Jack Kingston: “I think that the question also on the subject of money is, do we want the dollars that we earn, that we work hard 40…”

“I think that the question also on the subject of money is, do we want the dollars that we earn, that we work hard 40, 50, 60 hours a week for, do we want that money, those tax dollars, that portion of our income, to go to a bureaucrat in Washington or do we want it to go to a teacher in a classroom? One of the things we have been pushing are more dollars to the classroom, not tripling the bureaucracy in Washington who is micromanaging our school system, and I think that is important. I think the local flexibility is the key, though. In Colorado, the gentleman certainly had the big tragedy in Littleton that we are all aggrieved about, but we need to ask ourselves, maybe Washington is, in fact, part of the problem. Maybe pushing large, impersonal schools, where the teachers do not know the students as well, maybe the teachers are afraid to question kids who are acting suspicious or odd or peculiar because they are afraid of being sued themselves, and this kind of atmosphere really has been fostered by this large centralized government that has grown in the last 10 years in our country. If people could run their own communities, their own schools and their own lives, I think we would have a much better society.”