Tom Harkin

The road to economic stability and prosperity for Iowa and our Nation runs through our public schools.

Teachers are not the problem here. We are the solution.

Leaving States to cut education more deeply--and we already are cut to the bone--without additional Federal aid is short-sighted.

My colleagues back home asked me to come here to deliver a strong message--please act now to approve additional Federal aid targeted to help avert the looming layoffs that will reach into almost every Iowa community, threatening our…

My colleagues back home asked me to deliver a strong message--please act now to help avert the looming layoffs.

I want to thank you, Senator Harkin, for your leadership in introducing a similar bill in the Senate this week.

The Senate needs to act quickly on an education jobs package.

The education jobs crisis is not only about adults. It is about children, who get only one shot at an education.

I urge the Senate to support similar education jobs relief to save teachers and protect the futures of students.

I applaud members of the House of Representatives for including an additional $23 billion in education aid through the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund (SFSF) in the Jobs for Main Street Act, which passed in December.

I support this bill and ask all to support for the teachers, the principals, the counselors, school nurses, and other essential public school employees that are losing their jobs.

Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Look forward to working with you.

We may hold the record open for a while here to have some written questions from Senators who were not able to be here because of schedule conflicts.

Secretary Duncan, thank you very much for your testimony and for answering questions.

To support State and local efforts to help children learn what it means to be an American and finding a dedicated stream of funding for that.

I think it would be better if we are going to take it over and create so-called 'savings' if we give the students the savings.

What we are really doing with this Federal takeover of the student loan program is borrowing money from 19 million students.

I wonder from whose schoolchildren we are going to borrow this money? Because we have a looming debt crisis in our country, and we will need to debate this.

The Federal Government is really giving with one hand and taking away with another because the new healthcare bill, between 2014 and 2019, is going to add between $1.1 billion and $1.5 billion of costs, most of which will have to come out…

But this is going to have to be changed, in my view.

We have to make sure we don't go south. We have to make sure we are not seeing hundreds of thousands of people laid off.

I look forward to working with you to see how we can shoehorn this in some way.

We must remember that education begins at birth and that preparation for education begins before birth.

I hope that we can count on your active support and the support of the administration in getting this emergency funding through because it is an emergency.

The status quo is not acceptable, and it is not acceptable during economic downturns to say that we are just going to take a lot of this out of the hide of education.