didn't intend to exempt some people over others. We didn't intend to subsidize some businesses over others. We made a general decision that when we buy things in Tennessee, all sellers would collect the sales tax. We have a local sales tax and we have a State sales tax, and that is our right to decide. Some of the opposition in the past has come from conservative groups. It was important, just yesterday, to see the chairman of the American Conservative Union write a very strong article in support of a House version of this same bill. I talked with him yesterday, Mr. Al Cardenas, a businessman from Florida, and he is reviewing our bill. Ten years ago, William F. Buckley wrote about this problem and said that it was a loophole that needed to be solved and when States decided to subsidize some taxpayers over others and some businesses over others, that was not good conservative philosophy. So when you have Amazon supporting in a strong letter that Senator Enzi read, and when you have the chairman of the American Conservative Union on the same day announcing his support for the same principles, I think you have solved the problem. As Amazon just said in their letter, they are in business to compete and they can sell their goods, they claim, cheaper online than they can buy them in Senator Enzi's store in Gillette, WY. Maybe they can, maybe they can't, but at least they will have a level playing field, and both the store in Gillette, WY, and the online seller will do the very same thing. They will collect the sales tax that is already owed from the purchaser and they will send it directly to the State, which has been the way things have worked for a long time. This is an issue about preserving the States' right to collect or not to collect their own sales tax. It is about closing a tax loophole. It is about stopping the subsidization of some businesses over others, of some taxpayers over others. I will conclude my remarks in a moment, but first here is what William F. Buckley said about it: The mattress maker in Connecticut . . . does not like it if out-of-State businesses are, in practical terms, subsidized; that's what the non-tax amounts to. Local concerns are complaining about traffic in mattresses and books and records and computer equipment which, ordered through the Internet, come in, so to speak, duty free. Of course, Governors and legislators are up in arms as well. This loophole costs States $23 billion. Tennessee could use this money to ward off a State income tax which we don't have and we don't want. Wyoming could use the revenue to reduce its property tax. Other States might reduce rising college tuitions, or they might reward outstanding teachers. This has been a problem for the last 20 years, but Senator Enzi and Senator Durbin, with their legislation, have solved the problem. I will stop where I started. This is not a new tax, it is an existing tax. It is not a tax on the Internet; it is on all sales. Senator Enzi and Senator Durbin, with their legislation, have solved the problem, and I predict that because of the voluntary agreements and the ease of out-of-State vendors doing the same thing Main Street vendors do, that very soon we will eliminate these subsidies and close this loophole. I congratulate them for their years of work in this area. I am happy to join 10 Senators--5 Republicans, 5 Democrats--in cosponsoring this legislation. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to include for the Record the article by Al Cardenas, the head of the American Conservative Union; the essay by William F. Buckley; and a letter from Governor Bill Haslam of Tennessee, endorsing the Enzi-Durbin legislation.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Oh, yes.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Illinois.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, later this week the Senate will vote on a resolution to disapprove the Clean Air Act rule designed to limit the blowing of powerplant pollution from one State to another. In my opinion, overturning the rule would throw the matter back to regulators, back to courts, back to lawsuits, and back into a delay. Senator Pryor of Arkansas and I are introducing today S. 1815. We have sent it to the desk. It is bipartisan legislation that will provide what we believe is a better approach, and that approach is to enact the clean air rule into law but give utilities 1 additional year in which to comply with it. Our approach would provide certainty and cleaner air at the lowest possible cost to ratepayers. The motion to overturn the clean air rule will be offered by the junior Senator from Kentucky, Mr. Paul. Tennesseans admire much about our Kentucky neighbors. We admire their bluegrass, we admire their basketball, we admire their distinguished Senators. But Tennesseans don't want Kentucky's State income tax, and we don't want Kentucky's dirty air. We also know our neighbors in North Carolina don't want Tennessee's dirty air blowing into North Carolina because they have told us that through lawsuits in the courts, which they have won. Air pollution blowing from one State into another makes our citizens sick, especially our younger Tennesseans and our older Tennesseans. Air pollution blowing from other States into our State is a jobs issue. Pollution makes our Great Smoky Mountains more like the ``Great Smoggy Mountains.'' We like to see our mountains and we like for the 9 million visitors who come to visit us every year to stay a long time and to spend a lot of money because that supports our schools and it supports our State revenue. Dirty air blowing into Tennessee from other States makes it harder for us to create jobs in yet another way. I remember 30 years ago when I was Governor of Tennessee and the Nissan corporation came to our State. The very first thing Nissan did when it came to Tennessee was to go down to the State Air Quality Board and ask for an air quality permit in order to operate its paint plant. Fortunately, the air quality in the Nashville area was clean enough that Nissan could locate there. If Nissan hadn't been able to obtain an air quality permit to operate its paint plant, it would have been in Georgia or some other State. As a result the auto jobs which have come to Tennessee in the tens of thousands over the last 30 years would most likely have went to some other State. So dirty air blowing from Kentucky into Tennessee or Tennessee into North Carolina or from any State into another State makes it harder for the recipient State's communities to get their quality permits. It makes it harder, for example, for us to say to Volkswagen and its suppliers: We can provide a home to you because our air is clean enough so that you can get our air quality permit. Mr. President, in 2005, the Bush administration first put into place the predecessor to the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule that we will be voting on later this week. Federal courts found that the Bush rule was flawed in some technical respects and ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to write a new rule, which some now seek to overturn by means of the Congressional Review Act. The Bush clean air rule that was put in place in 2005 has now been there for 6 years. Many utilities have already taken steps to comply with it. The pollution standards in the new rule we will be voting on are about the same as those established in the 2005 Bush rule. As an example of costs, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Nation's largest public utility, tells us that complying with the amended rule will cost its ratepayers between $1 and $2 a month. We often hear, and I will have to say that a lot of those comments often come from our side of the aisle, that it is the job of Congress, not the bureaucrats and the courts, to write the clean air rules. The commonsense legislation that Senator Pryor and I offer today is an opportunity for Congress to do its job in a way that will clean the air at the lowest possible cost to ratepayers.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, later this week the Senate will vote on a resolution to disapprove the Clean Air Act rule designed to limit the blowing of powerplant pollution from one State to another. In my opinion, overturning the rule would throw the matter back to regulators, back to courts, back to lawsuits, and back into a delay. Senator Pryor of Arkansas and I are introducing today S. 1815. We have sent it to the desk. It is bipartisan legislation that will provide what we believe is a better approach, and that approach is to enact the clean air rule into law but give utilities 1 additional year in which to comply with it. Our approach would provide certainty and cleaner air at the lowest possible cost to ratepayers. The motion to overturn the clean air rule will be offered by the junior Senator from Kentucky, Mr. Paul. Tennesseans admire much about our Kentucky neighbors. We admire their bluegrass, we admire their basketball, we admire their distinguished Senators. But Tennesseans don't want Kentucky's State income tax, and we don't want Kentucky's dirty air. We also know our neighbors in North Carolina don't want Tennessee's dirty air blowing into North Carolina because they have told us that through lawsuits in the courts, which they have won. Air pollution blowing from one State into another makes our citizens sick, especially our younger Tennesseans and our older Tennesseans. Air pollution blowing from other States into our State is a jobs issue. Pollution makes our Great Smoky Mountains more like the ``Great Smoggy Mountains.'' We like to see our mountains and we like for the 9 million visitors who come to visit us every year to stay a long time and to spend a lot of money because that supports our schools and it supports our State revenue. Dirty air blowing into Tennessee from other States makes it harder for us to create jobs in yet another way. I remember 30 years ago when I was Governor of Tennessee and the Nissan corporation came to our State. The very first thing Nissan did when it came to Tennessee was to go down to the State Air Quality Board and ask for an air quality permit in order to operate its paint plant. Fortunately, the air quality in the Nashville area was clean enough that Nissan could locate there. If Nissan hadn't been able to obtain an air quality permit to operate its paint plant, it would have been in Georgia or some other State. As a result the auto jobs which have come to Tennessee in the tens of thousands over the last 30 years would most likely have went to some other State. So dirty air blowing from Kentucky into Tennessee or Tennessee into North Carolina or from any State into another State makes it harder for the recipient State's communities to get their quality permits. It makes it harder, for example, for us to say to Volkswagen and its suppliers: We can provide a home to you because our air is clean enough so that you can get our air quality permit. Mr. President, in 2005, the Bush administration first put into place the predecessor to the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule that we will be voting on later this week. Federal courts found that the Bush rule was flawed in some technical respects and ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to write a new rule, which some now seek to overturn by means of the Congressional Review Act. The Bush clean air rule that was put in place in 2005 has now been there for 6 years. Many utilities have already taken steps to comply with it. The pollution standards in the new rule we will be voting on are about the same as those established in the 2005 Bush rule. As an example of costs, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Nation's largest public utility, tells us that complying with the amended rule will cost its ratepayers between $1 and $2 a month. We often hear, and I will have to say that a lot of those comments often come from our side of the aisle, that it is the job of Congress, not the bureaucrats and the courts, to write the clean air rules. The commonsense legislation that Senator Pryor and I offer today is an opportunity for Congress to do its job in a way that will clean the air at the lowest possible cost to ratepayers.