David Brooks Quotes

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.

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.

'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.

States are free to modify the Common Core State Standards or adopt their own individual standards, because academic standards are the prerogative of the states.

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.

Louisiana standards and Louisiana tests for Louisiana students.

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

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.

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.

We're going to end Common Core. Going to bring our education local.

If there's one thing that 'No Child Left Behind' has proven, it's that more academics don't make for smarter children - or even higher test scores. And yet we somehow refuse to accept this reality.

We should have high expectations of our children, but politicians should not tell teachers how to meet them.

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.

The No Child Left Behind Act will be one of President Bush's enduring legacies. And it was engineered and inaugurated with a truly bipartisan coalition in Congress. Accountability, standards, and truly measuring student performance just makes sense. The only real debate about the law was and is whether or not it was adequately funded.

Hillary Clinton wants to leave behind No Child Left Behind.

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.

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.

Before this government came to power, many failing schools were simply allowed to drift on in a pattern of continuing failure. The government is determined to break that pattern and is successfully doing so.

While NCLB drove important progress on transparency and data disaggregation, I think it's clear that the status quo in public education is not working for our kids or our country.

At the federal level, we must help, not hinder, local school boards, parents, teachers and administrators as they make decisions about educating our children.

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.