House Leaders Debate Education Bill

States have historically taken the lead in public education, and we were recognizing that role by continuing to allow states to develop their own standards. In the reauthorization, I intend to provide incentives to states to raise their standards so they better prepare children for college and the workplace. We also need to give incentives to states to work together to jointly develop such high standards.

The preservation of state and local control over education is a principle to which I remain firmly committed for a very simple reason: the educational challenges and priorities in your home town of Haddon Heights, New Jersey are different than those in my home town of Santa Clarita, California, and policymakers here in Washington, D.C. ought not be making these kinds of decisions for either of our communities. What NCLB has made possible, for the first time ever, is for educators to clearly understand the progress being made by all students under the standards established in each state. Put another way, the framework of NCLB is meant to complement the educational structures at the state and local level - not supersede them with federal standards or curricula.

It should be noted that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) provides a uniform measure by which to judge the accountability systems of various states. NAEP uses a small, randomly chosen sample of students in each state, examines the state's definition of proficiency, and then compares states to verify that the progress being shown on the state-designed tests taken by all students is real.