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, Senator Corker and I wish to recognize Kathy Cloninger for her outstanding service as the chief executive officer of Girl Scouts of the USA for the past 8 years and her 28 years of service to the Girl Scouts movement. Kathy is a shining example of American leadership and service. She has devoted her life to girls and to one of America's most treasured institutions. We honor her today for a career that has been dedicated to building girls of courage, confidence, and character who make the world a better place. Kathy's journey with Girl Scouts began in 1983 and spanned more than two decades of service as the head of Girl Scout councils in Tennessee, Texas, and Colorado. During her tenure as CEO of the Girl Scouts of Cumberland, TN, Girl Scout membership in our region rose to more than 25,000 girls--an increase of nearly 40 percent. She was also responsible for creating an outreach program that tripled the number of African-American Girl Scouts, increased the participation of Hispanic girls, and brought more than 1,000 girls in public housing into the program. Since assuming her role as CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA in 2004, Kathy has transformed the Girl Scout movement. Under her guidance, the Girl Scouts accomplished the remarkable task of successfully merging 315 councils down to 112 high-performance councils nationwide. Kathy has unified the Girl Scout movement around a common mission and business strategy, laying a sound foundation for success as the organization looks towards its 100th anniversary and beyond. Kathy's service goes well beyond Girl Scouts. She has received numerous awards for her work on behalf of youth empowerment and the nonprofit community, including Nonprofit CEO of the Year 2000 from the Center for Nonprofit Management. In 2010, Kathy was named one of the ``21 Leaders for the 21st Century'' by Women's eNews. Mr. President, we ask our colleagues to join us in thanking Kathy Cloninger for nearly 30 years of service to the Girl Scouts and our country. Kathy leaves Girl Scouts on the eve of its 100th anniversary, with a mission and program that is as critically important today as it was 100 years ago. We wish her the best in all of her continuing work for girls nationwide, and we welcome her back home to Tennessee.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Kansas because I would like to make my point, if I may. Remember, the State of Tennessee won Race to the Top. It has been working on teacher evaluation for 25 years. It developed the Sanders Model, which was the first real way that we related student achievement to teacher performance. May sound easy. It is pretty hard. Nobody else would do it. This professor at the University of Tennessee's Agriculture Department, a statistician, said: I think I can do it. He did it, and it is being used all around the country in many places--but not everyplace. Some do not have confidence in it. So Tennessee wins $500 million in Race to the Top--to do what? Have a teacher and principal evaluation program. Here they are doing it. Twenty-five years of experience, and it is the front page news: ``Evaluation of Teachers Contentious''--all the struggles with that program. Then we get here into what is involved. It says: Under the new system-- This is the Tennessee system of evaluation-- tenured teachers will be evaluated at least four times each year. Nontenured teachers will be evaluated at least six times each year. . . . Teacher effectiveness ratings are calculated using a formula that is 50 percent qualitative and 50 percent quantitative. The quantitative portion combines student growth (35 percent) and student achievement (15 percent). Now, they are having a tough time down in Maryville, TN, and Nashville, TN, about implementing their own proposal. It says: State officials are also traveling across the state to meet with stakeholders. The state Department of Education's Advisory Group will bring revision recommendations to [the] Education Commissioner. . . . That's Kevin Huffman, one of the best in the country. Based on the proposed revisions, the recommendations might need to be brought before the State Board of Education. Do we really want them to come to Washington after they get through with that and say: OK, now we have it figured out. We are having a really hard time doing it. You tell us what to do. You define what we ought to do. And may we please have your permission to do things this way instead of that way? I think not. I think that would be the kiss of death for any movement for teacher-principal evaluation. So my plea is that we show some restraint, that we recognize that just a little movement here makes a big difference there when we are dealing with 3.2 million teachers, when we are dealing with 100,000 schools, and 15,000 school districts. Secretary Duncan, whom I greatly admire, says: A comprehensive evaluation system based on multiple measures, including student achievement, is essential for education reform to move forward. We cannot retreat from reform. He is exactly right. But that does not mean we need a national school board. That is what a Governor, a legislator, a school district, local people ought to be doing, working with teachers. So the NEA and I may have the same position today on whether to have a mandate definition and regulation from Washington on teacher evaluation. We may agree. I cannot speak for them. But I will be watching--as I did 30 years ago, as I did 15 years ago, as I did 20 years ago as Education Secretary--to see what they are doing in Tennessee. Are they making it easier for Kevin Huffman and the Governor and the legislature to implement this award-winning teacher evaluation program or are they making it harder? So I hope we will have a good, full debate as we move to the markup in the next few days. I respect the enthusiasm of all those who want to begin a process for teacher and principal evaluation. I would like to believe that no one wants it to move more than I do. I have watched it for 30 years. I have fought everyone who is against it for 30 years, and I strongly believe the right way to do it is to recognize that education is like jobs. Both are national concerns, both are of interest to the Federal Government, but we cannot create them from here. We have to create an environment in which local people, State people, can create better schools and create better jobs, and, in this case, a mandate definition and regulation from Washington, a national school board, would be a terrible error. I thank the Presiding Officer, and I thank the Senator from Kansas for his courtesy. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I am delighted the Senator from Colorado is in the chair when I speak. I want to speak on a subject where he is the foremost expert on the day-to-day operation of school systems. He will appreciate and understand what I am about to say in ways that many people will not. Yesterday I had a telephone conversation with a member of an editorial board of a prominent newspaper in this country who asked me this question. She said: Senator Alexander, how can you and the National Education Association possibly be together on the teacher evaluation question? How can you justify that? Then she said: When has the NEA ever done anything to encourage the evaluation of school teachers? That is a good question. Both questions are good questions. What she was referring to, of course, was the draft announced yesterday by Senator Harkin and Senator Enzi, who are the ranking members of the Senate committee that handles education. It included a provision on evaluation of teachers and principals. At my suggestion, and that of others, but contrary to the suggestion of a number of people, it does not include an order from Washington that all 15,000 school districts have a teacher and principal evaluation system. It does not include a definition of what it should be, and it doesn't include the opportunity for the Education Secretary, whoever it may be, to then issue a number of regulations defining what a teacher and principal evaluation system would be in Denver or in Maryville or in Nashville. What it does include is the following: For the first time it specifically allows a State to spend its title II money that is the $2.5 billion of Federal funds that goes to States. It allows that money to be spent to design and implement a principal-teacher evaluation system that is related to student achievement. In my view, that is the holy grail of public education. If we could ever figure out how to do that and to get everybody to do it, I think it would do more than any other single thing we could do to help our children learn what they need to know and be able to do, except some law that would make everybody better parents, and I don't know how to pass such a law. So that is the first thing the Harkin-Enzi draft includes about teacher and principal evaluation. In Tennessee, for example, that would mean there would be about $41 million this year that could be spent for that purpose. There are about 63,000 teachers in Tennessee, so that is about $660 per teacher per year of Federal funds that could be used to design and implement a teacher and principal evaluation system related to student achievement. This is the first time that has been specifically allowed. Secondly, there is something in the draft legislation called the Teacher Incentive Fund. Many school superintendents, such as the distinguished Senator from Colorado, know