Michael Bennet Quotes

'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.

While I do commend the Administration on its commitment and focus on high school reform, I believe that we must focus on graduation as the key accountability measure.

We had rising student achievement across the board because high standards, robust accountability, ending social promotion in third grade, real school choice across the board, challenging the teachers union and beating them is the way to go.

All I suggest is to make K-12 like higher education. Higher education in the United States is the best in the world because these institutions compete with each other for your tuition dollar. Let's just bring competition to public education.

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.

We really shouldn't be running education like a supermarket where you compare prices.

The key for all cities is whether you turn the public schools around.

The number one issue facing cities isn’t crimes or jobs anymore, it’s public education.

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

Federal oversight has focused primarily on fiscal accountability and not on educational accountability.

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.

Federal and State mandates don’t do anything for local schools other than to protect failure.

While the public school rewards failure by throwing more government money at failing school systems, the voucher system does the opposite.

Charter schools are not a panacea.

I can imagine no more important contribution to our country's future than a long-term commitment to improving urban K-12 public schools.

We know that the two most important things in a child's education are a good teacher and an involved parent. You don't foster those things with a bloated federal bureaucracy - you encourage them when you support choice and accountability.

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 believe public education is the new civil rights battle and I support charter schools.

As the son of a union activist and a lifelong Democrat, I've always thought that privatizing our public schools is not the answer. We must strengthen public schools.

The problem with K-12 education is socialism and the solution is capitalism.

I'm not one of those who thinks the only way to fix what's wrong with American education is to throw more money at it. We also need to do it much better.

Many of those who argue for vouchers say that they simply want to use competition to improve public education. I don't think it works that way, and I've been watching this for a longtime.

If we're going to have standards in schools, let's be honest and have standards.

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.