Mark McKinnon Quotes

Congress has an opportunity to take advantage of the opening created by Justice Kennedy later this year when it reauthorizes the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

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.

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.

Even on education, his one accomplishment, the Leave No Child Behind Act, and he has left it unfunded.

I remember when President Bush, George W. Bush, came into office, he focused on No Child Left Behind, and with - and before very long, suddenly, Republicans were thought of as being as interested and as competent in education as Democrats, and why? Because they were talking about it and doing something about it.

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.

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.

'No Child Left Behind' requires states and school districts to ensure that all students are learning and are reaching their highest potential. Special education students should not be left out of these accountability mechanisms.

Mr. Obama seeks to federalize large portions of education, beginning with his attempt to nationalize college student loans.

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.

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.

They [educators] don't want to hear my views on education. They just want the [federal] money.

I would abolish the federal Department of Education and very quickly. People don't realize that the federal Department of Education gives each state 11 cents out of every school dollar that every state spends. But it comes with 15 cents worth of strings attached.

Competitive programs such as Race to the Top provide incentives for communities to develop new solutions for old problems. Because of Race to the Top, states have raised their standards and committed to fixing schools that have persistently failed students.

When it comes to education, no solution, not even ones we like, should be dictated or run from Washington, D.C.

You can't improve what you can't measure, and liberals have resisted any kind of meaningful measurement of success in the classroom for decades. Instead of focusing on the three R's, liberals have thrown up a barrage of silly things designed to distract us all from their awful stewardship of the schools.

Every education law should be based around the question, 'Is this good for children?' And it's not.

And I think that's righteous, I think that's what parents want to know. They want to know what's going right in the school, and what needs improvement, and that's what this law does.

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.

The No Child Left Behind Program was an incentive to the schools to get their kids up to snuff on math and science and reading.

One of the things that we're all struggling with is how to judge the quality of the value-added experience of an educational course or year. I don't think it's impossible to do that, but it's difficult.

In Barack Obama, we have a great education president who is rebuilding America. His Race to the Top program is doing more to 'spur us' to improve our public schools than anything we've ever done as a nation.

President Bush and I had asked Congress to appropriate a half-billion dollars to school vouchers. We didn't get it, and we were disappointed. But we did not go out and form a corporation to pay for it. That would have been a problem.

Scholarships that allow students to get a good education are important, but first we want to measure the progress that the schools are teaching our students, we want to hold them accountable for the progress, we want to hold the schools accountable for teaching the young people in America.

Obviously, this whole 'no child left behind' idea is more rhetoric than actual practice.