that program very well. We know in Tennessee because of the work in Memphis. Basically it is a grant that was included as a result of language in No Child Left Behind. Secretary Spellings then beefed up the program, got the money appropriated, and it recognizes the difficulty of figuring out how to reward and evaluate teachers in a fair way, especially if you are going to base compensation on that. It says, if you want to do it, we will give you some money to help you try to do it. So you can do it one way in Knoxville, another way in Denver, another way in Los Angeles. Hopefully what will happen over time is we will find lots of fair ways to reward outstanding teaching and determine outstanding teaching, and smaller school districts and other school districts can borrow ideas from one another. That has been a big success. Secretary Duncan supports it. It has support all the way around. President Obama has supported it. The third thing that is available for helping develop teacher evaluation systems is a program called Race To The Top. There is $700 million in Federal money for fiscal year 2011. That is a lot of money. States had to compete based upon, among other things, their ability to develop teacher and principal evaluation systems. I can brag about this because I had nothing to do with it, at least recently. My State of Tennessee won that competition. It won $500 million, which has been spent to develop and implement an evaluation program for all the teachers in Tennessee. Then there is another item in this draft which fits in here. I would call it the Secretary's report card. All previous Education Secretaries--and I am one of them--have tried to use the bully pulpit. So have Presidents. When I was Governor of Tennessee and we were working on a master teacher program, President Reagan came to Tennessee to say it was a good idea. That was very helpful to me at that time. He didn't say this is how you should do it. He said, I recognize what you are doing and I applaud it and encourage it. Bill Bennett, when he was the Secretary of Education for President Reagan, went to Chicago and said they had the worst schools in the country. That made a lot of news. But when a Secretary uses that bully pulpit, he can make a difference. We have a very good Education Secretary right now, Arne Duncan. What he now has at his disposal no one else has had before. He has 8 or 9 years of reporting requirements of schools all across the country, and there are about 100,000 public schools for which he has this information. He can go around the country and say: This is good. This is bad. I will put the spotlight here. I will brag on this. Let's do more of this. He can do that in a way that nobody ever could before. So this is what is in the draft we are talking about that would for the first time get the Federal Government significantly involved in creating an environment for teacher-principal evaluations related to student achievement. One is $2.5 billion of Federal dollars in title II. All of it can be used for this purpose if States want to. No. 2, there is the Teachers Incentive Fund. That was $399 million this year. Race to the Top was nearly $700 million. Then there is the Secretary's Report Card. I responded to my editor, who called me, and said: Look, I know something about this. In 1983 and 1984, when I was Governor of Tennessee, we became the first State in the country to create a statewide system for rewarding outstanding teaching and paying those teachers based upon that. At that time, in Tennessee--or anywhere in the country--not one teacher made one penny more for being a good teacher. Not one teacher made one penny more for being a good teacher. So that is what we did in 1983 and 1984. She said: How hard could that be? Everybody knows some teachers are better than others. We all know that when we put our children into school. Everybody knows that. Why can't we evaluate teachers? How hard could that be? Well, I was a little bit amused by that because those were exactly the same kinds of questions I was asking in frustration 30 years ago. I would say it to every college of education in the country. I could not find a single one that would help me in any significant way evaluate outstanding teaching. Now, that may sound like an overstatement. But it is not much of an overstatement. I had dean after dean, education professor after education professor say: You cannot do that. You cannot determine that one teacher is better than another one, especially if you plan to reward them, compensate them based upon that. I found that patently ridiculous--patently ridiculous. Just like the editor was trying to tell me every parent knows that. My mother put me in one first grade instead of another first grade in Maryville, TN, because she thought one teacher was better than the other. She had an opinion about that. She was a teacher herself, so perhaps she knew. We all have those judgments to make. IBM hires a lot of education people. They have teachers and they know some are better than others and they pay them correspondingly. Colleges and universities hire a lot of teachers. They pay teachers all the way up the ladder, from lower amounts to very high amounts for distinguished professors. They can find a way to make a distinction, but somehow we got into this rut 30 years ago that said: We cannot make any distinction among teachers based upon their ability to teach, especially related to student achievement, and then we especially cannot take the next step and pay some more than others. The reason I thought that was such an urgent problem 30 years ago was because we cannot trap women in our schools anymore to teach. Women are in the marketplace now. That is what we did for many years. So if we want to attract and keep the very best men and women teaching in our classrooms, we need to be able to recognize excellence when we find it, to encourage it, and to reward it with compensation. I can remember sitting around with a group of Governors in 1980 when the late Bill Clement, Governor of Texas, said to mostly a group of Democratic Governors: When is one of you--and he used another word--so- and-sos going to get the courage to take on the NEA? What he meant was, every single one of us knew that the National Education Association had its foot on everyone who tried to pay some teachers more than others. Well, I was young and maybe did not know better, so in my second term I created a bipartisan commission with the Democratic leaders of the legislature, and we set out to figure out a number of things about education, including a master teacher program. The long and the short of it was, we did that. It took a year and a half of my time as Governor. I must have spent 40 or 50 percent of my time every day engaged in an ongoing brawl, mainly with the National Education Association, as to whether we could do this. They defeated my proposals in the first year. I came back in the second year and won by one vote, and we put in place a voluntary program that before long up to 10,000 Tennessee teachers voluntarily went into a career ladder program, became master teachers, and many got 10-month and 11-month and 12-month contracts. It raised their pay. It improved their retirement. It gave them distinction. I have teacher after teacher come to see me today to thank me for that, including the current leadership of the Tennessee Education Association, whose organization killed the program after I left office. So it is appropriate to ask: Senator Alexander, why are you and the National Education Association in cahoots on any sort of teacher evaluation proposal? Well, I want to say briefly why. A lot has happened since 1983, 1984. Governor Hunt, Democratic Governor of North Carolina, and others have worked to create the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. The NEA and the American Federation of Teachers both participated in that. That was a step forward in recognizing and certifying outstanding teachers. AFT, the American Federation of Teachers, has always been open to this proposal. I remember the late Albert Shanker telling me: Well, if we have master plumbers, we can have master teachers, especially if you are going to pay them more. He invited me to come out to his national convention in Los Angeles to talk about it. President Bush and Secretary Spellings, with the Teacher Incentive Fund, and President Obama and Secretary Duncan, who have taken a lead on this, despite the fact that it is not popular with many of the constituents of their party, have stuck their necks out on this, and I applaud them for that. The Gates Foundation has put money behind it. Bill Gates has told me personally this is one of the two things he wants to do in education with the time and the money he has. So there is a consensus. Everybody might not say, as I do, it is the ``Holy Grail'' of K-12, but there is a consensus that finding fair ways to reward outstanding teaching through teacher and principal evaluation related to student achievement is urgently important. So it is very tempting just to pass a law in Washington to say: Let's order it. Let's just do it. Well, that is not the way things work in the United States of America. We did that with professional development. The law now says, with all that $2.5 billion: Do it. Have professional development programs. I do not know what the Senator from Colorado thinks, but my view--and I do not think Secretary Duncan would mind my repeating his comments often--that is the biggest waste of money we have in the Federal education program. It is not well used. We say: Do it, and so they have all these programs. Teachers know it is a waste of time, and everybody knows it is a waste of time. We are not spending that money wisely. So why are we to think, if we just say, create a teacher evaluation system all across the country in 15,000 school districts, people will just say, OK, they have to do it to get the money, and they will just do it? I think it would be the kiss of death for the whole movement. Although it is tempting to do it that way. Then, yesterday, on my way up here, in my little hometown of Maryville, TN, I picked up the newspaper and it reminded me of why I so strongly believe it is a good idea to create an environment in which school districts and States can create teacher and principal evaluation systems and it is a bad idea to order it, define it, and regulate it from Washington. Here is the headline. I mentioned this yesterday in my remarks on the floor: ``Evaluation of Teachers Contentious.'' Now, here is the State of Tennessee--Mr. President, could I ask unanimous consent for 3 more minutes?

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Kansas, and I will kind of speed up my comments a little bit. But I might take 4 minutes, unless that is a problem.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Are we in morning business?

