the truth is, however, that esea really establishes a floor, not a ceiling. i want accountability and that states are obviously free to exceed and create new standards that in, facts, hold all students accountable. my only point is this. look, i celebrate the fact that over the last 50 years, the country has changed significantly for the better and become a more perfect union but i also recognize that americans often are ahistoric and fail to take into account the specific elements that led to the change that we support today. had the federal government not chosen to intervene, in state's activities in this area, we would not have had the improvement that we've seen. and those who seem to argue that states when left free of their own devices can achieve the kind of goals that we all seek need only look at the record that has been established over the past to recognize that the states themselves are not perfect. and that they have, in turn, improved their academic involvement because of the federal government. not in spite of it. and so i think in that sense,

the answer but it may be an idea issue and what's appropriate to that child and not necessarily an esea issue. so i just wanted to raise that. >> plaintiff seaton. >> yes, for tennessee, we have built in a way to kind of catch some of that 1%. young people that have a certain iq score, we use that as a baseline. if they are ample functioning close to, they are not allowed to be placed in that alternative assessment bracket. so one of the things that you know, people who want to opt out are not able to do that just based on the fact that they're young people or you believe that this will be better for your scores. >>> i'm sorry. could i just add one thing? i think the problem we're falling into too is there's either an alternative or what everyone else does. children fall in a lot of spots between those twos extremes. so i'm not sure exactly how it's worded in the law, but the idea of continuous progress can mean a student takes an assessment and score 30% in this month. and then they score 35% the next month. that's continuous progress. for some of our students who don't fall in that 1%

all esea can do is empower the u.s. department of education to issue regulations attached to funding which then must be funneled through state education agencies which then must be picked up by school district superintendents. at the end of day, what we wind up with are rules, regulars, case law which create unanticipated compliance burdens. one very evocative illustrationing is robert bob, a detroit financial manager, one of the crazy ideas he tried to promote was the idea they ought to be moving title 1 dollars out of substitute teacher funds and field trips into early childhood litera literacy. the state education agency told him he was not permitted to, that this was in violation of federal guidelines. the u.s. department of education said that was incorrect, that he was actually consistent with the appropriate interpretation of the law. but that's what happens when is we try to write laws from washington and they wind up on books at the state and in the district. we wind up creating enormous hurdles for people tryi

think of this as really not the reauthorization of no child left behind, but the reauthorization of esea. as an at just the connotation of the term "no child left behind," it really is demoralizing to us at this point because there is so much focus on teach -- i mean testing, testing, testing, that we have no time to teach. and it really has become that way within the schools. working with gifted education, i run into this all the time, because things that i want to do with my students, the teachers don't want me to take them out of the classroom because they're addressing a particular standard that is going to be tested. for instance, i was taking a group to view an open heart surgery, a live open heart surgery. and one of my teachers was taking a -- giving a practice test to practice for the practice test to test for -- to practice for the test. i mean that's the way that it goes. these students are testing all year round. and it takes so much time from instruction. and as long as we keep our standards and our gap groups set up as they are, i think the gap groups are effective. we want