David Price: “this education bill represents the first real bipartisan effort of this Congress. I commend the leaders from both sides…”

“this education bill represents the first real bipartisan effort of this Congress. I commend the leaders from both sides of the aisle who have put it together. I just hope it stays bipartisan for the sake of our children and our home communities. The bill will help local school districts meet some of our most pressing education challenges. There is a strong emphasis on early reading and a commitment to title I and special education funding. The bill expands public school choice, which is welcome news in my district where magnet schools have been especially successful. The bill also provides resources and specific remedies to turn around low-performing schools. In these next hours of debate, we are going to face amendments that could derail this bipartisan success. We will face an amendment to provide public funding for private school vouchers, which would siphon money away from public education, not strengthen it. We will face amendments to weaken the link between dollars and results. We must maintain accountability to ensure that our children are learning. Of course, when you have a truly bipartisan piece of legislation, no one gets everything he or she wants. I would have liked to have seen more attention paid to reducing class size. We know that smaller class size improves student learning, especially in the early years. We need to build more schools and hire more teachers to get class size down and to improve the quality of what is going on in the classroom.”