Political Quotes

“I think we ought to take a little bit of time talking about where we are with kids. We know our kids are not tested enough, but we also have proposals to fix these problems. We have a series of objectives that say here is what we would like to do. We have got a program called Dollars to the Classroom. It says we want to get 95 cents of every Federal education dollar back into a local classroom. We have got Ed-Flex. What is Ed-Flex? What Ed-Flex says is we know that as we have gone around America with our project called Education at a Crossroads, the States have consistently come back and said, we get 6 to 7 percent of our money from Washington; we get 50 percent of our paperwork. Ed-Flex says we are going to allow school districts and States to eliminate part of the bureaucratic nightmare that we have imposed on them. We have a program which we call Straight A's. So we are going to get more dollars into the classroom, we are going to get rid of the red tape, and then what we are saying is we are going to allow you more discretion so that in a school district in Colorado, if they need to buy technology, they can go out and buy computers. But if a school district in my area of west Michigan says we really want to do teacher training, they can take those dollars and use the dollars for teacher training, so that we recognize that the needs of west Michigan are very different than the needs of Colorado or South Dakota, so we are going to give school districts flexibility.”