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, last month several Republican Senators came to the floor and offered legislation to fix No Child Left Behind, the legislation that was passed nearly 10 years ago to try to address our Nation's 100,000 public schools. In that legislation, we sought to fix problems with the legislation, not just to create another big reauthorization bill. The ideas we had were not all our ideas. They included many ideas from President Obama and his excellent Education Secretary, Secretary Duncan, as well as Democratic and Republican Members of Congress. They included having more realistic goals for No Child Left Behind. The original goal set in 2001 would, according to Secretary Duncan, create an unworkable situation where 80,000 of the 100,000 schools might be identified as failing in the next few years. A second goal of our legislation was to move decisions about deciding whether schools and teachers were succeeding or failing out of Washington, DC, and back to State and local governments. A lot has happened in the last 10 years in the States--really the last 20 or 25 but especially in the last 10 years. We have better reporting requirements from No Child Left Behind. We have new State common standards, higher academic standards. We have new State tests that have been created--not here but by the States to do that. And now States are working together to create accountability systems. So there is a much better chance that States and local school districts can create an environment where students learn what they need to know and be able to do. Our legislation encourages States to create what I think is the holy grail of public education; that is, principal-teacher evaluation related to student achievement. I know from experience that is hard to do. In 1983 and 1984, when I was Governor of Tennessee, we became the first State to pay teachers more for teaching well. It took us a year and a half and a huge battle with the National Education Association in order to put it in place, but 10,000 teachers became master teachers. It was a good first step. Tennessee is already doing it again. Here is my local newspaper: Evaluation of teachers contentious. There is nothing more contentious, and the last thing we need is Washington sticking its nose into that, other than to create an environment where State and local governments can use Federal money to pay for their own State and local programs. We propose consolidating programs, making it easier for school districts to transfer Federal money and expand choices and expand charter schools. Now, today, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate education committee--the HELP Committee, as we call it--have introduced another draft piece of legislation to fix No Child Left Behind. I intend to vote to move this bill out of committee, although it is not yet the kind of legislation that I would be willing to vote to send to the President, but it is a good place to start. There is a good deal of agreement in terms of what we want to do in our legislation from a few weeks ago and the Harkin-Enzi bill. Among the agreements is moving decisions about whether schools are succeeding or failing out of Washington. Another is to encourage principal-teacher evaluation without mandating, defining, and regulating it from Washington, DC. Another good provision is to encourage but not define and mandate and regulate using measures of growth of students--not just whether they achieved something but whether they are making rapid progress toward a goal. The idea is to make that in terms of whether schools and students are succeeding. There are many provisions in the Harkin-Enzi bill that have been suggested by both Democrats and Republicans, but there are a number of provisions--not in our legislation--that I don't support, and I am going to seek to amend them. I have indicated to Senators that I intend to offer seven amendments which, in my view, would take out of the legislation provisions that tend to create a national school board. One is the so-called achievement gap. One is the so-called highly qualified teachers provision. These are all provisions that substitute the judgment of people in Washington for that of mayors, local school boards, governors, and legislators. So I don't think we need a national school board, and neither do most Americans. Some will say: Well, then, why would you support a bill that you don't entirely agree with? The reason is we have a process in Congress. This isn't like the health care bill a few years ago when we had 40 Republican Senators and Speaker Pelosi was in charge of the House of Representatives. We now have 47 Republican Senators, we have a Republican House of Representatives, and we need to get started fixing this problem. We need to do something a little different around here. Instead of just beating our chests, we need to find a way to put our heads together, head toward a reasonable result, come up with a solution, and offer it to the President and to the American people. There is no reason in the world why we can't, with the amount of agreement we already have, send to the President by Christmas legislation fixing No Child Left Behind. We should do it because if we don't, Congress's inaction will mean we will transform the U.S. Education Secretary into a waiver-granting czar for 80,000 schools in this country which, according to this law, will be identified as failing. Well, if we were to have an education czar, or if we were to have a chairman of a national education school board, Secretary Arne Duncan would be a good one. But I don't think we want one in the United States of America. So I think we should act before Christmas in order to avoid creating a waiver education czar, and we should act before Christmas in a way that does not create a national school board. There is one other suggestion I would make to the authors of this bill. In our earlier meetings with the President, Congressman George Miller of California, who was a key leader in developing No Child Left Behind, said this bill to fix No Child Left Behind ought to be a lean bill. I agree with Congressman Miller. The legislation Republicans introduced a few weeks ago totaled 221 pages in its five bills. The comparable section of the Harkin-Enzi draft is 517 pages. I urge us to follow Congressman Miller's advice in the final result and be much more succinct than that. So despite these concerns, I will vote on Wednesday or Thursday, whenever we finish, in favor of bringing this base bill out of the HELP Committee and on to the Senate floor where we can have full amendments. I am going to do my best to improve it in committee and on the Senate floor to make it more like the legislation we introduced a month ago. I am going to continue to do that in the conference we have with the House of Representatives. I think it is time we recognize the American people expect us to step up to major issues, to put our best ideas together, and come up with a result. We are part way there. There is a good place to start. I thank Senator Harkin and Senator Enzi for the work they have done, as well as Representative Kline and Representative Miller, and I thank the President and Secretary Duncan for their attitude. I look forward to working with them to come to a conclusion. One last thing: We talk a lot about jobs around here. Every American knows better schools mean better jobs, and they all know schools are a lot like jobs. We can't create them from Washington, but we can create an environment in which people in their own communities, and families and States can create better schools and better jobs. This is a good place to start. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter of support which also outlines my objections to the legislation that was introduced today, and a copy of an article from the Maryville Alcoa Daily Times today which reminds us of how difficult it is to evaluate teachers fairly and how wise we would be if we satisfied ourselves with creating an environment in which that could happen but did not mandate it, define it, and regulate it from Washington, DC.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, in February of last year, we had a fairly extraordinary event at the Blair House here in Washington. The President invited a large number of Members of Congress--must have been 20 or 30 of us around the table. He sat there the whole day, and we sat around the table and we talked about health care. It was called the Health Care Summit. A great many Americans watched that live on television, and because of the Internet and other explosions of new media, they still watch some of the things that were said that day. The reason I know that is because people have come up to me often and talked about an exchange I had with the President of the United States. The issue was about health care premiums in the individual market. Citing a Congressional Budget Office letter, I said to the President: ``Mr. President, respectfully, your new health care law that you propose is going to increase individual premiums.'' He stopped me and said: Now Lamar, let's get our facts straight. You are wrong about that. He proceeded to explain to me why I was wrong and he was right. With all respect, I believe I was right and even just a little year later, what the Congressional Budget Office was saying then, which was that individual premiums would go up as a result of the health care law, the last 17 months have shown that we were exactly right. This last week the Kaiser Family Foundation released a survey that showed the average family premium for employer-sponsored insurance was $15,000 in 2011, a 9-percent increase over the previous year. Let me quickly say that employer-sponsored insurance is not the same as the individual insurance I was talking about with the President a year ago. But it is the same subject. Republicans were saying that we opposed the health care bill because it would increase premiums, and what we wanted to do was to lower the cost of health care for Americans by going step by step in that direction rather than expanding an expensive health care system that was already too expensive for more Americans, and doing it in a way that would increase premiums for many Americans. ABC News said the Kaiser Family Foundation report ``underlines that many of the promises surrounding President Obama's health care legislation remain unfulfilled. Though the White House argues that change is coming.'' Even the New York Times on September 27 said: The steep increase in rates is particularly unwelcome at a time when the economy is still sputtering. Many businesses cite the high cost of coverage as a factor in their decision not to hire. And health insurance has become increasingly unaffordable for many Americans. I reported on this Senate floor my conversations with the chief executive officers of restaurant chains around the country. Together they are the second largest employer in the country after the government, and they employ a great many young people and low-income people, the kind of men and women who are looking for jobs today. What they were telling me was that the mandates of the health care law will make it more difficult for them to hire people. In one specific example, one of the largest of the restaurant chains was saying that he operates his store with 90 employees today, and because of the health care mandates, he will seek to operate his store with 70 employees a day. That is not a way to increase the number of jobs. But there are other provisions in the health care law that cause premiums to go up, which was the point of my discussion with the President in February of 2010. The CMS Chief Actuary predicted in 2010, saying that by 2014--still