Political Quotes

“tonight I am joined by a number of my colleagues to talk about what my other colleagues were talking about in the previous hour, and that is education. And rather than going through a long introduction, I want to start right off with a quote that the President of the United States made on March 27, 1996. This was in a response to the Governors Summit on Education: Education Excellence. And the President said, and I cannot agree with him more, "We cannot ask the American people to spend more on education until we do a better job with the money we have got now." This is the President of the United States about a year ago. That remark, along with some of the debate in Congress in 1996, led the committee that I chair, the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, to begin a project, which we call education at a crossroads, to ask and to find out what are we accomplishing and achieving with the money that we are spending today. We started with a very basic question. We said, how many education programs are there? Went to the Education Department because, of course, in Washington we coordinate all of the education programs through one department. Wrong. We found out that they go through 39 different agencies. We have over 760 different programs, and we are spending over or in the neighborhood of $100 billion per year on education today. That is a very appropriate question to ask. It is the question that we must answer before we expand the 760.”