John Tierney: “I do not know the gentleman from Pennsylvania, I do not think we have had any lengthy conversations, so I am a bit…”

“I do not know the gentleman from Pennsylvania, I do not think we have had any lengthy conversations, so I am a bit surprised to find out that he is taking what up to this point in time has been a fairly, I think, good level discussion about charter schools and how to best move forward in an inclusive manner and somehow inject it in an establishment type of argument. Let me tell my colleagues that Massachusetts under Democratic legislation has charter schools. As I said before, we have a variety of charter schools. So the issue is not whether it is establishment or antiestablishment, the issue is how do we become more inclusive so that even those people that were mentioned that might have been resisting now get brought into the fold and move forward and put these schools on the experiment basis that work, and that is the real issue. Nobody has raised, until the gentleman did, the issue of accountability; we did not say that we did not want accountability. In fact, to qualify as a charter school under the base legislation, there has to be an appropriate level of accountability.”