senator hassell? >> thank you, member chairman and members of the committee. good morning, panelists. thank you for being here. thank you for your energy and passion for educating our kids. i want to start off just by echoing echoing any federal dollars used to arm teachers. it goes against intent and we deny that any educational funding be used in this way. but today we are here to talk about the implementation of essa. this law has been lauded as opening the door to more flexibility for states to be innovative, something that my own state of new hampshire knows a great deal about. new hampshire's performance assessment of competency education, or what we call pace, executed through a federal waiver, helped pave the way to essa's administrative pilot, a pilot new hampshire has since applied to. students placed in pace replace standardized testing with competent assessments while giving those assessments to students just once in a grade span. we decide things we may have learned better. so we know that innovation is working, but we need the tools to know that