Political Quotes

“if the gentleman will once again yield, that is one of the ironies here. The gentleman is right. Many in Washington would say that the Congress functions as their school board, and yet we do spend somewhere upwards of $12,000 per student in the city of Washington, D.C. I know that for most of the school districts in west Michigan, the area that I represent, the number that they get per child is somewhere in the neighborhood of $6,700 to maybe somewhere around $8,000, maybe a little over $8,000, but in that range, and they would be saying, wow, if I got $12,000, and even for the most or the best funded school district in west Michigan that is another $4,000 per student, that would be a 50 percent increase, what would I do with all that money? And then, of course, they look at the results here, and those are not very good results. I remember when we did the ``Education at the Crossroads'' hearings, we did a district in Alabama, and it was very interesting. They had one of the lowest per-student funding ratios in the State and they had the highest test scores. So we asked them what they attributed this kind of performance to, because they did not get a lot of money, yet their scores were phenomenally well. The answer was, well, we only get enough money to focus on the basics. We do not do a lot of the peripheral stuff. We cannot do it. We cannot afford it. So all we do is, day in and day out, we focus on the basics.”