Bob Schaffer Quotes

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.

I think Common Core is a disaster. That doesn't mean there can't be a little tentacle left of the Department of Education, like 5 percent, just in terms of local coordination, perhaps.

I do not support Common Core because there is absolutely no evidence that a big, centralized bureaucracy makes anything better. In fact, there is a lot of evidence to the contrary.

No Child Left Behind's fourth-grade gains aren't learning gains, they're testing gains. That's why they don't last. The law is a distraction from things that really count.

I looked at No Child Left Behind after it was enacted and saw what happened and saw the expansion of the federal government and the role of education. And I said, you know, that was - that's not what I believe in.

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.

If I was a state, I would like to see education left to the schools themselves, but I don't want the federal government involved in education. I think that it ends up setting standards that cost you time and money and don't make any difference in education. I want to stop that.

Enacted under President George W. Bush's administration with the promise to focus on individual student achievement and overall school performance, No Child Left Behind was heralded as groundbreaking. And in some ways, it was.

I think that there should be national standards in reading and math and maybe history and civics….We have a culture of non-compliance with Federal requirements in education.

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.

While some of the critics are voicing legitimate concerns about the merits of a system of academic benchmarks, Common Core is frequently a straw man for the frustrations conservatives have with the federal government.

We should roll back Common Core.

I support charters, but the right kind of charters. I support charters that support kids who have the highest needs. A charter should be targeting students who are in serious trouble. It should serve students who didn't succeed in public schools when it can help them. Or, at least, charters should agree to accept similar proportions of the kids with the highest needs.

The state of our educational system is a disgrace to our country. We have an elementary and secondary school system in which close to half of the youngsters never graduate properly. It's a disgrace that there is more illiteracy today than there was 100 years ago.

We need to fund No Child Left Behind. We need to start at the beginning and we are not doing the job here in the United States of America.

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.

American Education has a long history of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them, for it threatens to destroy public education. Who will Stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?

If you serve a child a rotten hamburger in America, federal, state, and local agencies will investigate you, summon you, close you down, whatever. But if you provide a child with a rotten education, nothing happens, except that you're liable to be given more money to do it with. Well, we've discovered that money alone isn't the answer.

… while they're adding teachers in places like South Korea, we're laying them off in droves. It's unfair to our kids. It undermines their future and ours. And it has to stop. Pass this bill, and put our teachers back in the classroom where they belong.

It's not how much you spend, it's how you spend it. We have been putting a lot of money into education in the state of Nevada, and it's gotten us to 50th in the country in graduation rates. We needed more accountability in our system.

Parents and teachers alike are alarmed by this top-down approach to education that wrongly ties education money for states to the adoption of academic standards that do not fully reflect the values of South Carolina.

I don't want Washington - let me be perfectly clear - I do not want Washington involved in local education decisions any more than I want them involved in common core. You know, common core was a state-created and state-implemented voluntary set of standards in Math and English that are comparable across state lines.

Common Core is a big win for education.

Perhaps there is no greater evidence that the teachers' union has swung too far out of the mainstream that they both have been a target of near-constant criticism from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Whenever someone says to me, 'Are you for or against Common Core,' the first question I ask is, 'What do you think Common Core is?' You will get a different answer from every single person. You will literally get a different answer.