Teacher quality has proven to be one of the most important school-related factors influencing student achievement.

If we want every child to be taught by a highly-effective teacher, let us create the mechanisms to do so through the Teacher Incentive Fund.

I think it is important to appreciate that Federal regulation of insurance is different than instituting a systemic risk regulator for insurance.

At a time when we are facing massive record budget deficits and the president has us on a path to raising the national debt to $23.1 trillion by 2019, this is a road that America can simply not afford.

It is so often that we are comparing apples and oranges in these discussions, and so statistics get amusing and sometimes very confounding.

A February, 2009 report by economists from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics... found that when looking at leave benefits... 83 percent of workers in private industry have access to illness leave.

I have been one of those government bureaucrats, so I know firsthand what it means to take the legislative language and turn it into the very real practical rules that employers and employees have to live with every day in their workplaces.

If you take out violent deaths and MVAs, our life expectancy in this nation exceeds all of our peers.

I know we are in the habit these days in this Congress of not believing that anything in our nation is worth anything, and especially the health care.

It is also true, however, that the Healthy Families Act would impose a new federal mandate of unprecedented scope on very small business establishments.

I wonder if it is the committee's intention to include reforms of the Family and Medical Leave Act in the House version of the health reform expected of later this summer?