Timothy Roemer: “As education goes, so goes America. As we are able in a bipartisan way in this body to work together in a civil manner…”

“As education goes, so goes America. As we are able in a bipartisan way in this body to work together in a civil manner, Democrat and Republican alike, to try to work to give our local public schools more arrows in their quiver to try to solve some of the problems that they are engaged in right now, whether it is parental involvement, which we quite frankly do quite a lot about; but if it is the quality of teachers, we have some ideas that they might want to try, class size reduction. There are some ideas out there, many of them have started at some of the local levels that we have shared with other communities: professional development opportunities, such as the Eisenhower program, character education, discipline, safe schools, safe schools from drugs and drug dealers. These are some of the things that the Democrats and Republicans should be able to work together on as we did work together in a few instances on charter schools and public choice; on the education flexibility bill that my good friend, the gentleman from Delaware (Mr. Castle), and I worked on and we worked on some of the ESEA together before the agreement fell apart.”