a couple of years away, 3 years away--growth in private health insurance premiums is expected to accelerate to 9.4 percent, 4.4 percent higher than in the absence of health reform. The President had said in his discussion with me that under the law he proposed, the individual market would cost 40 to 20 percent less. That was also in the Congressional Budget Office letter. But those reductions were overwhelmed by other costs that were identified in the CBO letter that would produce a 27- to 30-percent increase. So the net result, according to the predictions in November 2009 by the Congressional Budget Office, was there would be an increase in individual premiums of 10 to 13 percent. These individual market premiums, premiums that individuals buy without an employer's help, are not the largest share of insurance policies in America, but they affect roughly 12 to 15 million Americans. That is a lot of people who are having their insurance costs go up. Aon Hewitt's recently released 2011 Health Insurance Trend Driver Survey reports that for 2011, individual health care plans reported estimated 4.7-percent increases directly due to the new health care law. Then according to the September 8, 2010 Wall Street Journal article: Health insurers say they plan to raise premiums for some Americans as a direct result of the health overhaul in coming weeks, complicating Democrats' efforts to trumpet their significant achievement before the mid-term elections. Aetna, some Blue Cross Blue Shield plans and other smaller carriers have asked for premium increases of between 1 and 9 percent to pay for extra benefits required under the law. In the same article it says Aetna said that extra benefits forced it to seek rate increases for individual plans of 5 to 7 percent in California, and 5.5 to 6 to 8 percent in Nevada. That was precisely the discussion I was having with the President in February 2010, when I said that under the health care law, because of the mandates in the law, individual health care premium costs will go up. In Wisconsin and North Carolina, according to that same article, Celtic Insurance Company says half of the 18-percent increase it is seeking comes from complying with health care mandates. Then in a September 16 article last year in the Hartford Courant, ConnectiCare is seeking an average 22-percent hike for its individual market HMO plans. Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Connecticut say in a letter, it expects the Federal health reform law to increase rates by as much as 22.9 percent for just a single provision. These increases happen for predictable reasons. Because of the requirements in the law for minimum credible coverage--in other words, if you are required to buy a better kind of health insurance, if you are required to buy a Cadillac instead of a Chevrolet, it is going cost more. And it does cost more. Another factor that will cause insurance premiums to rise is the new taxes on insurance, lifesaving medical devices and medicines in the health reform law. Someone has to pay for those costs, and the ones who are going to pay for them are the people who buy health insurance. Then there is the question of what we call cost shift. When we add 25 million Americans to Medicaid, premiums will increase because the costs will shift to private insurers to help pay for those costs. That is according to the Chief Actuary of CMS which is in this administration. Then, finally, age rating is going to cause insurance premiums to go up. What it basically says is that older Americans will not have to pay as much, so younger Americans are going to have to pay more. It is no surprise that under the new health care law, health insurance premiums are going up, becoming an even bigger drag on employment and on family budgets. This was predicted by the Congressional Budget Office while we were debating the health care law. It was predicted by Republicans who offered an alternative to take steps to decrease costs in health care, instead of this big, comprehensive law that expanded the system that already costs too much. It offers even more reasons why we should repeal or make significant changes in the health care law if we want to create an environment in which we can make it easier and cheaper to grow private sector jobs, and in which more Americans can afford a reasonable cost health insurance. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, our country has endured a 9-percent unemployment rate for a longer period of time than at any other time since the Great Depression. Yet, unfortunately, the Democratic leader is reluctant to address this problem of joblessness in a serious way. One way to address it would have been to take the three trade agreements, which were negotiated 4 and 5 years ago--one with Colombia, one with South Korea, one with Panama--and send them up to the Senate and House and let us ratify them and let us move ahead to avoid losing 350,000 jobs--that is an estimate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce--or create as many as a quarter of a million jobs--that is the estimate of the White House. Yet those three trade agreements had been sitting on the President's desk since the day he took office nearly 3 years ago. They arrived yesterday--or Monday, I suppose it was--and they are here waiting for us to act on them. Every day we do not act on them delays the day when we avoid losing 350,000 jobs or create 250,000 jobs. That has been the case every day for the last nearly 1,000 days. That would be a good way to address the jobs issue, but we have not. Instead, we had the President going around the country during the summer blaming Republicans for not acting on the three trade agreements when, in fact, the President had not sent them to us. There is no way the Congress can act on them until the President forwards them, which he now has. And if he has, why are we not debating them today? That would be a good way to deal with the jobs issue. Here is another example. On September 8, the President came before the Congress and proposed his jobs bill. He said, if I counted correctly, and I was sitting respectfully in the second row, almost in the front row--I think he said as many as 17 times: Pass this jobs bill now. And if that were not enough, he has said it almost every day since then. The Republican leader mentioned it a few times. He was in Dallas yesterday. Pass this jobs bill now; I am ready to enact it, said the President of the United States. Well, it has been sitting there on the Democratic leader's desk for the last couple of weeks, ever since the President sent it up here. He spoke about it on September 8. The person in this body whose job it is to set the agenda is the Democratic leader, a member of the President's own Democratic Party. Why doesn't he bring it up? So yesterday the Republican leader said: I will show courtesy to the President. I will ask the Senate to do what the President has asked that we do, which is pass this jobs bill now, and the Democratic leader objected. So here for the second time we have the President running around the country saying one thing, and then we try to do it, and his leader in the Senate objects. What are we doing instead? Well, a couple weeks ago the Democrats manufactured a crisis over disaster aid when we could have been debating the trade bill, the jobs bill, and we could have been offering the Republican proposals we have to encourage trade, to give this President and future Presidents new trade authority, to reform the tax law, and to have a timeout on regulations that are throwing a big, wet blanket, making it more expensive and harder to create new jobs in America. That would have been the kind of debate we could have had on the Republican proposals we believe would make a difference in this urgent jobs situation which has given us 9-percent unemployment for a longer period of time than at any other time since the Great Depression. So now this week, what are we doing? Well, we are debating a piece of legislation. The Democratic leader has decided this is the important piece of legislation to deal with jobs this week. And what will it do? It will give a punch in the nose to China, our second largest trading partner, our third largest export market, our fastest growing export market, and the second largest economy in the world. History teaches us what will happen. We saw that during the Great Depression. Perhaps it was the cause of the Great Depression. We remember the Smoot-Hawley tariff, the trade war that developed, the reciprocal punches in the nose that countries gave to themselves over trade, plunging the world into a depression. So here we are in a fragile moment, when headlines are saying we may be about to dip into a second recession, and what do we do? The Democratic majority says their best idea about creating jobs is to punch in the nose our second largest trade partner, our third largest export market, and our fastest growing export market, even though we know exactly what they will do to us. History teaches us they will punch us right back in the nose, and the result will be a trade war, which destroys jobs rather than creates jobs. Such legislation as that now pending on this floor is not how the world's strongest economy, the United States of America, should conduct itself. Such legislation is a sign of weakness or lack of self- confidence or defeatism that is not worthy of the United States of America. In Tennessee, we see the advantages of trading with the world, including with China. China is our third largest export market, after Canada and Mexico. Our leading exports are chemicals and agricultural products. Tennessee exports to China totaled $1.85 billion, a 43- percent increase over 2009. A little over 7 percent of all of our exports went to China. In Tennessee, 116,000 jobs are related to the export of manufactured goods; 5.3 million jobs in America. At a time of joblessness, why should we be punching in the nose someone to whom we might sell goods and that would create jobs in the United States? What should we do instead? Of course, there is legitimate concern about the way China values its currency. The administration should work with China to change that. China should accelerate the appreciation of its currency. But what else should the United States of America do? We might take a lesson from history. I remember 30 years ago, when I was just beginning my time as Governor of Tennessee, China was not the country in the news. It was Japan. There were books written: Japan, No. 1. The United States was, as it is today, the world's largest economy, but everybody was predicting: Watch out for Japan. Japan is becoming No. 1. The United States cannot keep up with Japan, it was said. Their autos, their computers, their electronic goods, their other sophisticated goods were going to overwhelm our markets, and we would quickly fall behind. There was in the early 1980s a $46 billion trade deficit with Japan. What did we do? Well, we did not act defeatist. We did not play games. We did not act as if we were the fifteenth largest economy in the world instead of the first. We asserted ourselves. We went to Japan and said to them: Make in the United States what you sell in the United States and take down your trade barriers so we can sell in your country what we make in ours. I went there myself. I remember vividly going to Tokyo in 1979, in November. I met with the Nissan officials. They were considering locating a manufacturing plant in the United States. At that time, they were making all of the Nissan cars and all the Nissan trucks in Japan that they sold in the United States. But they wanted to be in this market, which was and is the most profitable automobile market in the world. So we said to them: Make here what you sell here. And they did. They came to the United States. And where are we 30 years later? Nissan is saying to us that they have operated for 25 years now the most efficient automobile and truck plant in North America, and they are going to be making 85 percent of what they sell in the United States here in the United States. Nothing has done more to create higher incomes and better jobs in Tennessee than the arrival of Nissan and the Japanese industry, followed by the American auto industry, in our State over the last 30 years. That is how a strong and confident country asserts itself in world competition. That is not just true with automobiles, it is true with many other manufacturing companies that have come to our State from Japan and from other places. That is exactly the way we ought to deal with China. Our administration can assert itself in a variety of ways about the currency issue. But we should not act as though we are afraid of China anymore than we were afraid of Japan 30 years ago. We should seize this as a moment of opportunity. We should not escalate a trade war that no one will win. We should grow trade in sales and investment in China and urge them to make in the United States what they sell in the United States. If they should do that, that will create jobs here rather than destroy jobs, as history teaches us a trade war will do. I hope the Senate will decisively reject the legislation that is being proposed to initiate a trade war with China.