Angie Craig: “I join my colleague from Missouri and others who have spoken on the floor in relation to the legislation that we will…”

“I join my colleague from Missouri and others who have spoken on the floor in relation to the legislation that we will begin to debate next Tuesday, I believe, Senate bill 280. We are calling it the Ed-Flex bill because of a demonstration project that has now gone on in 12 other States in our country where school districts have demonstrated that, given the flexibility to move dollars around, they can accomplish great things for the young people they are responsible for educating. So for the rest of our country, I think the Senator from Missouri and I want to see a similar kind of flexibility. What does it mean? It is very clear what it means. It means that when it comes to educating the young people of our country, we basically trust parents a great deal more than we trust bureaucrats. For a long time, we felt that the promotion of education in our country would come only if you could have a national department of education, and from that would flow all good things to the rest of the country, and they would serve as the leaders to project our States and our school districts into the dynamics of improving our public education system. We found out that while there is a department of education necessary on occasion, that the real energy comes from a local school district, or a State, or a group of parents who do not like what they see, or the direction their children's education is heading in, and they want to make changes.”