Student Success Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. Chair, this is all about the local election of a school board, a school board that is elected that is distinct for that district. The parents go to school with the same kids. They're all interconnected, they know each other, and they're making decisions because we don't have a national school board. We should have local school boards.

Why do we do that? Because we want local decisions made on whether they're going to have uniforms, what they're going to serve at lunch, how they're going to interact, what their class schedule is going to be, what their curriculum is going to be. Those are local decisions that should be made because those parents know their kids extremely well and love their kids more than anyone. In central Oklahoma, I can assure you, our parents love their kids and know their kids better than someone 1,300 miles away in Washington, D.C.

So the simple decision should be made that I have personally contacted the superintendents in my district who ask for one simple thing: allow us to make decisions locally. We want to know that the decisions we make are going to stick and we won't spend all of our time and all of our money hiring compliance people to connect with the Federal Government to know what monies go where and what silos go where. And I hear over and over again, Race to the Top didn't give us greater flexibility. It actually said, You have flexibility in the silo that we give you. They want just real flexibility.

I would encourage the passage of this amendment.

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