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I congratulate the junior Senator from Tennessee for his usual good judgment and insight in working on a difficult problem. No Member of this body has done more in the last year to try to highlight the problem of the Federal debt. Through his cap plan, which has been a part of almost every discussion we have had seriously about it, through his effort--more recently to support efforts to try to achieve $4 trillion in debt reduction as a part of the select committee, and his suggestion today that allowing Americans to understand something that most of us hadn't focused on--that during our lifetimes we are paying in $110,000, $120,000 into Medicare and taking out, during our lifetimes, $350,000 or so, and that is a problem that has to be solved. I have been doing research lately on our debt situation. Fundamentally speaking, our problem lies with health care costs. It lies with families, businesses, and with the U.S. Government. Our discretionary spending--the kind we appropriate every year--on everything from national parks and national defense to roads and bridges, that is about 39 percent of the budget. If we stick to our guns on the agreement we made in early August, that will only grow at a little less than the rate of inflation. But it would go over to the mandatory spending, which is about 55 percent of our spending. It is going to go up three times the rate of inflation, and the fastest growing part of that mandatory spending is Medicare and Medicaid. So we need to save our Medicare and Medicaid system so Americans can rely on them. I think Senator Corker shows respect for the voters of Tennessee and for Americans by assuming that if they understand the problem, they will support a serious effort to deal with a solution. I compliment him for that leadership.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I congratulate the junior Senator from Tennessee for his usual good judgment and insight in working on a difficult problem. No Member of this body has done more in the last year to try to highlight the problem of the Federal debt. Through his cap plan, which has been a part of almost every discussion we have had seriously about it, through his effort--more recently to support efforts to try to achieve $4 trillion in debt reduction as a part of the select committee, and his suggestion today that allowing Americans to understand something that most of us hadn't focused on--that during our lifetimes we are paying in $110,000, $120,000 into Medicare and taking out, during our lifetimes, $350,000 or so, and that is a problem that has to be solved. I have been doing research lately on our debt situation. Fundamentally speaking, our problem lies with health care costs. It lies with families, businesses, and with the U.S. Government. Our discretionary spending--the kind we appropriate every year--on everything from national parks and national defense to roads and bridges, that is about 39 percent of the budget. If we stick to our guns on the agreement we made in early August, that will only grow at a little less than the rate of inflation. But it would go over to the mandatory spending, which is about 55 percent of our spending. It is going to go up three times the rate of inflation, and the fastest growing part of that mandatory spending is Medicare and Medicaid. So we need to save our Medicare and Medicaid system so Americans can rely on them. I think Senator Corker shows respect for the voters of Tennessee and for Americans by assuming that if they understand the problem, they will support a serious effort to deal with a solution. I compliment him for that leadership.

Mr. ALEXANDER

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

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, according to the Washington Post this morning, the President and his Education Secretary will announce tomorrow that the Department of Education will begin a process to grant waivers to States from the provisions of No Child Left Behind. No Child Left Behind, of course, is a law that was passed with bipartisan support in 2001 and 2002 by Congress. We are in its ninth year of its implementation. It needs to be fixed, and Congress needs to act to fix it. Republican Senators and Members of the House have already offered legislation that will begin to do that, which I will talk about in a minute. But my purpose in coming to the floor is to talk about the waiver requests the Secretary of Education may begin to approve. My request of the Secretary and of the President is that as they establish a waiver process and as they begin to approve waivers, they show restraint and not take unto themselves responsibilities that are the responsibilities of Congress. The truth is, the Secretary has the States over a barrel. We have about 100,000 public schools in America, and as he has correctly said, about 80 percent of them, under the current law, are going to be deemed as failing schools soon. The President and the Secretary and we Republicans would like to take the responsibility for determining which schools are succeeding or failing and put that back in the hands of the States. We would like to take the responsibility for determining which teachers are highly qualified and put that back in the hands of the States. That is a part of the legislation we introduced last week. Substantially, those ideas are ideas the President and the Secretary either have advanced or agree with. So we have a lot of agreement about this. But the Secretary has the States over a barrel. Most Governors want a waiver. Almost every State, from Missouri to Tennessee to Georgia, will be asking for a waiver. What I hope the Secretary will do is to look at the applications, and if those applications submitted by the States for exemption from the requirements of No Child Left Behind, if they would enhance student achievement, then approve them. If they would not advance student achievement, then deny them. But the restraint I am asking for is that the Secretary not use this occasion, when the States are over a barrel, to become a national school board and begin to impose on the States those requirements that Congress would not do through legislation and that States ought to be deciding for themselves. This is the request of the States themselves. The States have been working over the last 10 years in very good ways to take steps forward together. They have created common standards. They have created tests to measure performance against those standards. The chief State school officers are in the middle of creating an accountability system. A lot of progress has been made in what I like to call the holy grail of elementary and secondary education: finding a way to reward outstanding teaching by connecting it to student achievement. This is something Tennessee became the first State in the country to do when I was Governor in 1983 and 1984 and which many school districts in many States are trying to do now. So the difference of opinion I have, potentially, with this Secretary and this President on what to do about No Child Left Behind may seem very small. Let me compliment the President and let me compliment the Secretary in this way. They stuck their necks out and have taken some positions to help make better schools that are not popular with their natural constituents. I admire that. I respect that. They have advocated a number of changes in the schools; for example, getting rid of the adequate yearly progress provision, moving out of Washington the responsibility for deciding whether schools are succeeding or failing; changing the highly qualified teacher provision so States can figure that out through their own systems. All those are things we agree on, Republicans and Democrats. Where we may disagree, and the reason we have not advanced ahead with bipartisan legislation on No Child Left Behind, is what I would call the difference between Washington mandates and approving State requests or one might even say, the difference between a national school board and giving States the responsibility for making their own decisions. Here is an example of what I mean. There is agreement, as I said, that this process called adequate yearly progress for a lot of schools should not be decided here. We will read in the paper that such and such school is not succeeding or it is failing. It is a good idea for Tennessee or for Missouri or for California to set performance targets to replace adequate yearly progress. But those performance targets ought to be in the States' application and not be required and defined by the U.S. Department of Education in Washington, which could turn it into a national school board. A growth model, the idea of giving States and school districts credit for making progress, sort of an A for effort, to go along with an A for achievement, that is a good idea. President Bush, in his administration, began to permit that exemption from No Child Left Behind. But superintendents ought not to be flying to Washington from Nashville and Denver and different parts of America and asking anybody in Washington to approve their growth model or even be required to have one if they have some other way to decide whether schools are succeeding or failing. Let me take another example that I have a very deep interest in. Teacher and principal evaluation systems related to student achievement. Tennessee became the first State in 1984 to pay teachers more for teaching well. Up until then, not one State paid teachers one penny more for teaching well. In my office this morning were the two Principals of the Year from Tennessee and three representatives of the Tennessee Education Association. Four out of the five were voluntary participants in our Master Teacher Program or Career Ladder Program and were telling me how grateful they were for that. But let me tell you this, it was a controversial and difficult effort. It was opposed massively by the National Education Association, whose members this morning were thanking me for the program, because it is not easy to determine, in a fair way, how to reward outstanding teaching, particularly if we are going to relate it to student achievement and particularly if we are going to relate it to performance pay. The