Student Success Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Chairman, well, one of the many reasons that this is a good bill is that it recognizes that the Federal Government is taking too much control over education in this country.

One of the reasons the Federal Government should not get involved in many, many things is they are not very nimble. When they make a mistake, rather than turning something around--you know, if a school board makes a mistake, they may come back in a meeting 2 weeks later and undo the mistake they made. When the Federal Government makes a mistake, it can take 15 or 20 years, if ever, to admit they made a mistake.

Now, when the original No Child Left Behind bill passed, I used to meet with school superintendents a couple times a month. They knew within months that that bill was horribly flawed.

Chairman Kline has worked very hard on this bill. It is a very good bill, but it is still a very big, complicated bill. And I am sure within months, years, a couple of years, local superintendents will report changes they want to have made.

I think this is a very good amendment because, even though it doesn't assure us that we are going to revisit this in 4 years any more than the original No Child Left Behind we were sure we were going to revisit in 7 years, I think it reminds Congress that at least in a 4-year period you ought to be looking at it, see what your local superintendents think, see what your local schoolteachers think, and see if it can be improved. And, of course, it is going to be able to be improved in 4 years. So that is the reason for the amendment.

I mean, if you told anybody back home we are passing a law and we don't anticipate even looking at it again for 4 years, I think they would think that is highly unusual. That defines one of the reasons why we shouldn't get the Federal Government involved in a wide variety of things.

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