George Miller: “I am terribly sorry about the misinformation and the misconstruing of the language that I put into this bill. It was my…”

“I am terribly sorry about the misinformation and the misconstruing of the language that I put into this bill. It was my feeling, after very often being confronted in my district with teachers who tell me that they are forced to teach classes for which they have not studied, nor do they know the subject matter, for the convenience of their school and/or their school district, and thereby feeling that they cannot carry out their obligations to their students, that, when we are spending $8 billion and $9 billion in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and this is targeted to the poorest and the most disadvantaged children in our society, that the least we could do for the shareholders of this operation, for the taxpayers, is to ensure that those children, where we are sending Federal money, would be entitled to have a qualified teacher teach them the subject for which they are teaching. That sounds fairly logical, that no longer should we continue to tolerate a teacher who is schooled and qualified in English having to teach geometry against their will or against their qualifications, or let us say we have a PE teacher who is qualified to teach PE all of a sudden teaching algebra because it is convenient for the school district or they cannot find a qualified person.”