best way to do that is to encourage States and encourage school districts to try different ways of doing it and hope they succeed and borrow ideas from one another. This is what the Teacher Incentive Fund has done for the last few years as a part of No Child Left Behind. I fully support that program and hope we will continue giving money to help school districts who want to try different forms of performance- based pay. But to require a student-teacher evaluation in order to get a waiver from No Child Left Behind runs the risk of school districts all over the country--100,000 schools--being supervised by a national school board. I have had very good conversations with well-meaning superintendents and others in school districts who say: But Congress has to make us do it or we will not do it. I do not buy that. I do not think you can make schools better from Washington, DC. We can create an environment in which they might succeed. Schools are similar to jobs. We have a national responsibility for them, but we cannot create them here. We can create an environment to make it easier and cheaper to create jobs, private sector jobs. We can create an environment to make it easier to create better schools. Then, the next thing someone would say is: There is no harm in just saying in a Federal law or in a requirement for a waiver that we must have a growth model or we must have a performance standard or we must have a teacher-principal evaluation program. What is wrong with that? Here is what is wrong with it. That is not the end of it. Because there is the habit then, every time I have seen it--one time when we passed a law saying the Secretary of Education could not do it, of creating regulations to interpret what the Federal Government means by growth models, performance standards or teacher-principal evaluation systems, a lot of well-meaning staff members and other people and peer review groups then decided what a teacher-principal evaluation system related to student achievement looks like. That is going to be very hard to do since nobody knows what it looks like. That would be akin to telling people--requiring them to drive cars before the car was invented. We have had several good experiments around the country that are identifying good teaching, rewarding performance, relating it to student achievement and relating it to better pay. But it has been very hard to do. No one is absolutely sure how to do it. The worst thing we could do at this time with teacher and principal evaluations related to student achievement, even though I believe it is the holy grail of school reform, is to impose any version of it from Washington. I am simply asking the President and the Secretary to show restraint tomorrow. I have a lot of admiration for this Secretary and respect for the President's positions on kindergarten through the 12th grade education. Many of the ideas in the legislation advanced by Republican Senators last week to fix No Child Left Behind were suggested by Secretary Duncan. He has gone out of his way to work with Republicans, as well as Democrats. He has been an energetic, able Secretary, and I support most of his ideas. For example, he supported the idea--we agreed to it, Democrats and Republicans, Senate and House--that instead of reauthorizing this big law, we would fix it. Then we identified nine areas we tried to fix. The Secretary was comfortable with that, and so were Democratic colleagues and Republican Senators. We set a new, realistic, challenging goal to help all students succeed. We agree on that: Instead of a goal that would require 80 percent schools to be labeled as failing, we will have a new goal that says students will be college and career ready when they graduate from high school. We agreed we should free 95 percent of schools from the Federal requirement of conforming to a federally defined adequate yearly progress mandate. What that simply means is, instead of Washington deciding whether a school in Nashville is succeeding or failing, that decision will be made by the State of Tennessee. The State of Tennessee will be able to do it a lot better today than it could in 2001, because since then we have had common standards adopted by 44 States--tests of those standards adopted by about the same number. We have chief state school officers agreeing on the principles of accountability systems-- these are the performance targets, growth models, and other such things. In the case of Tennessee, they won the Race to the Top competition, which I also support. The third thing is that the Federal Government will help States fix the bottom 5 percent of their schools--that is 4,500 schools picked by the States. The Secretary agrees with that, and we Republicans agree, and I believe our Democratic colleagues agree. We agree on requiring States to have high standards that promote college and career readiness for all students. We agree on encouraging the creation of State and school district teacher and principal evaluation systems to replace Federal highly qualified teacher requirements. But for us that means allowing States--if they choose to do it--to use title II money to pay for it. We are not going to require it or define it. We are going to let it flourish. We believe in continuing the necessary reporting requirements. This may be the greatest contribution of No Child Left Behind since 2002. It requires reports on how schools are doing by subgroup, not on the average. So we can find out if African-American children or Hispanic children are doing as well as other children. We have this great volume of information now from school districts all over the State, so that we have, in effect, better report cards. We believe on the Republican side--and I think there is agreement, in principle, at least, on the Democratic side--that we should allow school districts to transfer Federal funds more easily to meet their needs and to consolidate Federal programs. We believe in empowering parents. In my office this morning, one of the State Principals of the Year from Tennessee was from Powell Middle School in Knoxville. Their enrollment is up this year, from 920 to 1,060, because parents were choosing to take their children out of schools that weren't succeeding, and they were permitted to transfer them to another school--in this case, the Powell Middle School, where they could succeed. That is my request of a Secretary I admire and a President whose K-12 education policies I respect: Please show restraint. Just because you have every State over a barrel, doesn't mean you should be tempted to use this opportunity to become a national school board. Step back, look at the applications for waivers. If they enhance student achievement, say yes; if they don't, say no. Then one last point. Someone might say, and they'd be exactly right, that the real reason the Secretary is granting waivers is because Congress hasn't done its job. We're in our ninth year of No Child Left Behind and we should have fixed it 4 years ago when the law expired. It has just continued, according to the provisions of the original law. We have substantial agreement in the Senate, except for these accountability provisions, these differences over whether we are creating a national school board. We should come to a conclusion about this. We should get a result. We shouldn't create a situation where every Governor has to come to Washington to get a waiver from standards that don't work anymore. That is our job. The Secretary has the power to grant waivers, but he should do it in a limited way and Congress should get to work fixing No Child Left Behind so there is no need for waivers. I call on our Democratic colleagues, with whom we have met dozens of times, to redouble our joint effort to get a result. This is not a case where we don't want President Obama to succeed, as some have suggested. We want him to succeed, because if the President succeeds on K-12 education, the country succeeds. We substantially agree on how we need to fix No Child Left Behind. We still have a few differences of opinion. The Secretary's regulatory action should not do what the Congress ought to be doing. I respectfully suggest that he should show restraint and we should get to work. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I thank my friend of 40 years, the Republican leader, for being here for these remarks I am about to make. I thank my colleague, Senator Corker, and several other of my Republican colleagues for, on very short notice, coming to the Senate floor for these brief remarks. Next January, following the annual retreat of Republican Senators, I will step down from the Senate Republican leadership. My colleagues have elected me as Republican conference chairman three times, and I will have completed 4 years or the equivalent of two 2-year terms at that time. My reason for doing that is this, stepping down from the Republican leadership will liberate me to spend more time trying to work for results on issues I care the most about. That means stopping runaway regulations, runaway spending, but it also means confronting the timidity that allows health care spending to squeeze out support for roads, support for research, support for scholarships, and other government functions that make it easier and cheaper to create private sector jobs. I wish to do more to make the Senate a more effective place to address serious issues. For 4 years in our caucus, my leadership job has been this: to help the leader succeed, to help individual Republicans succeed, to look for a consensus within our caucus, and to suggest a message. I have enjoyed that. However, there are different ways to offer leadership in the Senate, and I have concluded, after 9 years, this is now the best way for me to make a contribution. It boils down to this: Serving in this body, as each one of us knows, is a rare privilege. I am trying to make the best use of that time while I am here. For the same reason, I plan to step down in January from the leadership, I will not be a candidate for leadership in the next Congress. However, I do intend to be more, not less, in the thick of resolving issues, and I do plan to run for reelection in the Senate in 2014. These are serious times. Every American's job is on the line. The United States still produces about 23 percent of the world's wealth, even though we only have about 5 percent of the world's people. All around the world people are realizing there is nothing different about their brains and our brains and their using their brain power to try to achieve the same kind of standard of living we have enjoyed in the United States. As a result of this, some have predicted that within a decade, for the first time since the 1870s, the United States will not be the world's largest economy. They say China will be. My goal is to help keep the United States of America the world's strongest economy. There are two other matters that are relevant to the decision I am making that I would like to address. The first is this: When I first ran for the Senate in 2002, I said to the people of Tennessee--and they were not surprised by this--that I will serve with conservative principles and an independent attitude. I intend to continue to serve in the very same way. I am a very Republican Republican. I grew up in the mountains of Tennessee and still live there in a congressional district that has never elected a Democrat to Congress since Abraham Lincoln was President of the United States. My great-grandfather was once asked about his politics. He said: I am a Republican. I fought for the Union, and I vote like I shot. I have been voted five times by Tennessee Republicans to serve in public office. I have been elected three times by Senate Republicans as conference chair. If I could