President Lyndon B. Johnson
Fmr. Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY)
From a 1966 Senate hearing with then Education Commissioner Harold Howe:
Do you mean that you spent a billion dollars and you don’t know whether they can read or not?
Fmr. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Senator Patty Murray (D-WA)
Ranking Member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee
An excerpt from Sen. Murray’s remarks at a HELP Committee hearing on fixing NCLB (3/21/2015):
Many of my colleagues demand evidence and accountability in other federal programs – and I hope they would agree we need that in education too.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
From remarks on the 50th anniversary of ESEA (1/12/2015):
Educational opportunity cannot be optional for any child anywhere in this country. We need to stand strong for accountability that ensures that students are making progress, and that taxpayer dollars are producing real results for children.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)
Member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
An excerpt from Sen. Warren’s comments at a HELP Committee hearing on fixing NCLB (3/21/2015):
I understand the need for flexibility, but if the only principal here is that states can do whatever they want, then they should raise their own taxes to pay for it. Throwing billions of federal dollars at the states with no accountability for the states for how they spend taxpayer money is not what we were sent here to do.
Fmr. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa
In a 2014 Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal (7/20/2014):
Most say they are for accountability yet they dismiss measures of a teacher’s effectiveness as a “sham” and insist that standardized tests are “invalid” and “unreliable.” Let’s be clear. Testing isn’t teaching, and school districts that devote too much time to testing and test prep are doing a disservice to children. But parents and taxpayers need to know if children are learning. Without a test, too many children will slip through the cracks and too many ineffective teachers will remain in the system.
