John Tierney: “We have heard talk tonight about people saying that everybody on this side of the aisle wants to have things stay the…”

“We have heard talk tonight about people saying that everybody on this side of the aisle wants to have things stay the same, and that frankly is not so. We worked quite hard together to make changes and improvements in the first section of this bill, as we have made changes and improvements on the bill in previous years, continually improving it and continually reducing the gap in readiness for school. The problem comes in the second part of this bill. And the fact of the matter is that those proponents of the change in the block grant cannot show a single stitch of evidence that this would improve the situation. When the gentleman from Delaware was asked at the Committee on Rules to give an example of one parent group, one child group, one educational group, one social advocacy group that supported the block grant section of the bill, he could not do it. The fact of the matter is that the block grant does do damage to the Head Start program. It would not require performance standards. It would allow States to weaken educational standards by increasing class size, increasing child/teacher ratio, shortening the program duration, cutting off 3-year-olds, using unproven curricula.”