John Kerry: “The local entities that make the decisions, the State school officers, the secondary and elementary school principals…”

“The local entities that make the decisions, the State school officers, the secondary and elementary school principals, the teachers, the education associations--all of those folks are the ones who are supportive of the Democratic alternative. Second, I heard the Senator from Missouri say why is it that--I guess it was more than 50 percent of the people who work in schools are outside of the classroom? That is because we do not have enough teachers for the numbers of kids in the classroom. When you have one teacher teaching 35 kids, you begin to change the proportion of who is working in the school system. I am confident my friend from Missouri does not intend to have a school system that does not have custodians, does not have janitors, does not have schoolbus drivers, does not have people working in the cafeterias. These are the people 'outside of the classroom.' What we really need to face is the reason the proportion is out of whack, which is that we will need 2 million new teachers in America in the next 10 years. We will need a million of those teachers in the next 5 years.”