The Gorton Amendment passed 50 to 49!
This will eliminate
Goals 2000 and School-to-Work through a 10 billion dollar
block grant to the states.
The Ashcroft Amendment passed in a vote of 52 to 47!
This
will ban national testing. [The only Republicans that voted
wrong on the Ashcroft Amendment were D'Amato (NY),
Jeffords (VT), and Specter (PA)].
Senator Dan Coats from Indiana deserves special thanks because he courageously stood on the floor of the Senate and said he was changing his vote (from his compromise testing amendment last year) and now was voting with Ashcroft to ban national testing!
Senator Lott's office called us to tell us they thought they should not go forward with Ashcroft's Amendment because they were sure it would lose and set us back. We insisted that we needed to take it to a recorded vote. We also explained that based on our lobby visits to the Senate Monday and the amount of calls pouring in from the home schoolers, we thought we were very close to winning. As a result, Lott's office agreed to do all they could to push it.
We were told over and over again that this could not be done in the U.S. Senate!
Many staffers in the Senate have told us that the thousands of calls from home schoolers literally turned the tide. One U.S. Senator's office in Oregon said they alone had received about a thousand calls!
(Yesterday we defeated the Glenn Amendment in a vote of 60 to 38 which killed Glenn's attempt to exclude home schools from the A+ Accounts).
Late Thursday morning, the entire Coverdell bill with all of the good amendments will be voted on and the Senate Leadership expects it will pass. We will update you with a formal fax tomorrow as to the final outcome. If it passes, it will go to conference committee which also looks favorable at this time.
Thank you for all of your hard work! For this to happen in the U.S. Senate is nothing less than amazing.
God is in control!
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The National Center for Home Education
P.O. Box 3000
Purcellville, VA 20134
V: (540) 338-7600
F: (540) 338-9333
E: cap@hslda.org
Web: http://www.hslda.org
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