Providing for Further Consideration of H.R. 5, Student Success Act, and Providing for Consideration of H.R. 2647, Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, the debate before this floor today is who knows best how to educate our children.

I rise today to speak about H.R. 5, the Student Success Act. This is legislation that I believe goes a long way in getting the Federal Government out of the way of our schools and teachers and putting education back in the right hands by restoring local control.

As a member of the Education and the Workforce Committee, I have spent several hours debating and marking up this legislation. I have also visited several schools in my district and have spoken with parents, teachers, and administrators about the challenges they are facing.

What I heard across the board was that top-down regulations from Washington are burdening our teachers with seemingly endless compliance requirements.

Our educators should have the ability to focus on the individual needs of their students and their classes. Instead, our current system is forcing them to spend time filling out paperwork and meeting this one-size-fits-all requirement.

That is exactly why H.R. 5 is important legislation that I urge my colleagues to support today. This bill replaces the current accountability system that says Washington knows what is best for our students, and it replaces it with a system that gives States and school districts the responsibility for measuring the success of their schools. Through bottom-up reforms, it restores local control and gives our educators more freedom to innovate.

I have personally seen in my district how students and communities benefit from local innovation in schools. We have one such example in my district that does not get $1 of Federal funding, and it takes children who are discarded by the public school system and makes successful students from this group. I am very proud of what this school has accomplished.

H.R. 5 empowers parents, just like at this school, with more information to hold schools accountable for effective teaching, and it expands opportunities to send

their children to a school that best meets their needs. It also gets rid of almost 70 unnecessary Federal programs and, instead, creates a block grant that provides money to the States.

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Under H.R. 5, States are protected from being coerced into adopting Common Core by the Department of Education, and they have the right to opt out of any program under the law.

Mr. Speaker, all of these are significant and needed steps to put the responsibility of education back where it belongs, and that is with the States, local school districts, parents, and the educators, as they know what is best. I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 5.

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