Political Quotes

“I wanted to speak for this, speak on behalf of Dollars to the Classroom and against this amendment, because of how it works for Kentucky. Kentucky has long been cited for their education reform bill that was passed in 1990, and I was proud to have supported that bill and to have been on the partnership for the implementation of it. The entire bill, the entire reform was based on the fact that schools know best what their talents are, what their obstacles are, what the challenges are, their unique children in that school face, and the ideal was to put the dollars in the hands of a cite-based decision-making counsel made up of parents, made up of school employees, made up of teachers and the principal, and all together now they have the right to hire the teacher, hire the principals. They have the right to divide up their allocation of money. And the one thing I hear repeatedly from them is please stop telling us from Washington how we have to spend our money, how we have to comply with all these little incremental spendings instead of giving us the ability to really freely address the challenges that most confront our kids. I want to point out that Secretary Riley points to Kentucky very often when he speaks as the model of school-based reform, the model of what all schools should be after, and it is hard to believe that a Department of Education would support a program that would fly in the face of what he points to every day as a model of school reform.”