Frank Pallone: “Again, I do not want to prolong this, but we talked about higher education. If you talk about primary and second, as I…”

“Again, I do not want to prolong this, but we talked about higher education. If you talk about primary and second, as I pointed out before, the Federal contribution to local education is not very much in dollars. It is about 7 percent or 8 percent of the budget. But the Federal Government has traditionally, and again, President Clinton has talked about trying to create incentive programs that will basically try to improve the quality of education, with the few Federal dollars that go to the local districts. One of the areas that he has been a champion of is Goals 2000. Basically, this is where you set standards, if you will, for the quality of education, for curricula, whatever, within the school, and then you give the schools, on a competitive basis, a certain amount of Federal dollars to try to implement some changes, some innovations, that would improve the standards of the curriculum or the education. That, again, is something that is significantly cut back, almost eliminated in the Republican leadership budget.”