María Elvira Salazar: “I am a proponent of evaluating the effectiveness of the actions we take and the programs we enact here in this Capitol.…”

“I am a proponent of evaluating the effectiveness of the actions we take and the programs we enact here in this Capitol. That is because I believe that results do matter. At the end of the day, we can all say what we tried to do, but Americans will judge us by the results we achieve. We all have a responsibility to see that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely and well. Amendment No. 2224 is a ``results matter'' amendment. It will simply require the Department of Education to conduct an assessment of the effectiveness of youth violence prevention programs. These programs are vitally important in my home State of Colorado and across the Nation. During my time as Colorado's attorney general, I spent much of my time working on the investigation of the horrific murders involving many young people at Columbine High School, which remains today the bloodiest school shooting in American history. As we worked to learn the lessons from that terrible tragedy in Colorado, we also attempted to implement programs in our schools to create safer schools and safer school communities. As I went through the process of assembling information about how we create the safest school environments possible, it became obvious to me that though we spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars on programs intended to deal with the issue of youth violence prevention, we do not know whether many of those programs work.…”