Political Quotes

“Actually the whole key to Kentucky's education reform act is that children learn one child at a time, one classroom at a time, one school at a time, and one district at a time. The closer the effective education occurs and the decisions are made to that child and that teacher and that classroom, the more effective schools will be and the more effective the learning decisions that are made will be. Mr. Speaker, I particularly was interested in the President's America Reads program. First of all, one of the first weeks of the Committee on Appropriations on education, we had before us the National Institutes of Health. This is the research arm that the Federal Government spends so many billions of dollars on. They have done a great deal of research in the last couple of years on how children read and what the problems are with reading. They have come to the conclusion that children who have trouble learning to read, there are some children that will learn in any system, but children who have trouble need intensive phonics instruction. And yet this America Reads, one of the problems is we have so many teachers who have not come through a phonics-based system. So retraining them is a big issue. This America Reads program is almost as though the people that originated this idea did not read our own government's research. It is out of context of any phonics. It is out of context of understanding that very structured phonics is the way these children can best learn.”