Mr./Madam President, the work the Senate is engaged in this week is long overdue.

The last time the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was updated, fourteen years ago, Congress gave the country No Child Left Behind – a policy that, by all accounts, has been a failure.

That’s why in 2012 the Obama administration began offering waivers to states, allowing them to opt out of the coercive and ineffective requirements that No Child Left Behind imposed on America’s school districts and classrooms.

But state officials and local school boards quickly learned – just as parents and teachers did – that these so-called waivers didn’t solve the fundamental problem created by No Child Left Behind. They further entrenched it.

These weren’t waivers in any meaningful sense, because they came with a new set of strings attached that reinforced Washington, D.C.’s authority to micromanage the policies and curriculum of classrooms around the country.

They did not give state and local policymakers the freedom and flexibility to use education funding in a way that would best meet the needs of students and empower every child to succeed.

No. Instead, they forced teachers, school boards, and state officials to choose the lesser of two evils – either abide by the federal mandates of No Child Left Behind or accept the federal mandates prescribed by Common Core and Race to the Top.

Mr./Madam President, the underlying bill that we will vote on next week makes the same mistake and, unless it is amended, we can expect it to have the same disappointing results.

More kids will be trapped in failing schools, their opportunities in life predetermined by their parents’ zip code, rather than their God-given talents and desire to learn.

More teachers will be rewarded on the basis of the number of years they’ve been on the job rather than the number of kids they’ve helped graduate.

And more parents will – regrettably, but understandably – lose faith in the public education system, knowing that it’s designed to serve the ideological whims of federal politicians and bureaucrats, instead of the educational needs of their children.

That’s why I’m here this morning, Mr./Madam President: to offer my support – and to encourage my colleagues to offer theirs – for an amendment to the proposed reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act... an amendment that would avoid the mistakes of the past.

Mr./Madam President, the basic principle behind the bill before the Senate this week and next – and the principle behind No Child Left Behind and Common Core – is that, when it comes to running a classroom, Washington bureaucrats and politicians know better than America’s teachers, parents, and local school boards.

The principle behind this amendment, the A-PLUS Act, is essentially the opposite: that no one is in a better position to make decisions about a child’s education than his or her parents, guardians, teachers, counselors, and principals.

If you believe in this principle – as I do and as experience instructs us to do – then you must support the A-PLUS Act, because it empowers every child’s parents, guardians, teachers, counselors, and principals to make the greatest impact on their education and on their lives.

And it would do so without eliminating any federal mandates, coercive and ineffective though they may be. It would simply give states the choice to opt out of them – no strings attached.

Here’s how the A-PLUS Act works.

If a state’s legislators determine that the federal government’s approach to education reform has not improved academic achievement in their state, they have an alternative: they can submit to the U.S. Department of Education a “declaration of intent” outlining their state-directed education reform initiatives.

In states that choose to opt out, education officials will no longer have to spend all their time complying with onerous, one-size-fits-all federal mandates.

Instead, they’ll have the freedom and flexibility to listen and respond to the needs and recommendations of parents, teachers, principals, and school boards.

They’ll be able to make their education funds go farther, by consolidating programs and funding sources.

And they’ll be able to improve the educational opportunities of disadvantaged children, by designing their state’s policies to be more responsive and targeted.

This amendment isn’t about “states’ rights” – it’s about children’s rights, like the right to a good education.

And it would secure those rights by empowering America’s teachers and parents to pursue innovative policies, like charter schools and school vouchers and pay-for-success initiatives, that have proven to be successful in classrooms around the country.

Mr./Madam President, the bill that the Senate will vote on next week may be well intentioned in its reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

But it misdiagnoses the problem of the status quo: our education system needs to be reformed not in spite of excessive federal control, but because of it.

The A-PLUS Act recognizes this fact, and it takes critical steps to rebuild our education policy around it.

I urge my colleagues to support the A-PLUS amendment. The success of America’s children depends on it.