get a 100-percent Republican solution of any of our legislative issues, I would do it in a minute. I know the Senate usually requires 60 votes for a solution on serious issues, and we simply cannot get that with only Republican votes or only Democratic votes. Second, by stepping down from the leadership, I expect to be more, not less, aggressive on the issues. I look forward to that. The Senate was created to be the place where the biggest issues producing the biggest disagreements are argued out. I don't buy for 1 minute that these disagreements create some sort of unhealthy lack of civility in the Senate. I think those who believe the debates in our Senate are more fractious than the debates in our political history simply have forgotten American history. They have forgotten what Adams and Jefferson said of one another. They have forgotten that Vice President Burr killed former Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton. They have forgotten that Congressman Houston was walking down the streets of Washington one day, came across a Congressman from Ohio who had opposed Andrew Jackson's Indian policy and started caning him, for which he was censured. They have forgotten there was a South Carolina Congressman who came to the floor of the Senate and nearly killed, by hitting him with a stick, a Senator from Massachusetts. They have forgotten that another Senator from Massachusetts, named Henry Cabot Lodge, stood on the floor and said of the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson: I hate that man. They forgot about Henry Clay's compromises and the debates that were held during the Army-McCarthy days. What of the Watergate debates? What of the Vietnam debates? The main difference today between the debates in Washington and the debates in history are that, today, because we have so much media, everybody hears everything instantly. If one would notice, most of the people who are shouting at each other on television or the radio or the Internet have never been elected to anything. It would help if we in the Senate knew each other better across party lines. To suggest we should be more timid in debating the biggest issues before the American people would ignore the function of the Senate and would ignore our history. The truth is, the Senators debate divisive issues with excessive civility. I have enjoyed my 4 years in the Republican leadership. I thank my colleagues for that privilege. I now look forward to spending more time working with all Senators to achieve results on the issues I care about the most--issues that I believe will help determine for our next generation what kind of economy we will have, what our standard of living will be for our families, and what our national security will be. I thank the Presiding Officer, and I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I thank the Republican leader. I am deeply grateful for his comments, with one single exception. I have great confidence in Derek Dooley. He is a fine football coach at the University of Tennessee. They are playing very good football, and I intend to be at my usual seats at the Georgia game in 2 weeks.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, in the world in which we live, every American's job is on the line. As every American knows, better schools mean better jobs. Schools and jobs are alike in this sense: Washington cannot create good jobs and Washington cannot create better schools, but Washington can create an environment in which others can create good jobs and environments in which teachers and principals and students and communities can create better schools, along with their parents. A good place for Washington to start is with the five pieces of legislation we introduced today to fix the law known as No Child Left Behind. No Child Left Behind was a bipartisan effort in 2001 and 2002. President Bush and Democratic Members of the Senate and the House and Republicans as well agreed on it. By the 2013-14 school year, the law said that all 50 million students in nearly 100,000 public schools would be proficient in reading and math. There would be State standards, tests to measure performance against those standards, and requirements that the more than 3,000 teachers in America be highly qualified. There would be school report cards, disaggregated by subgroups of students, and schools that failed to make what was called adequate yearly progress would receive Federal sanctions. There would also be more choices of schools and charter schools for parents. During the last 9 years, Federal funding for elementary and secondary education programs has increased by 73 percent, while student achievement has stayed relatively flat. Our legislative proposals would set a new, realistic, but challenging goal to help all students succeed and to end the Federal mandates which have Washington, DC deciding which students and teachers are succeeding and failing. Our legislation would require States to have high standards that promote college and career readiness for all students and would continue the reporting of student progress so parents, teachers, and communities can know whether students are succeeding. It would encourage teacher and principal evaluation systems, relating especially to student achievement, and would replace the Federal definition of a highly qualified teacher. It would consolidate Federal programs and make it easier to transfer funds within local school districts. It would expand charter schools and give parents more choices. For the bottom 5 percent of schools, the Federal Government would help States turn them around. Much has happened during the last 10 years, and it is time to transfer back to States and to local governments the responsibility for deciding whether schools and teachers are succeeding or failing. Since 2002, 44 States have adopted common core academic standards. Two groups of States are developing common tests to see whether the students are meeting those standards, and more than 30 States are working together to develop common principles for holding schools and districts accountable for student achievement. Thanks to No Child Left Behind, we now have several years of school-by-school information about student progress that puts the spotlight on success and puts the spotlight on where work needs to be done. In addition, many States and school districts are finding ways to reward outstanding teaching and school leadership and to include student performance as a part of that evaluation. As common sense as that idea may seem, it was not until Tennessee created the Master Teacher Program in 1984 that one State paid one teacher one penny more for teaching well. All the sponsors of the five pieces of legislation we introduced today are Republicans. Many of the ideas were either first advanced or have been worked out in concert with President Obama and with his excellent Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, as well as with Democratic Senators here and with Republican and Democratic colleagues in the House. In other words, we have made a lot of progress. In the Senate, my judgment is that we are not far from agreement on a bipartisan bill, with most of the differences of opinion centering around what I would characterize as provisions that would create a national school board. We on the Republican side want to continue to work with our colleagues across the aisle and in the House. Our purpose in offering our ideas is to spur progress so we can enact a bill before the end of the year. The House of Representatives has passed its first bill to fix No Child Left Behind with bipartisan support. It would expand charter schools and is similar to the charter school bill Senator Kirk will introduce today. The President has met with us and given us his blueprint. The Secretary has warned us that, under existing law, most schools will be labeled as failing within a few years, and he is proposing to use his waiver authority to avoid that. The Secretary clearly has that waiver authority under the law, and I support his use of it in appropriate ways. I am introducing legislation today to make it clear that the appropriate use means using the waiver to accept or reject State proposals based upon whether those proposals enhance student achievement and not to impose a new set of Washington mandates. But the best way for us to relieve the Secretary of the need to consider waivers and to help American children learn what they need to know is for us to work together in the Senate and in the House to fix No Child Left Behind. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record following my remarks, and following the remarks of all the Senators, the following documents: Why we need to fix No Child Left Behind; how the environment has changed in the past 10 years; a summary of the nine proposals Secretary Duncan, Senator Harkin, Senator Enzi, and others of us have worked on; a summary of the legislation introduced by Senator Isakson to fix title I; a summary of the legislation that I am a principal sponsor of to fix title II; a summary of Senator Burr's proposal on titles II and IV; a summary of Senator Kirk's legislation on charter schools; and a summary of the legislation that I am also introducing on waivers.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, Senator Isakson of Georgia has a distinguished career in education, not just as a leader in the Senate of Georgia, but as chairman of the Georgia School Board, appointed by Gov. Zell Miller, and as a former Member of the House of Representatives who was a key author of No Child Left Behind when it was enacted in 2002.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank Senator Isakson for his leadership in education in the State of Georgia and on this bill. Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina has focused on elementary and secondary education for many years, especially on making it easier for local school districts to use the Federal dollars that are made available and on finding ways to encourage student and teacher evaluation. He is introducing a bill, which I am proud to cosponsor, amending titles II and IV of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from North Carolina, Mr. Burr, for his insight and leadership on how we help create an environment in which teachers, parents, principals, and community leaders can make schools better, rather than through orders sent from Washington telling them how to do that. Senator Kirk from Illinois will be here in a few minutes to introduce the charter school bill, which is the same bill that passed the House of Representatives yesterday with 365 votes in a bipartisan way. As I mentioned at the outset, our purpose is to get things moving. We think there ought to be a law before the end of the year that fixes No Child Left Behind. Toward that end, the senior member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Senator Enzi of Wyoming, began to meet quietly more than a year ago with the chairman of the committee, Senator Harkin, and with Secretary Duncan and, on some occasions, with the President. They were able to come to a good deal of agreement about fixing No Child Left Behind, and then, on the nine areas we would focus on, which I put into the Record a few minutes ago. Senator Enzi is here now, and I thought he might want to speak about that effort. While all of us who are introducing these bills today are Republicans, we are only doing this as a way of moving the process forward and are hoping to attract Democratic support so we can end up with a bipartisan result. I believe, at the same time, that Senator Enzi is continuing to meet with Senator Harkin, the chairman of the committee, with the hope that we will achieve that bipartisan result.