His comments come just a few weeks before the April 19 primary in New York, the state that has been at the epicenter of an “opt-out” movement. | Getty Bill Clinton: Hillary thinks feds require too many tests at school

Hillary Clinton thinks the federal government requires too many tests for U.S. school children, former President Bill Clinton said this week at an event in Wyoming — an apparent reversal of her past support for the No Child Left Behind law that ushered in annual testing requirements more than a decade ago.

The amount of time spent on testing in schools has been a priority issue for teachers unions and both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association endorsed her early over Democratic rivals. And Bill Clinton's comments come just a few weeks before the April 19 primary in New York, the state that has been at the epicenter of an “opt-out” movement . Last year, thousands of parents around the country kept their kids from taking annual exams in protest of testing.


“She thinks they are just too much, that it’s national overreach, and the most it could ever do is to help people at the very bottom levels of achievement,” Bill Clinton said Monday in Cheyenne, according to audio provided by Wyoming Public Radio.

As a New York senator, Hillary Clinton voted in 2001 for the No Child Left Behind law, which first required states to test all students in reading in math in third through eighth grades and once again in high school. After years of debate, Congress last year replaced the education law but the new version still requires the same schedule of testing.

Bill Clinton said it’s “not that there shouldn’t be tests, not that there shouldn’t be measures.”

“The idea of having to give a national test every year for five years in a row for people from the third to the eighth grade doesn’t make as much sense as investing the same amount of money in helping the teachers to be better teachers,” he said. “That would make more difference.”