Political Quotes

“For every dollar we spend on education, 30 to 35 cents of it stays in Washington, never gets to a child, never gets to a classroom, never gets to the local level where a parent, a school board, a teacher can say, ``Let's spend this money in this way to help our kids achieve academic excellence, to get them to be able to do reading and writing and math.'' The problem is not that we do not have enough money here in Washington for education. The problem is that we are keeping too much of that money here in Washington. We debated a bill today that just said we are going to give some level of flexibility to local school boards, to State governments, to take this money to get rid of red tape, to get rid of the abuse and to make this system more efficient so that rather than throwing more dollars into an inefficient system, let us make the system efficient so we can get 95 cents of every dollar into the classroom rather than the current 65 to 70 cents.”