David Weldon: “this amendment is the only provision that would offer hope to low-income children trapped in failing schools. The…”

“this amendment is the only provision that would offer hope to low-income children trapped in failing schools. The underlying bill will provide, in my opinion, only marginal improvement, if any, to public education. Public schools are a monopoly, and they face little to no consequences for failure. If I brought a bill to this floor proposing we put restaurants and supermarkets in the control of the government, nobody would support it, because everybody knows quality would go down. We have a serious quality problem in the public education system in many of our poor neighborhoods and inner cities, and we are going to just throw a little bit more money at it; a little bit of competition would go much, much further to help the problem. We have seen what happened in Florida with Governor Jeb Bush's A+ program. We need to have it throughout our own whole country. It is the best hope for poor families trapped in failing school systems. It is not a little more testing, a little more money.”