Kate Brown Quotes

President Obama still places far too much emphasis on relentless testing with standardized exams.

We have placed more emphasis on grades and school ranking than on genuine education.

In DC, policymakers think that if we can only have high enough standards, tough enough tests, and hold people accountable, we can close the achievement gap. And it hasn't happened. Yet the new law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, is based on the same test-based and market-driven framework and ideology, except it lets the states do it.

The U.S. has a long history of walking up to the precipice of rigor and then walking away. As voters, let's support leaders who were courageous enough to make the hard decisions necessary to move our system forward. And as parents, let's put our faith in our educators, our children and tests that hold them to their highest potential.

We owe every student in every neighborhood in New Jersey an equal opportunity to succeed. We know that more money, alone, is not the answer. We need to redefine success, and how we pursue that success, by the outcomes obtained by students.

Without any doubt at all, teacher quality is the fundamental differentiator. Not just, incidentally, of education, but I would argue, probably the biggest single differentiator of success for the nations of the 21st Century.

When I talk to teachers, parents, superintendents, my colleagues, everyone wants to fix No Child Left behind. There is great dissatisfaction with No Child Left Behind.

No Child Left Behind taught us that parents, teachers and state and local leaders are more suited to address students' needs than a one-size-fits-all accountability system developed by Washington bureaucrats.

Maryland schools succeed because we have never stopped investing in our students and doing the things that work.

We believe strongly in transparency and accountability, which is why Teach For America encourages rigorous independent evaluations of our program. Our mission is too important to operate in any other way.

With the enactment of the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act, we have taken an important step toward achieving federal education policies that will allow students to learn and achieve at the highest possible level.

Common Core, the initiative that claims to more accurately measure K-12 student knowledge in English and math, also encourages children to step up their 'critical thinking.'

Competition has not worked in education because it has never really been tried.

It is time to end social promotion in America’ s schools.

Schools should be held accountable for results.

I'm a little bit tired of people getting credit for improving education by doing the cheapest thing they can do, which is to call for the manipulation of test scores or to create new standards.

For many years we have spent a great deal of effort and money on school reform. Yet where are we today?

Good tests can help teachers determine how their students are performing and identify the areas in which their students need assistance. Like an X-ray, however, tests can diagnose, but they cannot cure.

Standardized testing is at cross purposes with many of the most important purposes of public education. It doesn't measure big-picture learning, critical thinking, perseverance, problem solving, creativity or curiosity, yet those are the qualities great teaching brings out in a student.

Massachusetts children cannot only lead the nation in test scores, they can be competitive with the best in the world. And the gap in achievement among races can virtually disappear.

The fact is that Common Core is no more responsible for a bizarre homework question than global warming is for a rain shower.

As we embark on something as ambitious as the Common Core, educators must be able to teach to the standards with the necessary support and collaboration and without the sense that there will be dire consequences if students, schools and their tests don't make the grade.

Beginning with the No Child Left Behind law and continuing today with Race to the Top, the federal emphasis on standardized assessments has become so excessive that it has modified state and district behavior in troubling ways.

Because the Advanced Placement Examination test is the required end-of-course examination, it cannot reasonably be viewed as a service or program for which a fee may be levied.

There's no silver bullet when it comes to helping all children achieve. Great public schools are our best shot.