Joe Baca: “the challenge confronting us today and the future of education in America is before us. We, as a Nation, must put…”

“the challenge confronting us today and the future of education in America is before us. We, as a Nation, must put education as the number one priority if we are to meet the needs of the 21st century, if we are to look at where our children are going to be. We need to invest in education. We need to make sure that class size reduction is in our classroom. We need to make sure that we do modernization in our classroom. If we look at today's society, if we look at where we were, many years ago many of us were very fortunate, that when we went to school, class sizes were small, we were able to have the relationship between 25 and one ratio. In today's classroom, we have 45 to one ratio. It is ridiculous. How can we have our children learn? How can we get them to progress and how can we hold accountability when we have so many students in our classroom? We have to put a high priority, that is why we have to look at modernization. We have to look at classroom reduction. If not, what is going to happen to our children? And if we look at modernization, we also have to look to create an atmosphere that is good for our children as well. When they go into the classroom, we want to make sure that the faucets work well, that there is no broken window, there are no leaking roofs. If we look at technology, we want to make sure that everybody is competitive, that our children and others have the same opportunity that other individuals have.”